Trucks at Work Blog

“All too often those of us in the safety business fail to adequately explain to political leaders and the public the importance of … reducing crashes and how it impacts on people’s lives as well as their economic situation, not to mention some of the other benefits such as reducing congestion, pollution, fuel usage and health care costs.” –Steve Keppler, interim executive director, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA)

Following a ton of Congressional testimony this week, we’ve got a clearer picture of how the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is going to re-shape how it measures safety in the trucking industry via its new Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010) program.

More importantly, we’ve now got a timeline governing CSA 2010 implementation – as well as a “heads up” on new regulations FMCSA is going to introduce to help support its new approach to motor carrier safety oversight.

Anne Ferro, FMCSA’s administrator, laid this all out in testimony this week before the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

[She also endured some tough questioning from several members of Congress on how FMCSA manages trucking safety, including that of the committee’s chairman, James Oberstar (D-MN), which kicks off the clip below.]

Here are some of the critical parts of CSA 2010, how they will affect trucking, and when they’ll start going into full effect:

• A new Carrier Safety Measurement System (CSMS) will replace the current safety “scoring” system known as SAFESTAT. CSMS will use ALL available safety violation data, weighted by crash risk, to give inspectors what Ferro called a “more robust tool” for identifying high risk trucking companies for review. It also will be the basis for the Selection System roadside enforcement officers will use to focus their roadside inspections.

• CSA 2010 introduces a new strategy known as an “intervention,” framed four distinct levels: comprehensive on-site review (much like today’s compliance review); focused on-site investigations; off-site investigations; and warning letters. “Through a mix of these interventions, combined with roadside activity, we will increase the number of carriers we ‘touch’ and catch unsafe behaviors before it leads to a crash,” said Ferro.

• For CSA 2010 to reach its “maximum effect,” Ferro noted, a new piece of regulation is required, dubbed the “Safety Fitness Determination” or SFS rule. “This rule will ‘decouple’ a carrier’s safety rating from today’s on-site compliance review, enabling FMCSA to propose carrier safety ratings through CSMS, thereby increasing the number of carriers we rate annually ten-fold,” she added, pointing out that a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for the SFS rule is expected in early 2011.

• Finally, the timeline: The official “roll-out” of CSA 2010 began in April this year with the launch of the data preview. The actual safety measurement system, though, gets previewed in late August, followed by full view to the public at the end of the year, said Ferro. All of CSA 2010’s remaining components – warning letters, NPRM, intervention process and more – will be established in stages through the end of fiscal year 2011. By that time, Ferro added, CSA 2010 is going to change its name and only be known by the initials “CSA,” which will stand for “Compliance, Safety, Accountability.”

FMCSA believes it’s on the right track with its new CSA 2010 system – a program it’s spent six years developing. This June, Ferro said her agency wrapped up a 2 ½ year, nine-state field test of CSA 2010, and Ferro told the committee FMCSA’s preliminary findings show that it achieved a 35% increase in investigations using this approach.

“We reached more carriers AND did so with greater efficiency,” she stressed. “We [also] have anecdotal evidence of carriers who examined and changed their business practices as the result of a CSA 2010 contact and improved their safety … further confirming the old adage, ‘what gets measured gets done.’”

There’s support for CSA 2010 within several corners the industry, based on safety performance rather than compliance with paperwork requirements; it focuses limited enforcement resources on specific areas of deficiency, rather than on comprehensive on-site audits; and because it will eventually provide real-time, updated, safety performance measurements.

However, there are a lot of concerns, too – especially as to how CSA 2010 affects the carrier-driver relationship, and not always for the better.

[For a really good overview of these worries, check out the clip shot by Canada’s TruckNews.com during a presentation last March given by Jet Express to review the difficulties CSA 2010 is going to impose on carriers.]

Keith Klein, CEO and executive VP of TL carrier Transportation Corporation of America, testified on behalf of the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and laid out some of the industry’s issues with FMCSA’s new safety program:

• The agency should make crash accountability or “causation” determinations on truck-involved crashes before entering them into a carrier’s record so drivers and carriers are held accountable only for crashes they cause.

• FMCSA should use vehicle miles traveled (VMT), not number of trucks or power units, as a carrier’s exposure measure.

• The agency must focus on using ONLY actual citations for moving violations and not un-adjudicated “warnings” issued by law enforcement.

The intent of raising these concerns is twofold, Klein said: “The first is a matter of safety, to ensure that unsafe carriers are selected for interventions, and the second is a matter of equity, to ensure that relatively safe carriers are not selected for interventions.”

ATA has others concerns as well: how the severity weights for violations are assigned; measuring carriers based on violations committed by drivers who have since been terminated; measuring carriers based on citations that have been dismissed in a court of law; inequitable measurement of open deck or flatbed carriers; overly broad peer groups; and inconsistent state enforcement practices.

“A system that is based on inconsistent data and a flawed scoring methodology will not achieve its objectives,” he said. “Instead, it will create inequities for some safe carriers and inappropriately allow some unsafe carriers to avoid scrutiny and consequences.”

As CSA 2010 is going to be a “data driven” safety endeavor, several industry observers believe carriers need to gird themselves with specific technologies in order to cope.

Dale Reagan, vp-sales for software provider Tenstreet LLC and a 30-year trucking industry veteran who has worked as a recruiter, safety manager and driver for several private and for-hire fleets, says truckers should invest in programs that automate the collection of a potential driver’s work history, background checks, and more to quickly and accurately identify quality drivers.

