“Did you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in ‘life’?” –Walter Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Everyone knows that wearing a seat belt in a motor vehicles vastly improves your chances of surviving a vehicle crash. That’s a given. So it would seem a no-brainer to equip all U.S. school buses with seat belts.

And yet … school bus crashes remain the rarest of incidents on the roadways today. In fact, the greatest dangers to children, according to years of data gathered from the Fatal Analysis Reporting System (FARS), are the areas around school buses, as well as the routes to and from school. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) argues that school buses are an incredibly safe form of transportation – probably one of the safest on the road today – making the addition of seat belts to buses a negligible benefit.

That’s one of the reasons why Christopher Murphy, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), is but one of several prominent voices opposing the Department of Transportation’s recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to mandate seat belts on school buses. The reason? Money.

“According to the proposed rule, school districts that decide to add seat belts could apply for existing federal highway safety grant funds to cover the cost of the additional safety equipment,” he said. “While this use of grant funds is not new, the additional focus on the issue may cause states to be pressured to spend federal highway safety money for this purpose to the detriment of many competing highway safety needs.”

In a recent press statement, he used Maryland as an example. That state receives approximately $3.3 million each year for its basic behavioral highway safety program. But if the seat belt rule went into effect, Maryland could spend that full amount on adding seat belts to school buses yet still not equip them all – and wouldn’t be able to fund other highway safety efforts.

“We want to ensure that federal highway safety funds are spent in areas that will have the most lifesaving benefit,” Murphy said. “ Largely these are directed to critical occupant protection, drunk driving and speeding programs. As these funds are limited, they could be quickly devoured if a state is pressured to use its federal funding for seat belts on school buses.”

To solve this issue, the GHSA wants more money – federal funds specifically set aside to cover the cost of adding seat belts to school buses. But in these tight times – especially with the economy for all intents and purposes in a recession – that seems unlikely at this stage.

More germane to the discussion is this: Are seat belts needed on school buses? The statistics show school bus crashes are rare, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. It all comes back to the word ‘if’ in my view – if the bus doesn’t crash, then you don’t seat belts. However, several years ago, such a crash DID occur in Arlington County, VA (where I grew up) between a school bus and garbage truck, injuring 15 children and leaving one of them dead. Would a seat belt have saved the child? Probably – the driver of the school bus walked away from the crash, as she was belted in.

But how do you make sure the kids belt themselves in – and don’t undo the belts mid-trip, for instance? There’s always the human factor, but by and large, since we are now belting our kids into a variety of seats in our personal vehicles since the day they are born, I would think by now seat belts are reflexive behavior, at least for most children.

I personally think it’s worth the money to put seat belts on school buses. It’s just not worth the risk, however small, not to have them in case a crash occurs. But with funds so tight, it could indeed create a financial headache for the states to handle. Yet I think it’s a headache the state’s can and should manage. Keeping vehicle occupants as safe as possible is something you just can’t skimp on.

The death-knell has sounded for Virginia’s controversial abusive driver fines, so for all the readers that thought these were a bad idea, your wish is coming true. Virginia’s Governor, Tim Kaine (D), said in his annual “State of the Commonwealth” address that “the abusive-driver fee idea has flunked with voters, and we should acknowledge it an move on.” Many Virginia Republicans praised Kaine’s position on the fees, which pretty much means they are headed for the trash bin.

The abusive-driver fines in question were civil penalties drawn up to fine drivers going 20 mph over the speed limit $1,050, plus $61 in court costs, in ADDITION to existing fines that typically total $200. Also, a first-time drunken driver faced a $2,250 civil penalty – plus fines and court costs that typically run about $500 or more – under the abusive-fee regime, while driving without a license came with a mandatory $900 civil penalty in addition to the ordinary $100 for a fine and court costs.

Many reasons are being trotted out for the failure of these fines, probably the biggest being that they only applied to in-state residents. That stuck in everyone’s craw, because if you didn’t pay them in three installments over 26 months, you’d lose your license: not so for someone from Ohio or any of the other 49 states in the Union.

And apparently so many people HADN’T paid them that Virginia planned to revoke 300,000 licenses over the next two years, according to a story in the Virginia Business Magazine. Non-payment of fines also meant that the state didn’t get much of the $65 million in revenues it expected: monies lawmakers were hoping to use for road repairs.

