It’s a quintessential American product that’s rapidly disappearing from the model lists of U.S. automakers: the minivan. Though small vans existed well before Lee Iacocca’s brainchild for Chrysler – Volkswagen’s Beetle Bus comes to mind – they’d never been mainstream until the Caravan and Voyager models rolled into showrooms in 1983.

Even then, all the minivans from Chrysler – and later Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, etc. – took their key design elements, such as the sliding doors and three rows of seats, from Volkswagen’s 1960s-era vans. American automakers also get credit for coining the term “minivan” as well, to distinguish it from their larger passenger van brethren like Ford’s E-Series.

While minivans ostensibly came to be viewed as the replacement for the family station wagon, they had a pretty significant commercial history, too – the U.S. Post Office, for example, bought thousands of Ford Windstars as a supplemental vehicle for its letter carriers in the 1990s. Those sliding doors – especially when double sliding doors, one for each side of the vehicle, became an option in the late 1980s – really made the minivan an ideal choice for urban deliveries. With no doors swinging out into traffic, they presented just the right profile for many businesses.

And now they are slowly vanishing.

The reasons are, of course, as old as the history books – U.S. automakers got beat in the innovation department. Honda and Toyota came out with more options – especially fold-into-the-floor third row seats – combined with sleek exteriors and rugged reliability. Ford and GM both suffered early from ugly designs, got beat in the options department and never caught up. Chrysler is gamely hanging on, leading in many cases in the functionality quotient, with fold-into-the-floor seats for ALL rows among other ideas.

Of course, a lot of folks out there are happy to see them go, I suspect: Minivans were as far from sexy as Pluto is from Earth. They are all functionality, despite high-tech DVD players, automatic doors, navigation systems, etc. No teenager would be caught dead cruising in a minivan on the streets of a beach town in summer. Not many adults want to, either.

Ah, but that functionality … it made the minivan such a versatile vehicle, even for those without the convenience of fold-into-the-floor seats. My old Ford Windstar is still chugging along at six years and 73,000 miles: hauling kids, groceries, soccer gear, lumber, mulch, refrigerators, toilets, building supplies, you name it. Even its low-tech attributes make it ideal for all this hard work – no automatic door motors to break, no fancy DVD players to damage. The gunmetal gray interior carpet and plastic are also ideal for hiding dirt stains and other unfortunate messes. The front wheel drive gets through the snow, rain, and muck as well as anything else I’ve driven.

But the minivan’s heyday as a light commercial jack-of-all-trades vehicle is all but gone. GM just dropped it from its commercial lineup last year. Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, and yes Nissan’s Quest and Kia’s Sedona all focus their products on the consumer market, with enough options and upgrades to make them as expensive as luxury vehicles ($40,000 for a minivan???? You must be joking!!!!)

Ah well. At least I’ll mine around for a while yet to do my dirty work. Which it handles just fine.

“Oh, I knew there’d be hell to pay/but that crossed my mind a little too late.” — Dierks Bentley

So we may finally get a glimpse of what changes – if any – the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is going to make to the hours-of-service (HOS) regulations that govern the working days and nights of U.S. truckers.

There’s a going to be a hearing this week – Dec. 12 – before the Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security Subcommittee that’ll be focused almost exclusively on the contents of HOS rules FMCSA submitted Nov. 27 to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The contents of those rules weren’t revealed to the public, so this week’s hearing is probably going to be the industry’s first look at them.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) is one group planning to attend this hearing in force to see what the lay of the new HOS land will look like – with senior member Walter Krupski from New Jersey, a long time trucker from New Jersey, testifying before the assembled Congressional members.

All of this devolves from the legal decision handed down this past summer by the District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which declared two key provisions of the current HOS rules adopted in 2004 –an increase in driving time from 10 to 11 hours and the 34-hour restart provision – null and void.

Yet a close reading of the court’s decision indicates (at least to this thick-headed reporter) that these two elements got tossed because the FMCSA didn’t provide enough data, or maybe the right kind of data, to explain their reasoning behind green-lighting those two provisions. In other word’s, FMCSA got charged with the equivalent of a technicality.

