Trucks at Work Blog

“Gen Y’s strong affinity for hybrid vehicles could make it the generation that leads us away from traditional gasoline-powered vehicles.” –Craig Giffi, vice chairman and automotive practice leader at global consulting firm Deloitte LLP

Could the ongoing shift between generations help foster greater acceptance – and thus wider acquisition – of hybrid vehicles? That seems to be one of the conclusions from a recent survey conducted by global consulting firm Deloitte LLP.

Craig Giffi, vice chairman and automotive practice leader at Deloitte, noted that the firm’s annual survey of Gen Y consumers (now in its fourth year) found that a strong majority (59%) of Gen Y respondents prefer an “electrified vehicle” over any other type of car or truck.

Moreover, Gen Y consumers heavily favor hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles (57%) over pure battery electric vehicles (2%) or vehicles with a traditional gasoline-only powertrain (37%). more

“It relates to that old saying: if you give a man a fish, he has one meal. But if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself for a lifetime.” –Steve Bertrand, Midwest district service manager for Peterbilt Motors Co. and one of the judges at the Rush Trucks Centers 2011 Technician Skills Rodeo

Every year that I’ve attended Rush Trucks Centers’ annual Technician Skills Rodeo, I make a special effort to grab Steve Bertrand – one of the judges and creator of many of the insidious challenges the techs must solve – for a few minutes to discuss some of the trends affecting the parts and service corner of the trucking business.

The biggest issue hanging over everyone in this space, of course, remains the ever growing shortage of technicians of all stripes – a bad omen for fleets and dealerships alike, which both rely on keeping trucks up and running to make a living.

Obviously, the industry is hard at work trying to solve the shortage – especially by forging partnerships with vocational schools around the country, while simultaneously encouraging more high school kids to take a stab at a vocational career (with similar efforts being concocted to counter the growing shortage of trucks drivers as well). more

“My dad started out driving Fords and I got a brand new one in 1988 myself. We must’ve had 15 or 20 of them over the years.” –Bill Warner Jr. of Bill Warner Jr. Trucking, talking about the truck that made him the “Grand Champion” of American Trucker’s “Readers’ Rigs” section for 2011.

One of the other hats I wear in my professional life is that of editor for American Trucker magazine, and one of the best parts of that job is heading up the annual “Grand Champion” selection process for its “Readers’ Rigs” section, which is sponsored by PPG Commercial Coatings.

Now, let me tell you – it’s not easy to pick a single truck from all the sweet iron chronicled in the Readers’ Rigs section every month and declare it the “best of the best” for the year.

But sometimes a vehicle just seems to stand forth, all on its own, as the winner right from the moment you see it – and this is exactly the case for Bill Warner Jr.’s fully restored 1989 Ford Aeromax LTL 9000.

Warner set out to restore this particular Ford to what he calls “brand-new-on-the-dealer-lot” condition for a simple yet unsurprising reason: both he and his father started their trucking careers behind the wheel of Aeromax models. [To see more photos of this truck, please click here.]

Although Warner freely admits that Peterbilts are far and away his favorites among commercial vehicles, he remains deeply attached to Ford’s long-since vanished tractors. That attachment is what drove him – with the more than willing help of his son Cody Warner – to infuse this one-of-a-kind “blast from the past” with new life. more

Swedish truck maker Scania is preparing to roll out a new global positioning system (GPS) linked cruise control system for its Central and Western European customers in early 2012 — one that will enable trucks to “see” the road ahead when in cruise control mode and thus automatically modulate speed with greater efficiency, thus boosting fuel economy by up to 3%, in Scania’s estimation.

GPS, as well all know, is a satellite-based navigation system, consisting of a network of 24 orbiting satellites eleven thousand nautical miles in space.

These satellites provide detailed electronic “maps” that motorists and truckers alike are using with greater frequency to fulfill location-finding and route-planning needs, instead of thumbing through dog-eared paper maps (the method I still prefer, though, to be completely honest).

However, Scania is taking GPS to a whole new level in combination with its cruise control technology. Dubbed Scania Active Prediction, the system is touted as being “intuitive” with the ability to adapt a truck’s operating style to the road’s topography – “looking ahead” some 3 kilometers or 1.86 miles ahead of the vehicle at all times. more

“The fun part is that you never know what kinds of trucks you’re going to find.” –Tom Schoening, marketing-communications manager for the Sioux City Truck Sales Peterbilt dealer group

I always eagerly await the yearly calendar crafted by former newspaper-journalist-turned-truck-dealer-PR-man Tom Schoening, because he’s developed a true aesthetic sense of the artistic qualities both modern-day and classic iron embodies and puts it on display for all to see.