Never mind, of course, that you would never encounter these fines if you did three simple things: DON’T DRIVE DRUNK, DON’T SPEED, DON’T DRIVE WITHOUT YOUR LICENSE. Gee, wow: guess we can’t manage to do anything that simple in my state. And the numbers prove it, too: over 1,000 people died in traffic accidents in Virginia last year: a number we haven’t seen in my state since 1990.

Several readers wrote in to tell me that fines like this don’t improve highway safety: indeed, they told me, punitive highway safety measures don’t work in the U.S. overall. Just look at the numbers – 43,300 people died on our highways in 2006, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation, with another 2.56 million sustaining injuries from highway crashes.

The DOT estimates that highway crashes cost this country of ours $230.6 billion a year, roughly $820 annually for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. Those numbers fluctuate up and down a few hundred, but by and large, that’s been the death toll for many years

And we seem to so blithely accept this!! I mean, drunk drivers killed 17,941 people in 2006 ALONE! And most drunk drivers are repeat offenders, folks that get caught again and again behind the wheel rocked out of their minds … yet manage to keep their license and the keys to their vehicles. Sure, Public Citizen is after the trucking industry, trying to find a way to reduce the 5,018 people killed in car-truck collisions … too bad no one wants to take the same approach to drunk drivers, who kill more than three times as many innocent people.

So, OK, abusive-driver fines are on the way out and we probably won’t see them again. But here we are left facing a yearly pile of bodies on our highways with no one – politicians and John Q. Public as well – willing to seriously address it. We’re driving more and more miles, at faster and faster speeds, and we don’t seem to care that a lot of people are getting killed in the process. I thought the abusive-drive fine regime would work. Obviously, it didn’t. You tell me what the answer is. I for one think killing 43,000 people a year due to chronic bad driving is a horrible statistic we shouldn’t be willing to accept.

“Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes

We live in such an electronic-driven age today that rarely do we dwell on the old-fashioned skill of talking – being able to speak clearly and firmly, in varying tones so we don’t put people to sleep. It’s a true skill, and one that’s vital in trucking as so much of the communication between driver and company, as well as carrier and shipper, gets done via voices over landline and wireless phones – even the tried and true citizen band radios that are so much a part of trucking’s heritage.

As usual, the good professor Jerry Osteryoung from the college of business at Florida State University has some thoughts on the subject and as he specializes in dealing with entrepreneurs – the backbone of the American business community – I think I’ll step aside and let him have the floor:

“By far, communication is the number one thing that all firms and managers can improve upon especially oral communications. Communication is where it is at because it conveys both the message as well as the emotions behind the message.

Inefficient communications can lead to a world of problems. I once had a boss that would offer criticism in a joking manner. He would say things like, ‘Jerry, spending more time with XYZ client would really help my wife spend more on the furniture for our new house.’ Statements like this do not really convey the message and only obscure the meaning. After a while, no one took any of his corrections seriously as we could never tell if he was being sincere or just joking around.

One tip for improving your communications is to watch your pace. I speak very rapidly, which is not always a good thing. People assume that those who speak rapidly are not calm. Frequently, this sends a danger signal to the listener, causing them to listen with much caution – and that can potentially interfere with the message.

If I want my messages to be understood, I have to work on slowing down my speech. Sometimes I just experiment with the pace and see how folks respond. If I see an audience or a staff member nodding their head, it is a pretty good indication that the pace is right, and that they are getting the message.

I have become a big fan of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer (with three dogs, I need all the help I can get!), which airs on the National Geographic channel. One of the things that he repeatedly says about dogs is that any message must be sent when both the trainer and the dog are in a very calm place. Even with dogs, we must communicate effectively!

Another thing to remember about communications is that emotions can either help or hinder the message. If the emotions are congruent with the message, the message will be understood much better. However, you run into trouble when the message and the emotions expressed through body language are not in sync.

Normally, messages sent with incongruent emotions are either completely misunderstood or not heard at all. For instance, I have seen manager’s complement staff members while frowning and standing with very rigid posture. Instead of a complement, a message of fear is received. In a like manner, you just cannot smile while telling an employee that there is a problem with their behavior.

The point is to make sure that your message and emotions are congruent. One of the best ways to evaluate this is to practice in front of a mirror or have someone else evaluate your communications. Normally, I have found that these issues are easy to correct once the speaker is aware of and understands the problem.