He also believes trucking recruiters need to forego the unorganized and cumbersome paper file system and multiple fax communications that are still widely prevalent today.

“Instead they need to get properly organized by using a state-of-the art online program that is flexible and versatile,” he explained in a recent white paper Tenstreet put together on CSA 2010. “You obviously want to identify and hire the best possible drivers, processing and qualifying them to make certain those are the drivers you’re getting because, unfortunately, those best drivers don’t stay on the market very long.”

One key aspect of Tenstreet’s systems is digital signature technology, which “captures” a script signature as opposed to an electronic signature, which is not allowed.

“Our customers are using these thousands of times a day, on their releases, to get employment transgressions, such as drug and alcohol violations, from previous employees,” said Reagan. “This new technology eliminates the old, time-consuming and paperwork-intensive hiring practices of the past, and more and more fleets are beginning to take notice.”

Reagan added that Tenstreet is offering fleets an option within its software system to create their very own “scoring system” to help weed out drivers that won’t qualify under CSA 2010 guidelines during the application process. “

It’s customizable and can include anything like moving violations, accidents, weight violations and more,” he noted. “Once a predetermined score or grade, is met, the system automatically rejects the applicant. Recruiters won’t even know the guy applied. Conversely, a quality applicant is quickly identified and jumps to the top of the list.”

More importantly, hanging onto the elite drivers in the era of CSA 2010 is going to be just as important as hiring them, Reagan stressed.

“Many trucking companies are so focused on how to recruit employees that they neglect to work to retain them afterwards,” he explained. “They need to know that programs are available to reach out to employees during vulnerable periods of their tenure and capture employees’ perspective on how things are going.”

Training is yet another discipline that is slowly making the transition from pen and paper to mouse and computer screen, and this, too, will become all the more important as fleets search for new ways to cope with CSA 2010.

“There’s a lot of data out there when it comes to CSA 2010, so the more communication and training you have with drivers, the safer your fleet is going to be,” added Tim Crawford, president of Tenstreet.

“Fleets were telling us they wanted a solution to help them better track communication with drivers, so that way, they could show responsiveness to the government’s new safety regime,” he noted. “They were telling us ‘CSA 2010 is really raising the stakes,’ particularly because under the new system, there’s going to be more data that’s discoverable and admissible. “

Perhaps the most important part of the CSA 2010 debate, said Steve Keppler, interim executive director for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), is that this program can not only keep safety statistics moving in the right direction but save the nation a lot of money, too.

“First, there is some good news to report. The large truck fatality rate dropped by 12.3% in 2008, and is down 20.8% since 2005. There were more than 1,000 fewer deaths in 2008 from large truck crashes than there were in 2005,” he said in his Congressional testimony.

“[Yet] The downturn in the economy certainly has played a role in this, and my fear is that as it begins to recover, as thankfully it looks to be the case, we will not have adequate resources to maintain these numbers, much less improve upon them,” he cautioned.

Most Americans, and in particular those employed in the truck and bus industries, are very conscious and concerned about the congestion that many of us live with and how it impacts our lives and commerce, said Keppler. What most do not realize, however, is that the cost of safety far outweighs the costs of congestion.

Traffic congestion is not only exasperating, it is costly. In Optimizing the System, the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) references a 2001 Texas Transportation Institute report examining the costs of congestion in America’s 85 largest urban areas.

“An astronomical 3.5 billion hours of people’s time and 5.7 billion gallons of fuel were wasted in 2001 because of congestion. The cost of these squandered resources is a staggering $69.5 billion,” the report noted.

However the AASHTO report goes on to say something else, Keppler stressed: “As bad as this is, there’s an immeasurably more costly and tragic measure of the system’s performance: the human toll. Every year, more than 43,000 people are killed and nearly 3 million are injured in crashes on our nation’s roads and highways – and the annual economic cost of vehicle crashes is over $230 billion dollars.”

That, in his view, is but another example of why new safety efforts such as CSA 2010 are needed.

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And on that note, ladies and gentlemen, this reporter is taking a VERY necessary break from this blog (oh my aching fingers!) We’ll see you back here July 6 – and may any journey you take on our nation’s highways be completed safe and sound.

“I’m asked all the time if installing a hydrogen fuel system on a family car or truck is going to result in a ‘Hindenburg outcome.’ Rather than tell you it is safe, I decided to show you it’s safe in conditions that your vehicle would never encounter.” –Brian Hess founder and inventor of Hessgen Inc., on why he drove a vehicle equipped with his fuel system in the Baja 500, a brutal 500-mile off-road race

Hydrogen has a bad (if undeserved) reputation as a transportation fuel for over seven decades now – the result of the infamous explosion that consumed the German dirigible Hindenburg in a horrific fire back in 1937 while it attempted to land in New Jersey – an explosion caused when a bolt of lightning ignited the lighter-than-air hydrogen gas used to keep the massive airship aloft.

Ever since, hydrogen’s proved a tough sell in the transportation sector – whether used directly as a fuel or indirectly, to help generate electricity as part of fuel cell power systems.

Brian Hess, however, is out to change all that – largely by racing a rough-and-ready “hydrogen hybrid” he recently raced in the brutal Baja 500, putting it through extreme conditions (and crashes) most vehicles will never experience over their life cycle.

[Check out the clip below – it’ll give you a flavor of how rough the conditions are – including some “pilot view” shots of one of the rollovers Brian experienced.]