So that leaves me to believe that what we might see this week when the curtain is pulled back on FMCSA’s revised HOS rules are … the exact same rules, but with different and more detailed paperwork supporting them. No change to the 11-hour drive time limit; no change to the 34-hour restart. If that’s so, I would fully expect the same parties that sued the first time around – Public Citizen at the fore – to sue the FMCSA again, if the D.C. Appeals Court doesn’t throw out the agency’s argument right from the get go, that is.

At the end of the day, we’re all going to be right back where we started – trying to establish a single set of rules that govern the working hours of millions of truck drivers, people whose sleep patterns are all over the map, working in an industry that must serve the 24/7 needs of our economy and society at large. To call this a Gordian knot is an understatement, for you can’t solve this problem al la Alexander the Great (cutting it down the middle with a sword – that’s a sharp dude).

Vic Suski, a senior engineer at the American Trucking Associations – one of the largest lobbying groups in trucking – and I shared a few emails on the topic, and his frustrations with the regulations speak for a lot of drivers and carriers, I think. “Look, some of us are ‘night people’ and some are day people,” he told me. “Let drivers drive when they know they are at their best: don’t cram them into one-size-fits-all regulations.”

It’s a good point, but the obvious problem is not all drivers will conduct themselves professionally – making sure they get enough rest, not pushing it while fatigued – and so increasing the risks of an accident. The blunt truth is that people cheat in the business world – just look at the sleight-of-hand of Enron for starters – and without regulations in place, legitimate law-abiding companies and their employees lose out.

But at the same time there’s got to be some way we can come up with a set of rules that give drivers the flexibility to take naps and get sufficient rest without impacting their ability to make a good living. It’s a tall order, for sure. We’ll see if we can tackle it over the next few months.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” – Shakespeare’s Henry V

As luck would have it, I got to look inside the working life of today’s diesel truck technician this week, courtesy of three top-notch pros – Matt Wheeler, Pat Driscoll, and Michael Willoughby, along with added insight from Ken Carter, their service manager or “head coach” as he prefers to call his position.

Wheeler, Driscoll, and Willoughby all work for Rush Enterprises, at the Rush Truck Center in Oklahoma City. They’d each spent 10 long months taking training classes to prepare for the “entrance exam” to Rush’s second annual technician skills rodeo held this week in Nashville TN. All three passed, joining 57 of their colleagues from other Rush Truck Centers around the country at the competition.

What struck me the most about this particular group of techs – whom I quickly dubbed “The Oklahoma Crew” – was their calm approach to the contest, leavened with considerable humor. Talking with them during breaks during the day and over drinks in the evening, I learned their shop – like most truck service centers, I suspect – is a close-knit fraternity, where the techs kid each other mercilessly as a way to break up the tension they work under, trying to unravel and fix an ever-widening range of complex vehicle problems on tight deadlines for customers.

“Keeping up with the changes in technology is what I think is our biggest challenge,” said Wheeler, a seven-year Air Force veteran whose been at Rush’s Oklahoma City site for 11 years now. “For a guy to come in here fresh from school and start working on these engines today, it can be really overwhelming.”

Wheeler has the highest energy of the bunch: quick to laugh and tell a joke, even one at his own expense. (“I don’t like heights,” he told me. “Which left my father wondering why the hell I joined the Air Force!”) A heavy equipment repair specialist stationed in Alaska for years, fond of heavy-metal T-shirts and a prized leather Harley Davidson jacket, Wheeler jumped at the chance to repair trucks somewhere – anywhere – in warmer climes after he left the service.

Driscoll is the relative newcomer to the group, an expatriate from Canada that’s been in Oklahoma City for two years but whose experience in diesel engine repair spans nearly three decades. “I wanted to work on motorcycles, but there wasn’t any money in it,” Driscoll explained to me. “So I went into diesel engine repair.”