The final tip is to vary your volume and pitch. I cannot tell you how many times at Georgia Tech (yep, I am a Rambling Wreck) I took some course that I saw little value in (like thermal dynamics) where the professor spoke in a flat monotone. I fought every day to stay awake in class. If the professor had just varied his inflection or his volume every so often, the course would have been so much better.

Sometimes when I am giving a speech I slightly reduce the volume of my voice just to force people to try harder to listen to me. Just this little change has made such a difference in the quality of my talks. So with regard to your communications, you must ensure that your pace, body language and pitch are set to optimize the reception of the message.”

Good stuff as usual, Professor Osteryoung. For more business tips on a range of subjects, feel free to drop him a line by e-mail at jostery@comcast.net

“Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.” –A. A. Milne, author.

It’s a boring subject, organization, though it fills up a lot of books about business I can tell you. Yet when everything is organized and in its proper place, it becomes just so much easier to get the job done – especially when you’re not hunting around for tools, keys, parts, and other such items.

Had a long talk about this very subject with Corey Lowe, regional manager for Rush Truck Centers of Oklahoma a few weeks back. Lowe – who manages four Rush dealerships in Okalahoma – agreed to be part of what’s called a High Impact Kaizen Event or “HIKE” last year.

The term “Kaizen Event” originated in Japan and refers to a focused, short-term project designed to improve a process. It includes training followed by analysis, design, and, often, re-arrangement of a product line or area. Lowe chose his Oklahoma City dealership to undergo a HIKE in 2007, as it was the oldest in his area.

The HIKE entailed bringing in a Six Sigma-qualified moderator who would help employees selected by Lowe go over all the work processes in Rush’s Oklahoma City shop step by step to see where they could be improved – thus helping the shop boost productivity, in terms of getting more trucks repaired faster. Lowe also chose two front line technicians to handle this overhaul – Matt Wheeler and Mike Willoughby (who you’ve met in this space before). They would create new processes under the guidance of their business moderator, then put them out to the shop for feedback.

“I didn’t much at all in this – just put these guys in a room and bought them lunch for a month,” Lowe told me. That’s a big understatement, for to my mind, it’s a stroke of genius to have the guys who do all the repair work day in and day out guide a massive shop reorganization like this.

And this was a very detailed reorganization, let me tell you. Buckets for old rags, for example, were painted red and had a red dot on the floor – one the side of the bucket’s bottom – identifying where they needed to be placed. Instead of having technicians leave their station to get parts, or manuals, or get manager input, Wheeler and Willoughby designed a light stand so a tech could flick a switch and thus call particular personnel to his or her station – allowing the tech to stay on task and not break stride on a repair.

“They hashed out everything, with the moderator guiding them,” Lowe explained. “When they got hung up on stuff, he kept it relevant. He’d say, ‘OK, now this process you’re trying to resolve. How important is it? Do you perform it every hour? Every day? Once a week? Once a month?’ That kept everything from bogging down.”

In the end, with their plan in hand, Lowe shut down the entire shop for a weekend and totally reorganized it – including repainting the entire parking lot, which spanned almost an acre of space. “One issue is that our employees parked their cars and trucks being brought in for repairs all over the place – there wasn’t a designated employee parking area,” he said. “So we re-lined the entire space, designating parking for our workers and specific spots for trucks coming in for repairs, those going out, etc.”

To Lowe, the results aren’t so much about measuring dollars saved as it is about improving productivity. “It’s all about making iron easier to move into our shop, get it fixed, and get it back to the customer,” he told me. “That’s at the heart of why we went through this.”

“It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.” –Samuel Johnson

I loved every minute I spent reading the controversial book “The DaVinci Code” by Dan Brown – but certainly not for its wild and almost ridiculous plot line about secret societies protecting the supposed later-day brood of Jesus. No, my love of that book comes from his use of Opus Dei – a secretive, archconservative Catholic organization – as the bad guys.

You see I attended an Opus Dei run all-boys elementary school for a few years (grades five through seven) and it was simply the worst experience of my childhood – hell, my entire life. It was a violent, mean-spirited place, and for many years I contemplated leaving the Catholic faith because of my time there. Needless to say, anytime I see Opus Dei getting whacked in the press or even in a fictional bestseller, I enjoy it immensely.

That’s the power of negative impressions. And we’ve all been there, too. Get treated shabbily by a dealership when buying a new vehicle or getting it serviced, for example, and not only won’t you ever go back there again, you may never buy the brand of vehicle they sell ever again. You might share your negative experience with others, too, and warn them off of both dealer and brand.

