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Former Senior Contributing Editor
Well-known in the industry for his wealth of knowledge, folksy style and straight talk, Tom Berg covered vocational and medium-duty applications, maintenance and alternative fuels for Heavy Duty Trucking for several years.
He is a commercial driver’s license holder and a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Truck Writers of North America and 11 Jesse H. Neal honors.
He has covered trucking since 1978.
Depending on who you are in the medium-duty truck business, things are going great, or well, or not so good but looking up. A few builders have picked up market share in Classes 3, 4 and 5 and in Class 6-7. Others have lost some or a lot, but sales continue to climb for most midrange truck makers.
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With tractors getting heavier, Monarch Distributing in Indianapolis needed to lighten up its trailers to recapture payload capacity. Its latest group of 53-foot vans from Great Dane accomplish this by scaling 2,000 pounds lighter than previous units.
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Coming up: another “non-event” for brakes? That’s what Phase Two of new federal stopping-distance requirements will be for truck operators, according to people we talked with. Stronger, higher-performance brakes on certain vehicles won’t even cost much more in most cases. But like Phase One two years ago, which was hardly noticed by truckers, Phase Two represents a lot of work for brake makers and truck builders.
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Makers of trailer aerodynamic improvers are well aware of truckers’ suspicions that the devices will be damaged, sooner or later. That’s why many of the latest ones are made with materials that are flexible and impact resistant.
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CORRECTED -- Kenworth Truck Co. sees a lot of promise in natural gas-powered vehicles, so it featured them last week at gatherings for dealers, customers and trade press writers at its plant in Chillicothe, Ohio. But diesel-powered trucks form a huge majority of those on the road and will continue to dominate the Class 8 business, one of the company’s executives commented to reporters.
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It takes a tractor to move a trailer, which is why we’re looking at this new product from a small company: Tractor AeroKit from Flow Below Aero Inc., in Austin, Tex. The kit saves fuel by smoothing air flow around the vehicle’s drive wheels.
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How does 18 mpg in city driving and 25 on the highway sound for a full-size pickup? That’s what Chrysler’s Ram brand is claiming for some of its 1500 series trucks with a gutsy V-6 gasoline engine mated to an 8-speed automatic transmission.
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It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where my load is? That’s a shipper asking a trucker the whereabouts of the trailer or container carrying his cargo. He’s not asking about a tractor and its driver; he wants to know about his load. From that point of view, it’s odd that trucking companies attached the first satellite and cellular-based tracking devices to tractors years ago, when products became available.
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United Parcel Service is so committed to using low-emissions fuels that all of the 700 Class 8 vehicles it has ordered for delivery late this year and into 2014 will run on liquefied natural gas.
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Despite all the publicity and development of new products from truck and equipment manufacturers, especially for natural gas, trucks that run on gases and liquids other than diesel and gasoline are still a small minority of all those being bought in recent years, acknowledged panelists at the Alternative Clean Transportation Expo, which runs this week in Washington, D.C.
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