He still raced motorcycles in his spare time, up until 1994, largely in multi-day, 100-mile or more off-road endurance contests, suffering a broken foot and ribs along the way. But when his wife finished nursing school at the same Canadian hospitals were going through layoffs, they decided to try their luck south of the border. His classic Canadian accent (“Repairing trucks is fun, eh?”) coupled to a nearly constant smile (“He’s ALWAYS smiling!” said Wheeler) made him an easy fit for the Oklahoma crew.

Willoughby followed the most unlikely path of them all into the business. Built like a boxer, sporting a shaved head and a series of complex tattoos, he started out in a lawn mower repair shop, then spent a five-year hitch in the Army repairing Soviet armor and Vietnam-era Sheridan tanks for the “Red Teams” in war games training in California.

He literally joined the diesel truck technician ranks with no truck experience at all, yet more than made up for it with unstinting hard work – and would be the only one from the Oklahoma crew to join 11 technicians in the final round of the competition, winning $3,000 and a $1 an hour raise in the process.

“I may not have talent, I may not be fast, but you will NEVER outwork me,” he said. After 12 years in Oklahoma City, Willoughby believes he knows why people like him become – and stay – technicians, despite the grease, the scraped knuckles, sweltering heat and cold, and the fast-paced technology upgrades that keep them hunched over computers more than they turn wrenches much of the time.

“Repairing trucks is like a puzzle – you want to figure it out and you HATE to give up,” he explained. “You also feel perpetually like the new kid, telling yourself ‘I can’t WAIT to get experience, because then this job won’t be so HARD.’ But what you really are is a full-time student – you are always learning something new. This job will make you mad many times, but it’s never boring. If you get bored, then there’s something wrong.”

“It’s such a fast-paced business now that you can’t afford to be set in your ways,” noted Ken Carter, the service manager at Rush’s Oklahoma City site. “It takes a special personality to do this: you must have a passion for it.” Originally from Massachusetts, Carter has worked on trucks and engines his whole life, starting around age seven helping out in his dad’s trucking business, followed by vocational school, work for Caterpillar, running his own shop, then joining Rush about eight years ago.

“We have about 25 technicians, five managers – one assistant manager, three shop foreman, and a warranty manager – and me,” he said. “I’m like the head coach – focused on strategy, finding and hiring the best players. My managers are like offensive and defensive coaches, focused on developing and executing the individual plays.”

It’s a wry comparison; one Carter delivers with laughter and an easy smile – traits that carry over into how he deals with his crew on a daily basis. For to Ken’s mind, the most important asset in any shop is chemistry and teamwork: that’s what really makes a shop function at a high level.

“That’s why I am a coach, in that my job is to figure out how to pull a team together,” Carter said. “They didn’t hire me as just a manager either – they hired me to think, to find ways to do things better. And I can’t do this alone – all my guys help me do it. That’s what great about our place: no one has an ego and they don’t watch the clock. They all help each other out.”

It’s tougher now on the whole crew, as their two best and beloved senior technicians died back to back this year – Melvin Young and Charlie Sossaman. “They were like uncles, looking out for me,” recalled Willoughby, who still gets emotional talking about them. “They would watch out for you and yell at you sometimes, but that’s because they wanted to make sure you didn’t get hurt – and that you remembered what they told you 10 minutes ago. In many ways I felt like I grew up in this shop; it felt just like a family at times.”

“They were absolutely great guys,” added Wheeler. “Melvin actually wore out a hammer working there – a hammer! Who wears them out? But he also taught me you don’t have to be fast – just persistent. Charlie taught me how to think – sometimes telling me the wrong thing to see if I’d figure it out.”

Now, Wheeler and Willoughby both find themselves taking on the role Melvin and Charlie played for so long. “One of the most poignant moments for me – upsetting yet also neat – was when one of the younger techs asked me for help and I told him, ‘Go find one of the older guys.’ Then he came back to me and said, ‘You’re it.’ That stopped me in my tracks,” said Willoughby.

But it’s also a responsibility they are both accepting, too. “It’s like the old saying: ‘Give a man a fish, he has a meal. Teach him to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.’ But then most of the younger guys would rather us just give them the fish,” said Wheeler.