Trying to reverse that negative impression is a huge undertaking that might never succeed. Just look at how GM and Ford have lost market share to the Japanese year after long year despite massive improvements to the design and quality of their vehicles and dealer networks (though I think they will both start to rebound over the next five years).

Trucking has its own share of negative impressions to overcome and we all know why. I’ll share my neighbor’s recent experience: driving home from upstate New York from a long holiday vacation with family, they were tailgated mercilessly on the Pennsylvania turnpike by a trucker doing 80 mph in heavy rain. A frightening experience, to say the least (and they called the state police to report him, a move I firmly endorse). Even though his brother is a top-notch truck driver, having that kind of day on the highway made him steam about truckers as a group – and rightly so.

I talked to Julie Cirillo once about this. The first chief administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration when it was formed back in late 1999, she told me one negative experience like tailgating – something that happened to her own sister – colors people’s overall perception of trucking for a long time. She said those kinds of negative highway experiences gave the whole industry a bad name, undoing all sorts of positive work by professional truckers.

That’s why I think from here on out trucking as a whole needs to really refocus itself on addressing the kinds of driving habits and incidents that lead not only to such bad experiences, but cause accidents, too. The freight may be hot, but that’s no excuse for throwing caution and good safety practices to the winds. For negative impressions last a long, long time, and they’ll complicate industry efforts on a lot of fronts.

“I’ve noticed that some of the other candidates are almost scornful of the word, the implication being that if you’re hopeful you must be naïve. That’s not what hope is. Hope is not ignoring the challenges ahead. Hope is working for and fighting for what seemed impossible before.” –Barack Obama

It’s hard to be hopeful these days, with the country now teetering on the edge of a recession, engaged in billion-dollar-a-day wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, healthcare costs spiraling out of control, with the threat of a terrorist attack by Al Qaeda or some other nefarious group not far from our minds.

It’s harder still in trucking, which watched diesel prices jump over $3.50 a gallon in some parts of the U.S. last year (the industry’s total fuel bill is expected to reach $110.1 billion for 2007) while freight levels slumped almost 2% overall from 2006 levels – after suffering through many volatile peaks and valleys month by month last year, with freight as unpredictable as the weather.

What to do? It can seem overwhelming with all this bad stuff happening at once. Throw in a couple thousand a month in truck payments, add in an unexpected health crisis in the family, and things can really turn ugly frighteningly fast. But I don’t think that makes trucking a bad business to be in – far from it, actually. There will always be freight to move – even air cargo carriers and railroads need trucks for first- and last-mile service. The trick is finding the profitable freight, winning some good customers with your service, and keeping them for the long haul.

It’s sounds simple, but I know it isn’t. And trying to do all of that while clocking in 2,000 to 3,000 miles a week on the road is beyond my meager skills, let me tell you. But one guy who did – in good times and bad – is Tim Brady, our contributing editor in charge of the “Small Business Review” you’ll be seeing every month in our magazine. I bring him up not to be self-serving to our editorial staff (well … OK, maybe a LITTLE self-serving), nor because he spent nearly 23 years behind the wheel of a big rig in the moving industry, but because he breaks down all the complicated mumbo-jumbo of business into simple, common sense concepts.

I met Tim by happenstance back in 2003 and an industry convention, selling a book he’d co-written with tax advisor Esta Klatzkin called “Driven 4 Profits.” He gave me a copy to read, explaining that this was his attempt to make the complicated business of trucking far less so for owner-operators and small fleets alike.

What a book! Simple, clear, concise … even a layman like myself grasped everything he laid out in there. I went back and ended up interviewing him over several days, writing a couple of stories on him, and started to keep in touch. I met Terry, his wife, a former journalist herself who helped keep Tim’s prose on the straight and narrow (and simple, clear, concise…). The rest, as they say, is history.

Thing is, you don’t have to agree with Tim’s philosophy on what’s right or wrong with trucking – heck, as we all know, the old saw goes that no two truckers can agree on anything! But all kidding aside, his books (and articles, podcasts, online forums, etc. – Tim and Terry are nothing but prolific) will at the very least give you – whether you are a driver, small fleet owner, or big fleet manager – something to think about. Maybe it will help you find a new angle to solving an old problem, or help address new ones.