His work is again on display in the third such yearly calendar he’s created for Peterbilt dealer group edition of Sioux City Truck Sales (SCTS). The new 2012 calendar – dubbed Working Trucks of the Midwest – is available for free at SCTS three Iowa dealerships (Des Moines, Council Bluffs, and — obviously — Sioux City) and its lone Nebraska outpost (in Norfolk, to be precise) while supplies last.

Tom told me by phone that he really focuses on capturing images of “real working trucks” for SCTS’s calendar, using his hard-won shoe-leather reporting skills canvassing the company’s employees to glean tips on where some sharp looking iron might be found. more

So I spent some time about a week or so ago tooling around in one of Caterpillar’s new vocational trucks, the CT660, which in my case sported a dump body and automatic transmission (with the cab painted – surprise, surprise! – a gleaming shade of “Caterpillar yellow.”)

Now, before we go any further, let me ask this question: why should a fleet care about my driving impressions concerning a particular make and model of truck, in this case the CT660? more

“The concept here is to help unify shipper and carrier support for heavier trucks; to explain the advantages for both groups so we push this [legislation] the last mile.” –John Runyan, executive director, Coalition for Transportation Productivity

In an effort to forge a more united front among shippers and carriers in support of the Safe and Efficient Transportation Act (SETA), which would grant states the ability to raise interstate weight limits to 97,000 lbs. for six-axle trucks, the Coalition for Transportation Productivity (CTP) recently put together a video touting what it believes the benefits of allowing heavier trucks to operate on U.S. highways might be.

I spoke with John Runyan, CTP’s executive director, about why his group felt putting such a video together is a necessary move at this stage in the legislative game, and his point to me is that the benefits – both in terms of safety and economics – need to be “more forcefully explained” to the carrier and shipper community alike. more

“All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.” –W. Edwards Deming

Anyone who visits a show truck festival like Shell’s annual “Super Rigs” competition at some point questions the reasoning of the contestants. [Want to seem some of the sights from this year’s event? Just click right here.]

I mean, take this year’s “Best of Show” winner, Jeremy Heiderscheit, who scored the $10,000 grand prize with his 2003 Peterbilt 379 and a 2009 East flatbed trailer. For many of the folks vying take home the big trophy, $10,000 barely covers the cost of the paint job on their trucks.

That’s before you get into paying for stuff like chrome, aluminum battery boxes, and interior work, much less the cost of getting everything “show ready.”

Yet when you talk to the contestants – those that win and those that don’t – you get a very clear idea of why most of the do all of this: pride in what they do for a living. And this, I stress, is a case where “pride” isn’t being served up as one of the seven deadly sins either. more

“We are convinced that liquefied gas is one of the most important future alternatives to today’s vehicle fuels.” –Lars Mårtensson, director-environmental affairs, Volvo Trucks.

The effort to make natural gas a more efficient fuel for powering long-haul freight trucks increased this week as Volvo Trucks – a division of Sweden’s AB Volvo – officially revealed a production-line ready heavy duty model that runs on a mixture of 75% liquefied natural gas (LNG) and 25% diesel fuel. This is a truck that Volvo’s been working on in the prototype stage for some time.

The interesting twists to Volvo’s new FM MethaneDiesel model is that is can use either LNG or “biogas” refined from, say, the methane vapors generated from landfill decomposition as the main ingredient in its fuel cocktail, the company said. That’s because both natural gas and biogas share methane as the “base stock” in their composition, noted Lars Mårtensson, director-environmental affairs for Volvo Trucks.

He noted that Volvo uses a conventional 13-liter diesel engine generating 460 horsepower and roughly 1,696 ft-lbs. of torque. It’s equipped with gas injectors, a special Thermos-like fuel tank that keeps the gas liquefied and chilled to minus140 degrees Celsius (roughly minus 284 degrees Fahrenheit), plus a specially modified catalytic converter so it can operate on blended methane/diesel fuel. more

“Our industry has taken many punches. In addition to the economic downturn, we’ve had to weather a series of regulatory changes that magnified the ups and downs of our already cyclical business.” –Kyle Treadway, president of Kenworth Sales Co., Salt Lake City, UT, and chairman of the American Truck Dealers (ATD) association

“Normal” is a term very much in flux these days within trucking circles. Many experts I’ve talked to say that after the cataclysmic downturn of the past few years, trucking won’t necessarily return to “normal” but rather to a “new normal” where the time span between this industry’s historic ups and downs gets shorter, more intense, and makes survival for fleets that much more challenging.

Still, despite all that, confidence in the short term is blooming – and no sector of the industry exemplifies that more than truck dealerships right now.

Kyle Treadway, (at right) president of Kenworth Sales Co., Salt Lake City, UT, and chairman of the American Truck Dealers (ATD) association, pointed to some of the factors bolstering the confidence among dealers during the group’s 48th annual convention in Phoenix, AZ, this past week. more