APU Makers Show Wares at Conference
By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Feb. 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
ORLANDO, Fla. — An empty booth at the Technology & Maintenance Council’s 2009 Transportation Technology Exhibition marked the spot where auxiliary power manufacturer Rigmaster Power Corp. was to display its wares.
Rigmaster, Toronto, ceased operations shortly before the Feb. 9-12 conference here, but APU makers did not entirely abandon the show floor.
Four third-party APU providers shared the TMC show floor here with engine maker Cummins Inc. and truck maker Navistar Inc., both of which offer APUs.
Two of the four third-party vendors offer battery-powered systems rather than conventional diesel-powered APUs.
Glacier Bay, a first-time exhibitor at the show, offers a battery-powered APU called Climacab that the company said requires substantially less maintenance than diesel-powered alternatives.
Glacier Bay is a relative newcomer to the APU scene, having brought its battery-powered APU to market six months ago after 2½ years of development, said Patrick Russell, a regional sales manager.
While Glacier Bay so far has achieved only limited market penetration — there are about 500 Climacab units in field operation, Russell said — the company recently cinched a deal to provide Climacab APUs to Mesilla Valley Transportation, a Las Cruces, N.M., regional truckload carrier with about 850 tractors.
Elsewhere, an engineer with Dometic Environmental Corp., which offers battery-based auxiliary air conditioners for heavy trucks, said that the current economy has crimped carriers’ cash flows and depressed fuel prices to levels that are stretching out the return on investment for APUs and similar technologies.
“Nobody’s buying anything right now,” said Ken Allen, a Dometic senior engineer. “We’ve got a fleet in California that said, ‘We love your stuff, and as soon as we have some cash flow, we’re going to buy it.’ ”
Allen also said that lower U.S. diesel prices, which on average have fallen more than $2.50 a gallon from their July peak, mean that it now takes a fleet between a year and a year and a half to recoup the initial cost of installing Dometic’s auxiliary air-conditioners.
With the demise of Rigmaster, conventional diesel-powered APUs were represented at TMC by two third-party manufacturers: Carrier Transicold, Athens, Ga., and Bergstrom Inc., Rockford, Ill.
Nevertheless, a representative of Carrier Transicold said, third-party APU providers still have a great deal of the market to themselves.
“We don’t see the OEMs as having entered the APU segment yet,” Eduardo Andrade, director of business development for Carrier Transicold.
He added that the survival of third-party APU providers probably would depend on their ability to offer end-users an accessible service network — something that Rigmaster lacked but truck and engine OEMs such as Navistar and Cummins have in abundance.