[You can reach Tim at www.writeuptheroad.com and his direct email, by the way, is tbrady@writeuptheroad.com]

The whole point is that despite the rapidly worsening economic times – the stock market dropped by 292 points yesterday, after home prices reportedly dropped another 5.3% – it’s not a death knell for trucking by any means. There are ways to make profits in this business, and not by crooked dealings, either. It just takes a little good sense to find your way there … and maybe Tim can supply you with some.

I’m sort of a neat freak when it comes to keeping our family cars clean and tidy (which will surprise the hell out of my college roommates, no doubt, who knew me as ‘King Slob’ of our living quarters back in the day).

My wife isn’t a big fan of this behavior, gritting her teeth when she sees me vacuuming or washing one of our aging rides – telling me on more than one occasion that, “If you are such a clean freak, why aren’t you cleaning the bathrooms?” Well, you don’t take the bathroom over to the neighbor’s house, nor do you take the neighbor’s kids and the rest of the soccer team in the bathroom to games. The bathroom doesn’t pick the boss up at the airport, nor does it help your friends move to a new home.

The point is that vehicles become an extension of ourselves, in a way, when we interact with others, either for fun or for business. Their condition sends a message just as a loud and clear as personal dress and grooming habits. I once got a cargo facilities tour from a public relations professional in their personal vehicle and it was so dirty and foul smelling that it made me ill.

Most truckers understand how their vehicle’s appearance – interior as well as exterior – impacts how they are perceived, which extends to their personal appearance as well. But it’s not just about looking good – keeping your truck clean also helps it last longer.

Tim Brady, one of our excellent contributing editors and former owner-operator himself, told me he used to keep a small pressure washer handy in his truck so he could clean off all the road salt and grime off his rig at regular intervals – reducing the affects of corrosion. As Brady worked in the moving business, he added that keeping his truck clean helped immensely on the public relations front, too, as he’d be parked in front of someone’s home for long stretches of time.

Keeping it clean for me extends to keeping my rides regularly maintained as well – with the crankcase filled with clean oil, the transmission with clean fluid, the radiator with clean green coolant. Keeping tabs on those metrics helped make my S-10 pickup last 16 years and my Jeep go 11 years – and that’s some pretty good life cycle value, if I say so myself.

Highway tractors take a lot more pounding in some wretched conditions than anything I ever faced, of course (and my vehicles never pulled 80,000 pounds on a daily basis, either), but I’ve seen first-hand the benefits truckers can get by keeping their rigs in tip-top shape.

More times than I can count, wending my way along the parked rigs at the Mid America Trucking Show, among others, I’ve been struck by how many 10-year-old (or more!) tractors I see out there, weathered but clean, ready to roll out and haul more freight. Their drivers show them off with obvious pride, and it’s hard not to notice the clean dashboards, seats, tidy sleeper berths, etc., they maintain. They might not be show trucks, but they are always clean as a whistle and ready to roll.

Had a nice chat the other day with Steven Anderson, corporate director for safety at DiSilva Transportation, which owns a number of trucking companies that haul freight in the Northeast, roughly from Maine down to Virginia and as far west as Ohio.

A 25-year veteran of United Parcel Service before joining DiSilva five years ago, Anderson told me one of his biggest challenges as a safety director is educating his workforce about the trucking profession – particularly the younger workers coming in through the company’s doors, people that view trucking more as an occupation than as a lifestyle.

“Our workforce isn’t made up of truck drivers from birth anymore – that’s our greatest challenge,” he told me. “In the past, truck drivers grew up wanting to drive trucks – it’s something they wanted to do since they were kids. And with that came the focus on skill the professionalism, everything you needed to become a great truck driver.”

Anderson told me the hurdle he must cross is how to transfer that focus on skill and safety to workers that view trucking only as a job – and he believes that transfer is a vital necessity.

“Look, we drive in probably some of the most congested areas of the country – New York City, Boston, Washington D.C.,” he told me. “That’s why safety and skill is so important, simply because the operating environment is very difficult.” Anderson sees himself and his staff playing the roles of educator, coach, and mentor to enable younger workers to absorb and hopefully drive with the professionalism of what he calls “old-time truckers” so they will be safe – along with the people surrounding them on the highways.

This is a challenge faced by all trucking companies – large and small, long-haul, regional, private, you name it – as the position of truck driver is viewed increasingly as just a job, no longer coming with the title “Knight of the Road.” It will be interesting to see how the industry adapts to the changing workforce in the years ahead.