The founder Hessgen Inc., Hess wants to convince everyone that operates motor vehicles – everyday motorists and truckers alike – that hydrogen is a fuel just as safe as the gasoline and diesel currently powering their cars and trucks alike.

His technological invention – dubbed the H2G System – injects a percentage of hydrogen gas into the combustion reaction, on the order of 10% to 20% of the total fuel mix, for either compression (read as diesel) or spark ignition engines. It’s available for passenger cars with up to 4.6 liter engines, trucks and SUVs operating 4.6 liter to 7.3 liter engines, and big rigs running 7.3 liter engines and up.

Every model comes with the required engine management modules in a plug and play format that control the hydrogen injection, he said. That addition of hydrogen has been shown to decrease the formation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and unburned hydrocarbons coming out of the vehicle’s tailpipe andyehre from 20% to 40%, while boosting fuel economy 20% to 40% in the bargain.

The theory behind this concept of lower emissions/greater fuel economy is that the addition of hydrogen can extend the lean operation limit, improve the lean burn ability, and decrease burn duration.

OK – that’s nice, of course. But the top questions truckers ask when such technology arrives with great fanfare revolve around price and reliability. How much does a “hydrogen hybrid” system cost? I don’t know the answer to this one. Now, in terms of its reliability, Hess’s sojourn in the Baja 500 reveals some answers.

For starters, his “Hessgen Hydrogen #88” off road truck racer is powered by a 700 hp engine – showing that Hess’s “hydrogen hybrid” concept can work with the “big bore” units used by commercial trucks. Second, he had only three weeks to get this prototype ready for action – meaning that this wasn’t some specially-crafted vehicle that required years of lab work to get ready.

Finally, Hess flipped his racer over within the first five miles of the race, landing the entire vehicle – weighing some 5,000 pounds – right on top of the hydrogen fuel injection system. No explosion resulted from this rollover and, once righted, the vehicle’s engine and hydrogen injection system turned over and kept running – allowing him to finish the race.

“This alone proved that the system is safe in an impact-rollover crash and tough enough to meet the demands of everyday over-the-road driving,” Hess said. All told, Hess covered the 500 miles of the Baja off-road race in just over 21 hours and 40 minutes of nonstop driving.

Does this mean Hessgen’s H2G system is a “silver bullet” to meet all of our complex transportation energy needs? Hardly. What it DOES demonstrate is that we may have more options for fueling our cars and trucks on the table than we suspect – technologies that might, with the right engineering and planning, be a lot simpler to implement than we think.

“Our research provides hard evidence that constituents and consumers alike are fed up with the polarization of our political system and the uncivil tone of our country as a whole. As a result, Americans are tuning out and turning away from news, information and informed opinions that make up the very foundation of American democracy.” –Jack Leslie, chairman of Weber Shandwick

Anyone that’s been driving on the highways and byways of late (including this reporter) isn’t surprised one iota by the statement above – nor by the finding in a recent poll conducted by public relations firms Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate, in partnership with KRC Research, that two out of three Americans consider a general lack of civility to be a major problem for the nation, with some 72% believing poor behavior has gotten worse in recent years.

While poll also found that Americans believe their friends, family and places of worship are bucking the trend toward incivility, a majority of the public sees uncivil behavior throughout society – especially in politics and high schools; on talk radio; our nation’s highways; in Hollywood and professional sports.

[Here’s a clip from the Associated Press about how New York City got pegged as the “Road Rage” capital of the U.S. last year – and why many NYC residents actually agreed with that determination!]

The online survey conducted by KRC in April asked more than 1,000 Americans how civility affects people’s views of and participation in social media, politics, media and buying behaviors

Extrapolating from the data gleaned in that research, three out of four Americans believe the financial crisis and recession have lessened the level of civility in American life, with 72% of Americans viewing the political world and government as uncivil – the highest percentage recorded in the poll.

Nearly half of Americans (49%) are tuning out government and politics, and almost two-thirds of those people (63%) cite the general tone and level of civility as a major factor in their decision. Another 46% are tuning out opinion pieces and editorials in the media, and 45% cite incivility as a major factor, while 38% tune out news coverage and reporting – with half of them (50%) attributing their actions to the lack of civility.

With regard to social media, the survey found that blogs are considered more uncivil than social networking sites and Twitter (Oh no! So much for blogging!)

The poll also found that there is a high cost to rudeness and inconsiderate behavior. Three-quarters of Americans believe that companies that exhibit uncivil behavior should be boycotted. Based on personal experiences of incivility, one half or more of Americans have refrained from buying a company’s products (56%), reevaluated their opinions of a company (55%) or advised friends and family against purchasing their products (49%).

Although Americans pointed fingers at many segments of society for engaging in uncivil behavior, they strongly believe that everyone is responsible for improving such behavior. Asked who is responsible for improving civility, 87%answered “the American public”; 83% said political leaders; and 81%, 79% and 76% percent cited the news media, businesses and places of worship, respectively.

What does all of this prove? That civility – basic good manners – still matters not only in everyday life but in the business world, too. I’ve talked to plenty of truck drivers and trucking executives in my relatively short career and I can attest that the ones that survive the ups and downs this business dishes out are inevitably ones with high standards of personal and professional civility. Let’s hope more of that is encourages as the industry continues to travel on the long road back to fiscal health.