But Willoughby added thoughtfully that this is the way it works in the diesel technician world – knowledge isn’t just acquired from books and the classroom; it’s handed down from one generation of techs to the next. “It’s really not me in this shirt – it’s Melvin, Charlie, and all the technicians I’ve learned from in here. They taught me all that I know. I am their hands now.”

Got a chance to sit down with W. Marvin Rush this week, the founder and chairman of Rush Enterprises, a $2.4 billion mammoth collection of commercial truck and equipment sales and service centers spread throughout the U.S. The occasion was his company’s second annual technician skills rodeo, being held at the Nashville, TN, Rush Truck Center location, where 60 technicians from across Rush’s network vied for nearly $100,000 worth of prize money (among other goodies).

While we talked about a very wide range of things – the outlook for heavy and medium-duty trucks sales, the nationwide shortage of technicians, deer and quail hunting, etc. – probably the most interesting part of my visit was watching Marvin interact with his employees. A business professor once told me the fastest way to find out what a person is really like is to take them out to dinner in a public restaurant and see how they interact with the wait staff and other patrons. So watching Marvin talk to everyday truck technicians proved enlightening.

For starters, he’s “Marvin” to everyone – technicians, salesmen, secretaries, the works – and doesn’t stand on a lot of ceremony. Walks around, shakes hands, chats about work, family life, even shares his insight on the trucking industry when his technicians ask. Everyone knows he’s fabulously wealthy – a few techs asked how his private plane was holding up and he laughed that it was in the shop – but that’s not a barrier to him, nor to his people.

“My daddy gave me two pieces of advice when I started this business in 1965,” Marvin told me. “First, surround yourself with smart people – the kind of people who really know their stuff. And second, most importantly, if you end up making money, make damn sure all of your people do well, too.”

For example, he noted that his company spends about $1.5 million a year on company picnics for all his locations – which includes amusement park passes for all his employees (some 2,800) and their families. Even when the heavy truck market soured this year, he made sure that money wasn’t touched. “A couple of folks said we should not hold them to save money,” Marvin told me. “I said go find savings elsewhere; you’re not touching the picnics.”

That philosophy applied to the technician’s rodeo as well. Out of the 60 techs competing in four divisions, 11 made it into the final round – unofficially termed “the money round.” Third place finishers won $3,000 and a dollar per-hour bonus, second place garnered $4,000 and $1.25 an hour bonus, with first place netting $5,000 and $1.50 per hour added to their paycheck. Once tech split the first place prize in two divisions and went on to win in the “all-around” category – bagging $14,500 and a $3 per hour raise in pay. Expensive perhaps to some, but more than worth it in Marvin’s eyes.

“Listen, as I tell everyone, this company is nothing without our people – they do all the work,” he told me. “In my view, we in corporate serve them. We’re here to help them do their jobs better, so we can all then serve the customer better.”

This isn’t a lot of “rah-rah” stuff either, because the company is banking on its employees’ loyalty and creativity to make Rush Enterprises a $5 billion company by 2011. An ambitious goal, to be sure, but not out of the realm of possibility once you meet the Rush folks in charge of doing it.

“They don’t turn down any proposal from us that makes sense,” Mike O’Brien, general manager of the Rush Truck Center in Nashville, explained to me. “We have a lot of freedom to spend the money is we can show a good reason for it.”

For example, O’Brien spent a lot of time, effort, and money to design and build the shelving system in his facility’s parts storage center – with an inventory worth $3.5 million. “There’s value in parts being organized, especially in terms of efficiency. For example, when we recently checked our inventory, it took only a weekend to do and we were only 1% to 2% off. It’s just good business to be organized that way.”

Yet there’s also the character and culture that pervades the Rush’s empire – very down-to-earth, hard-working, yet outsized at the same time, a mirror reflection of its founder. But while ten-gallon hats and leather cowboy boots are the order of the day, Marvin – like his company – doesn’t shy away from the nitty-gritty that needs to be done.

