California-based TransPower has installed its ElecTruck battery-electric drive system into the second of eight trucks of this design that it plans to convert this year and place into drayage service near the L.A./Long Beach ports.
Finding and training technicians, purchasing tools and equipment, maintaining a parts inventory, dealing with OSHA and the EPA. These are just a few of the headaches fleets that maintain their own trucks face.
It’s been 14 years since repairing any trailer’s “ICC bumper” was a simple matter of cutting off the damaged section and welding on a straight piece of angle iron. Most trailers built since Jan. 26, 1998, have been equipped with more complex required rear impact guards that are not only stronger but are designed to absorb shock from a collision.
The consequences of texting and driving can go far beyond your CSA score, a ticket or even the maximum $11,000 fine from the feds.
As well as being in short supply, trucking’s new recruits are also, shorter generally, and thinner, as well as less likely to want a truck to look and feel like a truck. The challenge for truck makers comes in designing truck cabs to fit an expanding body-size profile, while making the driving environment appealing to people who have different expectations about trucks – all without alienating the existing driver population.
Is electricity a fuel? Sure, even if we call it “power.” Electricity itself is far cheaper than any petroleum or gaseous fuel, and the motors it powers have many advantages for propulsion – high efficiency, tremendous torque, quietness and cleanliness, at least in the vehicle itself.
Bruce Hudson, director of corporate maintenance at Heartland Express, has a heart when it comes to the Iowa-based truckload and logistics company’s drivers, who must spend nights on the road. So he’s come up with changes to a tractor’s electrical system that will benefit them during off-duty hours.
Every year for the last two or three centuries (or so it seems), March has meant a trip to Louisville, Ky., and the Mid-America Trucking Show. And every year the show produces a dominant theme, albeit unwritten, in the collection of new products introduced there.
In 2012, driver turnover at large truckload carriers averaged 98%, according to figures from the American Trucking Associations. At smaller truckload fleets turnover averaged 82%.
Let’s examine the top three CSA violations for both vehicles and drivers across the industry and discuss practices that can help bring the numbers down.
Fleets spend tons of money on tires – so much, in fact, that bad tire management can become a competitive handicap. Find out how four well-run fleets run their tire programs to give their operations a competitive advantage.
From collision avoidance to cameras, from rollover prevention to analytics, technology is rapidly changing the safety landscape.
Bruce Purkey knows where the electrons go. And, as president of Purkey’s Fleet Electric and his many activities in the Technology & Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations, he’s well aware that some of them flow to batteries that support the electric-over-hydraulic systems for liftgates on trucks and trailers. Usually there are two and as many as four Group 31 batteries, like the ones on a truck or tractor.
From the ground and behind the wheel, you’d think this Freightliner Columbia is brand new. This was obvious on a run out on Interstate 70 in eastern Missouri, pulling a hopper-bottom trailer with a heavy load of granulated lime destined for an animal-food plant in Montgomery City, west of St. Louis. It rode, shifted and ran like new, and was just as comfortable.
PeopleNet's Brian McLaughlin talks about the company post-acquisition, telematics trends, the rate of technological change, the 'Internet of Things" and more.
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