“Domestic automakers have made impressive strides in steadily improving vehicle quality, particularly since 2007.” –David Sargent, vice president of global vehicle research, J.D. Power and Associates

It’s a significant achievement by the U.S. automotive industry that needs to be remembered yet also built upon: domestic auto brands, as a whole, demonstrated higher initial quality than import brands according to the 2010 U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS) put together by J.D. Power and Associates – the first time they’ve ever achieved this distinction over the 24 years J.D. Power has conducted this study, the research firm said.

Overall, the industry average for initial quality is 109 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100) in 2010, increasing slightly from 108 PP100 in 2009. However, initial quality for domestic brands as a whole has improved by four PP100 in 2010 to an average of 108 PP100, J.D. Power’s research indicated – slightly better than the initial quality of import brands, which averages 109 PP100 in 2010.

In particular, substantial improvements by specific domestic models – including Ford Motor Co.’s Focus small car, Chrysler’s Ram 1500 LD pickup and General Motor’s Buick Enclave crossover – drove the overall improvement of domestic automakers in 2010. In particular, initial quality of Ford models has improved steadily for the past nine years.

In addition, J.D. Power said Ford, as a corporation (which includes Volvo) has 12 models that rank within the top three in their respective segments in 2010 – more than any other automaker this year – with GM nipping at their heels with 10 models ranking within the top three in their segments.

[One of the ways Ford, for one, hopes to stay in the top quality rankings, while also delivering vehicles with more power and better fuel economy, is via new EcoBoost engine technology. You can see a clip about these new engines below.]

“This year may mark a key turning point for U.S. brands as they continue to fight the battle against lingering negative perceptions of their quality,” said David Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of global vehicle research.

Historically, newly launched models have incurred substantially more quality problems than carryover models, on average. However, more than one-half of all models launched during the 2010 model year perform better than their respective segment averages, he said.

“With automakers committing huge budgets for the design, engineering, production and marketing of all-new models and major redesigns, hitting the quality mark out of the gate is critical,” noted Sargent.

“Getting initial quality right on model launches can serve dual purposes for automakers – boosting profitability and also inspiring consumer confidence in the overall quality of their models,” he added. “Having a strong quality image is essential for automakers to be able to compete in today’s market – both in the U.S. and around the globe.”

Yet this only the starting point on a long road that needs to be travelled, he stressed, as domestic automotive manufacturers need to consistently prove to consumers that they can produce models with quality that equals or beats that of the import brands.

“Achieving quality comparability is the first half of the battle; convincing consumers – particularly import buyers – that they have done this is the second half,” Sargent pointed out.

[GM plans to keep plugging away at consumer perceptions of its products on a number of fronts, especially in the car segment with new vehicles like the 2011 Chevy Cruze, seen below. Note the focus in this clip on smaller displacement yet more powerful engines as well as extreme durability testing for the Cruze.]

Still, it’s a noteworthy moment for domestic OEMs that have long fallen short of the top quality mark. The Ford brand, for example, moved to fifth place among all brands from eighth last year. This is the highest position Ford has achieved in the IQS since ranking 23rd in 2004, the automaker noted. Its luxury brand, Lincoln, which was 26th on the list in 2009, now sits at eighth.

“Steady and meticulous attention to new model launches along with consistency in how we do them across the brand and the globe are having a very positive effect on the initial quality of our all-new or redesigned products,” said Bennie Fowler, Ford’s group vice president for global quality & new model launches.

Yet a lot of pain and suffering also must be accounted alongside the top quality scores U.S. automakers are now nabbing. Ford, for one, shut down its 70 year-old Mercury brand in early June, which followed the selloff of the Land Rover and Jaguar luxury brands as the company consolidated cash in order to ratchet product engineering and quality up to higher levels.

GM’s been doing the same, going through bankruptcy proceedings last year with the aid of Federal bailout monies, also while shedding former product labels such as Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer. It’s been a trying time to say the least for GM, but it’s also managed to still knock a few out of the park, with the redesigned Chevrolet Malibu mid-size sedan still garnering critical praise, along with its redesigned pickups and crossovers (especially the Chevy Traverse).

None of the domestic automakers are out of the woods yet – not by a long shot – but the IQS numbers this year at the very least show they are on the right path, firing on all cylinders.

“I get a lot of work simply because people remember these trucks.” –Jerry Beaudoin, owner of Soil Recovery Systems (SRS), Southington, CT

On the surface, at least, the “show truck” as a concept seems gratuitous in the extreme for this industry.

I mean, let’s face it: profits in trucking used to be measured in pennies, but are today reduced to mere percentages of pennies. Then go beyond the bottom line to look at the work environment these trucks must survive in: racking up 120,000 to 150,000 miles a year over rough roads, in bad weather, covered in dirt, grime, and corrosive ice-melting chemicals to boot.

With all that in mind, not only does dumping some $10,000 into an eye-popping paint job or sheet metal work seem highly impractical, it borders on the suicidal – from a purely business perspective, of course.

Then you meet someone like Jerry Beaudoin (at right), owner of Soil Recovery Systems (SRS) out of Southington, CT, and your thinking on the practicality of show trucks takes a 180 degree turnabout.

For starters, Beaudoin and his shop personnel do all of the fabricating work on his fleet of 13 trucks – which now includes painting them, as he recently brought on a technician rich with that skill. That significantly cuts down on the cost of creating these unique diesel-powered pieces of rolling art.