For instance, he spent years developing a big ranch two hours south of his San Anton, TX, headquarters – a place where he could take his family and his customers hunting. He also took pains to not only teach the finer points of marksmanship to those guests who’d never held a rifle in their hands, he also did all the skinning and dressing of the meat for them – arduous work that took hours to perform. He doesn’t do that anymore, of course – he’s got a full staff on the ranch now – but he set the example for what had to be done.

“Look, the trucking industry is still a relationship business – it’s about getting to know people so you can trust each other when you do business together,” Marvin explained to me. “That’s why we still invite our customers and out suppliers down to the ranch every year, why myself and Rusty [his son and the company’s president and CEO] try to personally meet everyone in our company. It’s all about the people. That’s what it will always be about.”

Everyone in trucking knows that fuel prices are skyrocketing and burning a gigantic hole in a lot of wallets out there (more so for ones without fuel surcharges in place – ones that actually stick, I might add). Yet when you start looking at the numbers, that’s when the scariness of the situation really comes into focus, I think.

According to the International Energy Agency, oil prices jumped 45.3% since January. And U.S. diesel prices are up 18% just since September – nearly double the 10% rise in gasoline prices. The situation isn’t going to get better anytime soon, either, because a lot of new unexpected pressures are now coming to bear on diesel supplies.

For example, the Wall Street Journal noted that a spate of refinery outages in Europe is creating a wellspring of demand for diesel in that part of the world. That’s because half of the 15 million cars and light vehicles sold in Europe every year run on diesel, compared to just 50,000 diesel cars sold in the U.S. annually.

Then there’s diesel’s arch enemy, home heating oil. Both are made from the same base petroleum distillate and when demand for heating oil goes up, it takes precedence over diesel fuel production. And that’s what’s happening now – and not only is demand for home heating oil up, so are prices, jumping 10% in the last month.

Then there’s the problem posed by rising automotive sales in China and India, two gigantic nations that didn’t use to have major auto demand. Annual car sales in China alone have doubled since 2004 and are estimated to hit 4.1 million units a year by 2008. By 2010, annual car sales may reach 10 million units per year in China, jumping to 20 million units by 2020 if the trend holds – making that country the single largest car market in the world.

It’s a grim forecast, but then we knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Talked to Darry Stuart last week about trends in truck maintenance, focusing on the rapid increase in technological complexity of trucks, plus the computers and other electronic the tools technicians use to take care of them. While he freely admits that you can’t properly take care of trucks, nor run today’s modern shop, without the aid of computers and related technology, it’s still “the simple stuff” that costs fleets the most money in terms of maintenance – and generates the most vehicle downtime.

“Tires and brakes: those are still the top two maintenance items, in terms of dollars and out of service rates,” he told me by phone from his office in Boston. “The most basic things on trucks relate to the highest maintenance cost. That’s the reality of life in this business.”

Tires, for example, are typically the third-highest cost in any fleet’s budget – right behind labor costs and fuel. Then there’s brakes: according to the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), brake-related citations remain the number one reason for putting vehicles out of service (OOS), with 30.1% of OOS citations pertaining to faults in brake-adjustment in 2005, with another 25.2% involving brake systems. By comparison, in 2005, lighting problems accounted for just 11.8% of OOS citations, tires and wheels 8.9%, safe loading 8.5% and suspensions 5.1%.

“The basic stuff – the non-computerized stuff – is what keeps the truck up and running,” Stuart said. Part of the problem revolves around how maintenance is being conducted in this computerized day and age, too, as fleet managers today are more likely to be holed up in their offices hour after hour, glued to computer screens and data files, rather than walking around the shop to see how things are going.

“Even today, with all the electronic data available, I still firmly believe ‘management by walking around’ must remain a key part of the maintenance manager’s day,” Stuart said. “You’ve got to be out on the floor where the work gets done, to see what’s going smoothly and what’s not.”

That also applies to the part’s room, he stressed. “You need to know not only what parts you have but where they are located,” Stuart emphasized. “A computer does not keep a part’s room neat and clean. It may tell you what’s in the room, but what good is that information if you can’t find it?”

It’s a reminder indeed that no matter how technologically advanced trucking gets, keeping a close eye on the simple stuff must remain a bedrock management principle.