There’s a well-used example in scientific circles about the perils of adapting to short-term change while missing the big picture. That’s what “frogs in a pot” is all about. The story goes that if you put a frog in a pot of water and then slowly increase the heat of the water, the frog will stay put – adapting to each increase in temperature – until it gets boiled to death.

When it comes to oil and fuel prices – both gasoline and diesel – we’ve been that frog in the pot, adjusting ourselves to ever higher and higher prices. The question now is whether we’ll get out of the pot before we, as a nation, get boiled to death. The recent explosion in biofuel production efforts – both ethanol and biodiesel – coupled to existing alternative efforts in the natural gas area gives some hope at least that we may indeed escape the frog’s fate. Yet that remains to be seem for we have a long way to go.

Look at the global picture: according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), global energy demand is going to keep growing despite the relatively high world oil and natural gas prices. However, the agency projects that rising oil prices should dampen growth in demand for petroleum and other liquids fuels after 2015 and, as a result, reducing their share of overall energy use from 38% in 2004 to a projected 34% in 2030. In contrast, the energy shares of natural gas, coal, and renewable energy sources are expected to grow over this period.

Still, liquid fuel consumption is still expected to grow strongly, reaching 118 million barrels per day in 2030, with the U.S., China, and India together account for nearly half of the projected growth in world liquid fuel use.

And the EIA’s analysis is coming on the heels of some disturbing near-term supply trends. Our web editor, Justin Carretta, recently wrote a story about oil prices breaking the $100 per barrel mark and got some scary comments from Denton Cinquegrana, markets editor for the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS).

Cinquegrana said predictions for the price of oil in 2008 remain high. “Even with the most conservative estimates, all forecasts for 2008 are for well over $80 a barrel,” he said, adding that it is hard to tell how long it will stay in the $90s—it could be a few weeks, a few months, or even longer.

And this historic oil price comes on the heels of a recent report that suggests oil-producing countries may not be able to meet demand sooner than anticipated. According to the Associated Press, the December issue of the OPEC Review, published by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said that its countries might not be able to meet demand at some point between 2024 and 2048, with several countries unable to produce their share even sooner.

OK, this is troublesome, sure. But we’re also seeing a big movement towards alternative fuels that could ease vehicle fuel crunch — if it all pans out. Blue Sky Bio-fuels and the city of San Francisco, for example, are partnering to use waste grease from restaurants to make biodiesel for the city’s school buses – which has the added benefit of stopping such waste grease from being dumped into the city’s sewer system.

“Our goal is to help California reduce its carbon footprint and become less dependent on foreign oil,” said Patrick MacIntyre, president of Blue Sky Bio-fuels. “Our solution is a triple win proposition where cities have their waste grease turned into a renewable … cleaner burning fuel at a price that is competitive with diesel.”

Blue Sky Bio-fuels, located in Oakland, CA, has designed and engineered a 20 million gallon per year facility and MacIntyre said as long as they can keep their biodiesel priced competitively for the school districts, it’ll prove itself to be a better alternative to petroleum diesel.

Richard Kolodziej, president of NGVAmerica, noted that natural gas is gaining more traction as a vehicle fuel as he noted that natural gas costs only $40 per equivalent barrel when compared to $100 per barreloil. “In the past, there were substantial societal benefits of using more natural gas as a vehicle fuel – such as reducing dependence on foreign oil, reducing greenhouse gases and reducing urban pollution,” he said. “Now, as the price gap between petroleum and natural gas widens, we’re seeing a major economic advantage, too. As a result, 2008 will be a milestone year for natural gas vehicles (NGVs) in the U.S.”

Kolodziej added that in 2007, the U.S. used about 250 million gasoline-gallons-equivalent of natural gas for vehicles, with high fuel-use fleet vehicles, such as transit buses, school buses, trash trucks, and delivery vehicles remaining major targets for conversion. He added that, to encourage the shift to NGVs, the federal government is offering income tax credits that range from $2,500 to $32,000 for the purchase or conversion of NGVs.

So maybe we are at a turning point – maybe this time the frog will jump out of the pot before it’s too late. Let’s hope we do.

“Brand names should mean something.” –Jim Walton

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately (a dangerous occupation for me, I know) about the General Motors-International Truck & Engine deal announced late last year, with GM selling its medium-duty commercial truck business to International for an estimated sticker price of $500 million or so.

