Freightliner Cascadia

“Proprietary” is a magic word among truck builders. It describes components of the company’s own manufacture or design that are installed on the company’s own trucks. For truck users, this can be a good thing, because they’re designed to work specifically with a company’s other components.

This past weekend, Saddle Creek Logistics Services embarked on “The Great American Green Ride,” the first cross-country trip with a for-hire, compressed natural gas truck.

As interest in natural gas power broadens, Freightliner is adding options that appeal to fleets wanting greater range and fuel savings technologies. The company plans to increase the operating range of some natural-gas-fueled trucks out to 800 miles.

Heavy Duty Trucking's Equipment Editor Jim Park takes you on a walk-around tour of the new Cascadia 113 tractor equipped with the Cummins Westport ISX12 G natural gas engine and a 115 DGE compressed natural gas fuel storage system. Read more about Freightliner's natural gas plans here.

Correction: Towards the end of this video, I describe two fill ports on the saddle tank as being for either the saddle tank or the cabinet tanks. In fact, either port will fuel all of the tanks simultaneously. One port, the smaller of the pair, is the one used by 95% of the retail CNG stations in North America. The larger port is a Transit port, which evolved from the transit industry, where they flow more fuel in a shorter period of time. Not many retail CNG stations currently use Transit ports, but as new stations are built, most are offering both fill ports. -- JP

The C13 engines produce 1,050 horsepower and 4,400 pounds-feet of torque