More importantly, though, Beaudoin told me he gets a lot of work simply because he operates such sharp dressed steel – because nobody forgets a delivery by one of his rigs. Yet Beaudoin stressed that his company is also memorable because they’re customer service is second to none – again due to his high class trucks, which allow him to find and retain some of the best drivers in the trucking business.

“You’re a rock star every day you’re behind the wheel of one these trucks,” he told me at the 2010 Shell Rotella SuperRigs competition held last week at the LEE HI Travel Plaza outside of Lexington, VA. “People slow down all day long to take pictures and give you a ‘thumbs up.’ It’s just so cool.”

In a lot of ways, Beaudoin is a “classic” trucker, earning his chops the hard way. Originally from Quebec, Canada, Beaudoin’s family relocated to the U.S. where his father worked as a welder and drove a truck to make ends meet. Already infatuated with metalworking, Beaudoin learned to weld at age seven, quickly turning a beloved mini-bike into something straight out of Orange County Choppers.

Yet big rigs really fired his imagination, Beaudoin told me, so he set to work figuring out how to build a trucking company successful enough to fund his artistic passions. His solution proved unusual: moving dirt.

In and around the northeastern U.S., numerous construction sites needed soil filled with chemical residues from factories and other heavy industries to be hauled away. It’s dirty, grimy, unappealing work for any trucker, yet also requires real skill in terms of operation end-dump trailers. Beaudoin thought he could do such work as well as anyone, while also bringing some major pizzazz to the business.

About 17 years ago, he got started working on the Saugatuck River Bridge refurbishment project and never looked back. Seven years later, he’d earned enough to go out on his own, gradually building his fleet up from one to eventually 13 trucks over a decade of hard work.

Today, he’s got 100 owner-operators working for him in addition to his 13 company-owned vehicles running up and down the east coast, hauling soil one way while backhauling compost, aggregate and concrete.

While his business is profitable, Beaudoin’s passion for show trucks hasn’t abated. Each one takes about a year to build, start to finish, with him doing most of the fabricating work. Parts get sandblasted and reused, with his mind always in overdrive, looking at new ways to create what he calls a “clean, simple design.”

“I don’t like gaudy – lots of chrome, lights, stickers and loud paint,” he explained. “I like subtle designs, ones that take a while for you to notice.”

[You can see what I mean in the clip below, which includes a review of Beaudoin’s truck as he prepped it for the 2010 Shell Rotella SuperRigs competition.]

He showed me around his most recent creation, pointing out “bat wing” parts he’d crafted himself, helping link the entire tractor and trailer together from an artistic view. And he firmly believes in doing all the fabrication in-house, too. “I mean, why spend $1,200 to $1,500 on a custom battery box when I can do it myself?” he told me.

For example, one unique fixture on his latest rig are headlights set back into a big western-style front bumper that automatically flip down and up with the touch of a button. “That cost me just $50 of my own welding time to do,” Beaudoin said.

Today, he and his full-time staff of 15 people do almost everything when building one of SRS’s unique creations – everything except exhaust pipes. Beaudoin favors what he calls “traditional” Peterbilt paint schemes for his trucks, using just orange and black as his base colors, combining them in different patterns for each vehicle.

It’s important to note that not just any driver gets handed the keys to one of SRS’s unique creations – oh no.

For starters, his trucks haul some heavy loads and thus need to pack a big punch – up to 800 horsepower for one of his Cummins ISX powered rigs. Most are equipped with 18 speed manuals, too, so a driver really needs to know how to shift. In fact, Beaudoin said he’ll let a truck sit if need be until he finds just the right person – someone who knows trucking, can operate an end dump, doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty, and won’t scratch the paint … ever.

“But the guys I have here love working for me,” Beaudoin stressed. “I mean, where else do you get to drive something like this for work every day? Driving a truck like this really puts the trucker in a whole new light for everyone he or she meets during the day: the customer, fellow truckers, and everyday motorists alike.”

“We’re putting a lot of effort into our full size pickup trucks; we’re not wavering in our commitment to the full size market.” –Tony Truelove, Chevrolet Silverado marketing manager

I spent a few days last week tooling around parts of western Maryland and (albeit only briefly) Pennsylvania in some of the new 2011 Chevrolet and GMC pickup models being rolled out by General Motors.

Now, obviously, I don’t spend nearly as much time as an untold bevy of work crews and others do with trucks such as these. They’re in them at all hours of the day and night for months and years at a time, but far more strain on engines, frames, components, and interiors than I ever will in a two-day test drive period.

So when I go on these ride and drives, I’m looking for the “work truck basics” so to speak; how easy or difficult is it for someone to jump in and smoothly operate these pickups. At its most simplistic level (and feel free to correct me if you think I’m way off base) a true “work truck” takes the driving portion of a landscaper’s or contractor’s day and makes it “uneventful,” to borrow an apt description from one of GM’s engineers I talked with.

[Here’s a “walk-around” look at one of the vehicles I drove – a diesel-powered 2011 Silverado 3500 4WD crew cab, equipped with a small Knapheide dump body.]

In essence, you should just be able to get in and drive – loaded or unloaded, with highway miles or hills before you – and get to the job site or home base without any fuss or muss. You’re not struggling with sluggish engine acceleration, or compensating for poor maneuverability. You’re not stopping on the side of the road to figure out how to turn the A/C on or fumbling around to activate tow-control features. You just get in, go, get out, and get to work.

