
My drive of the Cummins Wesport ISX12 G was at a mid-July “natural gas summit” hosted by Kenworth at its plant in Chillicothe, Ohio. A half-dozen gas-powered KWs built for different applications were offered to dealers, customers and press reporters for inspection and evaluation. A few fellows with CDLs, like me, took them for drives, and I had – how shall I say? – a learning experience while in a T800 short-haul daycab tractor pulling a 53-foot van trailer.
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Freightliner’s Cascadia 113 and the ISX12 G from Cummins Westport aren’t exactly strangers. About 100 of the trucks have been in customer hands for some months now. Equipment Editor Jim Park takes one for a spin.
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A trucking company decided to give out an award for the best driver, so they asked employees to nominate and vote on the honor. The winner, however, turned out to have one of the worst safety records in the fleet.
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At its most basic level, a work truck is a piece of equipment that helps your employees do their jobs. Since well-designed equipment enhances productivity, your objective when designing a work truck is to optimize the vehicle to achieve the best overall return for dollar spent.
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Prime Inc., Springfield, Mo., has its entire fleet equipped with auxiliary power units to limit idling, with an automatic 5-minute idle shutdown timer. But its tanker fleet was experiencing significantly higher idling, because product had to be kept heated to the right temperature.
Read More →The transportation law, MAP-21, upped the financial security requirements for freight brokers and forwarders to $75,000. The law offers options for the new financial security requirement, but specifics are not always clear. With the FMCSA deadline approaching in just a week, here is some information on an option for small- to mid-size brokers and for carriers who also act as brokers.
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Says the butcher: “We eat what we sell.” Says Kwik-Trip: “We burn what we sell.” That’s natural gas, sold in liquefied and compressed form at 15 of the 430 retail filling stations the company operates in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.
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Monarch Beverage Co. of Indianapolis is spending $16.5 million to convert its truck fleet to natural gas.
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Natural gas. Biodiesel. Dimethyl ether. Hybrid. Electric. Algae-based diesel. Hydrogen fuel cells. There’s a virtual smorgasbord of available and potential fuel sources to power medium- and heavy-duty trucks. The critical question becomes which one, or which combination of fuel sources, represent the best path for fleets, manufacturers and the industry.
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There are lots or reasons not to embrace fuel-saving technology (some better than others), but validation exists for tire-pressure mitigation systems. And the payback is significant.
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