What’s interesting to me is this deal is yet another sign of the opposite strategic paths auto and truck makers in the U.S. are on these days. For decades, U.S. automakers like GM and Ford seemed to be on a brand-name breeding program – even buying other brands of cars and trucks to add to their stable.

GM’s Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac brands were later joined by Hummer (bought from AM General), Saab (bought from Sweden), and Opal (bought from France). The company also went into partnership with Isuzu to gain diesel engines for its medium- and light-duty trucks (the Duramax) and get a lighter cabover medium-duty vehicle as well. It even built Class 8 trucks via a partnership with Volvo and White Mfg. For many years

Ford always had the Lincoln and Mercury brands, then went out and bought Volvo’s car business, Land Rover, and Jaguar. It even used to build heavy Class 8 trucks under the Aeromax brand.

Truck makers, by contrast, kept focused on core products – medium- and heavy-duty trucks only. Each had a distinct brand (Freightliner, Peterbilt, etc.) The only exception proved to be International Harvester at the time, which built farm equipment, heavy trucks, and even the famous Scout light vehicle (now a collectors item), an early version of Jeep’s Cherokee SUV. But by and large, each truck maker really supported only one brand name in the market – not the plethora GM and Ford supported.

How times have changed! Now the automakers are the ones rapidly divesting themselves of brands and product lines, whereas the truck makers are adding more – and on a global scale to boot.

Ford sold off its Class business in the late 1990s and is trying to find buyers for Land Rover and Jaguar now, while paring down the product offerings across its Lincoln, Mercury, and Ford brands. It’s nearly seven year relationship with International to build a joint cabover medium-duty truck and get diesel engines may very well end soon, with Ford building its own diesels in house. GM has been just as aggressive – shutting down Oldsmobile, selling off its “bread van” business, Allison Transmissions, its medium-duty business, all while shrinking product offerings across the board.

The truck makers, now, they are going down the path GM and Ford used to follow. Jim Hebe, Freightliner’s former chief, got the ball rolling. After being acquired by Daimler AG of Germany, Hebe went out and bought Ford’s Class 8 business, which it turned into Sterling Trucks, followed by Thomas Built buses, Canada’s Western Star, and others. Freightliner later bought Workhorse Custom Chassis. Daimler acquired big diesel engine maker Detroit Diesel and added that to the Freightliner mix.

Volvo AB of Sweden bought out GM’s heavy-duty truck stake and then bought Mack Trucks in Allentown, PA. Paccar, which owns Kenworth and Peterbilt, bought DAF trucks in England and plans to add that company’s diesel engines to the U.S. market via a big $400 million plant it’s building in Missouri.

International has also undergone a lot of change. After selling off the farm equipment business, the company changed its name to Navistar in the late 1980s. Finding that brand didn’t do well, it gradually brought the International nameplate back to the fore. Technically, though, the company is still Navistar and gets referred to as such by most stock analysts because it didn’t change its stock listing name – and that causes more than a little brand name confusion out in the market from time to time.

So what does all this shuffling mean, in the great scheme of things, when we look at the GM/International deal? Well, for starters, GM gets to take all the engineering resources it used to spend on medium-duty trucks and refocus that on its light-duty pickups – a real bread-and-butter line for the company. I talked to Mike Matheny, owner of GM dealer Matheny Motors, about that very subject and that is what makes him happy about this deal.

“We have a whole separate commercial department for light trucks and I consider it pretty steady business compared to our retail sales,” he told me. “The one thing I wish we had was something to match Ford’s 450/550 truck – what we need to get there is time and money, and now we’re getting some money to do it.”

On International’s side of ledger, though, the challenge will be integrating the Chevy and GMC brands into its lineup without diluting them or its core International brand – a tall order, in the eyes of Jim Walton, president of PR firm Brand Acceleration.

“Here’s the problem that Navistar will face if they continue to use all three names. In the eyes of the consumer, Chevy is a car sold by General Motors and GMC is a pseudo-Chevy, [also] sold be General Motors,” he told me.

“One reason that companies like to keep three brands is because they are afraid of losing any of the collective market share … [but] brand names should mean something,” he added. “The ‘big three’ forgot that more than thirty years ago: Oldsmobile is now gone and the Cadillac brand nearly ceased to exist.”

So where the Chevy and GMC brands go in the medium-duty market now is up in the air. Though they’ll be around for a while, International controls their destiny, so anything is possible. One thing is for certain: It’ll be an interesting brand transition to watch.