In this context, the trucks I spent the most time with proved exceptional. I took a plain vanilla 2011 Chevy Silverado 2500 4WD regular cab on a nearly two-hour jaunt from a hotel outside Baltimore-Washington International Airport up I-70 and into the Alleghany mountains, at highway speeds, local road speeds, on flat stretches and hilly grades.

End result: an uneventful ride. I could safely control the vehicle with one hand on the wheel while nipping from my coffee mug. The 6-liter Vortec V-8 gasoline engine purred along, jumping easily to my requests for acceleration, yet never bellowing once – I talked to my GM passenger at a normal volume, with no need to bark over the roar of an engine.

I spent a nice slice of the following afternoon navigating a lot of local roads at the helm of a 2011 Silverado 3500 4WD crew cab, equipped with a small Knapheide dump body. I deliberately wanted the dump body to be empty, because when “empty,” ride quality usually suffers.

Not so in this case; there wasn’t any hitch or jump in the suspension as I tacked back and forth over some mountain grades, nor on the flat stretches.

A 6.6-liter Duramax diesel powered this model, hooked up to an Allison 1000 six-speed transmission and it hummed along quietly, regardless of acceleration demands. The traditional “bark” of the diesel is now significantly muffled due to all the emission controls now in place – and those emission systems didn’t interfere one iota with my operation of the vehicle.

Again, to put it simply, piloting this crew cab proved “uneventful” to this driver – it did everything I asked of it, I didn’t have to struggle with its operation, and so I could relax and attempt to think of clever headlines for the stories I’d write about the experience. (Predictably, none emerged – but I DID get to listen to some awesome country music!)

The most interesting feature on GM’s 2011 diesel-powered heavy-duty pickups is the new “smart” exhaust brake feature that enables controlled vehicle slowdown on downhill grades without applying the brakes. I rode shotgun in 2011 Silverado 3500 4WD crew cab towing a 9,000-pound trailer and watched it work smoothly first had.

Both the driver and myself had some sweaty moments – it is HARD to let a machine totally control your fate like this – but it worked and worked well. Best thing is, if a problem did develop, the truck’s brakes would be fresh and ready for action; not hot and already overworked after descending a steep grade.

Of course, you can’t pass up an opportunity to live it up a little, and that opportunity showed up in the form of a 2011 GMC Sierra Denali 2500 4WD crew cab. Powered by a 6-liter Vortec V-8 gasoline engine married to a 6-speed HydraMatic automatic transmission, this truck came with all the trimmings: leather seats, onboard navigation system, remote start, tire pressure monitoring system, you name it.

Oh my, was THIS a nice ride! Tooling around in the Denali was indeed quite a treat. Yet the $51,855 price tag made it an outright no-no for THIS reporter’s family budget!

From a work truck perspective, GM did its homework on these new 2011 model pickups. You couldn’t ask for better packaging of power, performance, ride, handling, and comfort, all tied together with simplicity of operation. The key, of course, will be how durable and reliable these trucks are over years of hard-knock operation. That, my friends, is where you take over.

“I’ve never been in the Shell SuperRigs contest before and I always wanted to see if I could make it into the calendar – and I figured if I never go to one, I’ll never get that chance. So here I am.” –Kirby Martin, owner-operator out of Gettysburg, PA

I spent some time this week covering the 28th annual Shell Rotella SuperRigs competition at the Lee Hi Travel Plaza outside of Lexington, VA – truly a stunning spot for a truck stop if I’ve ever seen one.

Trucks large and small flocked to Lee Hi’s picturesque location from all over the map – one even from North Dakota! – to compete for cash and prizes valued at approximately $25,000. Also, 12 of them would also get selected to have their truck featured in the 2011 Shell Rotella SuperRigs calendar.

Vehicles entered into the SuperRigs are judged by members of the trucking media and score the rigs on exterior appearance, design, detail/finish, originality, and workmanship. In total, 25 working trucks receive awards for categories such as best of show, tractor, tractor-trailer combination and classic categories.

Along with the above categories, awards will also be given in specialized categories such as “Best Chrome,” “Best Theme,” “Best Mural,” “Best Lights,” “People’s Choice” and others. The “Best Lights” judging will be held at dark on day two of the event (June 11), and the “People’s Choice” award will be voted on throughout this year’s three -day event (running from June 10-12) by all contestants and spectators.

[Want to know what the judges are looking for? Watch the clip below as Eric Harley, host of the Midnight Trucking Radio Show on WBAP, gave me a quick tour on one contestant’s vehicle to give some insight into what catches his eye as he judges rigs.]

Shell’s SuperRigs contest, by the way, is free to all participants, with every entrant receiving a gift package consisting of: one gallon of Shell Rotella T Triple Protection engine oil; one gallon of Shell Rotella ELC Extended Life Coolant; a single application tube of Shell Retinax Fifth Wheel Grease; Shell Rotella SuperRigs t-shirt and hat; a 2010 Shell Rotella SuperRigs calendar; and a package of Rain-X wiper blades.

But of course, truckers don’t do things in half measures – and the contestants in this annual competition serve as a prime example. For starters, all them spent countless dollars and hours putting together extraordinary vehicles, then spent days cleaning and polishing them to a high degree.

[You can see some of the design work that went into these trucks – as well as the backbreaking hours of cleaning and polish preparations – in the clip below.]

Shell turns the yearly SuperRigs locations into a huge “country fair” of sorts, as well, bringing in carnival rides, hot air balloon rides and drive-in movies (this year featuring that trucking classic, Smokey and the Bandit), plus free nightly concerts, which included bluegrass band Nothin’ Fancy 70’s show band Right On Band; and the country music of Burns & Poe at the 2010 event.

To top it all off, Shell organized a parade through downtown Lexington with some of the competing trucks as well as antique vehicles, capped by a fireworks show will kick off the big rig light contest.

Shell also brought its one-of-a-kind “Rotella Road Show” tractor-trailer to the SuperRigs contest, to highlight diesel engine systems and the lubricants that protect them.

[Below is a video tour of the “Roadshow” big rig.]

The father and son racing team Larry & Adam Koester from the National Tractor Pullers Association (NTPA) were on hand, too, showing off their unique “mini-modified” racing tractors that crank out (and I am not kidding) 2,700 horsepower.

Sponsored by Shell, Larry (in the wheelchair on the left) and Adam each have an NTPA championship under their belts (Larry actually has three of them) and they gearing up to try and get another this year.

[You’ll read more about Larry and how a life-threatening farm tractor accident over 20 years ago made him into the NTPA champion he is today in a post next week. Trust me; it’s a story worth waiting for.]

Probably the most interesting thing about SuperRigs, when all is said and done, is the camaraderie among the “competitors.”

Kirby Martin, an owner-operator out of Gettysburg, PA, told me that while he loves showing his truck off, these contests allow him to catch up with other drivers and their families – people he rarely gets to see.

“It’s like a family reunion in a way,” he told me. “I don’t get to see them unless I go to a show. And this year my family and I are making a ‘summer vacation’ out of it, staying here in a camper for the weekend to enjoy the carnival and other stuff.”

It’s that kind of atmosphere that makes SuperRigs a special occasion for all of the drivers involved, regardless of whether they win a prize or calendar photo shoot.

“I tell you what – this truck makes some very wide turns.” –Charlie Lester, driver of the Maryland State Police incident command vehicle

It’s a one-of-a-kind truck that grabs your attention by both labels and holds on to them very tightly.

With its communication masts fully extended and high-tech computer stations deployed, the Maryland State Police incident command vehicle is an impressive sight. And it serves an important role, as well: that of an all-important “base camp” to help law enforcement combat all kinds of calamities, be they natural or man-made.

I got a chance to tour this impressive truck as the state police deployed it to help manage Operation Roadcheck out at the FedEx Field football stadium in Landover, MD, this week.

Built following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the truck functions as a mobile headquarters packed with a dizzying array of communications technology so the Maryland State Police can coordinate incidence response with any number of groups dealing with a crisis – local police, National Guard units, etc. – via radio, cellular, and even satellite communication networks.

It’s built on a specially-modified 2005 Kenworth T-2000 Class 8 chassis, powered by a 625 horsepower Caterpillar engine and 18 speed autoshift transmission. Though it’s got a clutch, the truck only needs to be manually shifted for the first few gears to get rolling. Once up to speed, the gears shift themselves so the driver can keep both hands on the wheel.

And both hands are certainly needed as this “straight truck” is 56-feet long from bumper to tail. Grossing out at 62,000 pounds fully loaded – weight that includes 300 gallons of fuel plus 300 gallons of fresh water.

Charlie Lester (at right, showing off the stacks of servers, cellular routers, generator controls, and other systems packed into this truck) is the incident command vehicle’s dedicated driver and told me he can raise the truck’s twin 56-foot tall communication masts and extend the work area compartments with just the touch of a button from the driver’s seat. However, he typically goes outside first to make sure nothing will be in the way when he fully deploys the truck for action.

Lester added that the truck comes equipped with two 20 kilowatt diesel-fired generators to power up the plethora of technology packed into its confines – computers, radios, fax machines, printers, and flat-screen televisions.

Four computer stations collect and manage all the communication traffic at a crisis site, while piping in television news feeds plus transmitting and recording video from one of five fixed security cameras around the vehicle, along with a mobile camera atop one of the masts.

Sergeant Ellis Diaz (at left) with the Maryland State Police told me the truck’s communication system is deliberately “layered” so it can tap into any available cellular network at an incident site – be it Verizon, AT&T, etc.

In rear of the vehicle is a miniature “conference room” of sorts equipped with television monitors, plug-in locations for laptops, and phones sp site commanders can quickly huddle up face-to-face to map our crisis response strategy.

Of course, since such a truck will literally be a “home away from home” during a crisis, it comes equipped with a toilet, two sinks, microwave, refrigerator and freezer.

[And let me tell you, having had too much coffee in preparation for covering the “Roadcheck” event, this reporter was MOST please to discover the truck came equipped with a bathroom!]

One thing for certain – it’s a vehicle ably suited to support the modern-day cavalry when it rides to the rescue.

“In the end, all that matters is the customer’s perception.” – Brent Deep, development engineer for full size heavy-duty pickups at General Motors

Brent Deep is pretty unusual for a truck engineer. For starters, he’s six-foot-six, which means he often must fold himself up like a pretzel to fit into the cabs of the trucks he test drives for a living.

Then there’s Deep’s job title. He’s dubbed a “development engineer” now because that’s what he’s supposed to do – to develop the heavy-duty pickups built by General Motors so they perform above and beyond customer expectations.

[Here’s a unique computer generated imagery or CGI look at the underpinnings of GM’s new 2011 Chevy Silverado 3500 HD pickup.]

In the past, though, his job bore the ungainly title of “powertrain integration engineer,” because that’s what most of the work focused on – getting the engine, transmission and axles to work together as a single, integrated unit.

But the work is different now because it’s not all about numbers and outputs anymore, he told me. Oh, for sure, matching transmission shift points to the engine’s torque curve remains just as critical, as do about a billion other algorithmic calculations managing every other aspect of vehicle operation, such as fuel consumption, engine braking, stability control, etc.

Yet Deep (standing behind the pickup in the photo below at right) told me a lot of what he does revolves around a most unlikely engineering characteristic: “feeling.”

“How transmission shifting ‘feels’ to the driver, how the vehicle behaves on different road surfaces, these are the kinds of things drivers and owners notice before anything else,” he explained.

“You might have a truck with great fuel economy or really fast zero-to-60 acceleration speed. But if the customer doesn’t like how the truck changes gears, or if the engine braking comes on too soon, or if they hear annoying sounds, then they aren’t going to buy your truck,” Deep said.

So his job is to go out and drive these trucks for hundreds – if not thousands – of miles on regular roads, as well as on test tracks, recording myriads of data on truck performance, but also searching for those subtle “feelings” resulting from vehicle operation.

“For example, I felt that on steep grades, engine braking should activate sooner; that it should react faster to steeper downhill descent,” Deep told me. “So the engineers reprogrammed everything and I tried it out. But then I found it just came on too soon – it annoyed me, for lack of a better word. It interfered with my judgment as a driver. So we set it back the way it was.”

[Here’s a short clip about how GM’s new 2011 Chevy Silverado pickups get built.]

Smooth shifting is another factor Deep spent a lot of time working on, trying to get things “just so” to make the driver experience that much cleaner as well as more efficient. “In some cases, we went to short shifts to better match the torque curve without disturbing the drive experience,” he said.

Then there’s “pedal travel,” which encompasses vehicle acceleration response. “We feel you should get to use ‘the whole pedal’ when accelerating,” Deep explained. “You should get a different level of acceleration at every stage of the pedal. You shouldn’t get full response when you ‘tip in’ to 25% pedal depression, with acceleration rate unchanged as the pedal goes all the way to the floor.”

That full range of “pedal travel, Deep added, also helps the driver better manage their fuel economy. “By having that full range of pedal travel, you can better manage how much fuel you’re consuming,” he said. “It gives you, the driver, more control.”

The toughest part about Deep’s job, though, is that if he does everything right, if nails both “feelings” as well as the algorithms … then the customer should never notice.

He’s constantly tweaking things to make driving on of GM’s pickup trucks as uneventful as possible, with no untoward hitches or shimmies, bumps or noises, working behind the scenes and hoping to stay that way.

It’s just one of the many unseen engineering disciplines that keeps making trucks better and better, now and for the future.

So I’m on the road for the next couple of days testing out the new 2011 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup truck models from General Motors, and already entered some “never been done before” notations in my “ride and drive” ledger.

Like showing up in my soccer coach uniform, for starters.

Yes, yes, I know – youth soccer coaches wear UNIFORMS? Well, not in the sense that baseball managers do. It’s really just a golf shirt emblazoned with the club’s logo. But what can one do? There wasn’t enough downtime to get changed – and it didn’t matter anyways, since dress is decidedly “informal” for such events.

[Though my hosts noted that if I’d shown up in a REFEREE uniform, it would’ve been very different.]

While I can’t share my driving impressions until June 14, according to the rules of this ride and drive, I can tell you we got a very lucky break with the weather. I arrived in Baltimore, MD for the start in the event in a driving thunderstorm – weather that delayed a lot of flights for both GM representatives and journalists alike.

Fortunately, as we were heading west to Rocky Gap, MD (where I’m sitting now, coffee in hand), we left the rain behind and enjoyed a sunny yet cool day.

We took I-70, through the rolling farmland of western Maryland, with a brief stop outside Sharpsburg MD for a McDonald’s iced coffee – a scant 10 miles from the battlefield of Antietam. In the Civil War, the Confederacy always named battlefield locations after the nearest town, while the Union chose the nearest river or creek.

In this case, Antietam is the name history remembers for this tragic place where 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862. Antietam ended the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s first invasion into the North and led to Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Temptation knocked mightily on my mind’s door as I stood in the parking lot looking down the road. Antietam is just 10 miles away, I thought: I haven’t been there in years. I could even take a quick tour of the site – perfectly preserved, looking just the way it did on the horrible September morning so long ago – before getting back on track to Rocky Gap. No one would miss me.

But I resisted and moved on.

A while later, I-70 gave way to I-68 and we punched up through Sideling Hill; a 2,321 foot rise in the Allegheny Mountain range, capped with a 340-foot deep roadway notch excavated from its ridge. It is notable as an impressive man-made mountain pass, visible from miles away, and is considered one of the best rock exposures in Maryland and the entire northeastern U.S.

I pulled in to the rest stop there to take some photos (as you can see in this post) enjoying the view and marveling yet again at some of the engineering feats of mankind. Looking at how much stone had to excavated to make this roadway cut is just staggering; requiring determination and patience in equal measure to accomplish.

We capped the day’s drive (some 130 miles or so – a very scant measure in the trucking business) at the Rock Gap resort, which sits on a 243-acre lake (translation: it’s HUGE) in the foothills of Rocky Gap State Park. It’ll be our “base camp” for running routes in three states – Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Maryland – to put the Silverado and Sierra models through their paces, with plenty of steep grades to measure engine power, braking, plus ride and handling.

We’ll see how these trucks perform.