Fleet Directors Minimize Tires’ Cost
Efforts Combat Wear and Tear with High-Quality Materials, Regular Maintenance
By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Sept. 17 print edition of Transport Topics.
Tire wear and tear is inevitable, but carriers can minimize its effects — and help their bottom line — by choosing high-quality materials and being rigorous about maintenance and checking correct air pressures, several fleet maintenance chiefs and tire manufacturers say.
Tim Miller, Goodyear’s marketing communications manager, told Transport Topics the story of a fashion-savvy customer who wore only the finest suits but was wary of paying higher upfront prices for premium tires.
To illustrate the importance of starting a new tire life cycle with top-tier tires, a Goodyear sales representative bought a threadbare suit and wore it to his next meeting with the customer.
The suit, he told the customer, was a bargain. But like a cheaper tire, it would wear out quickly and soon need to be replaced.
“You can shop around for something that’s cheap and maybe it looks good when you book the bargain-basement price, but long-term, it could cost you more,” Miller said. “It’s like buying a good suit versus a cheap suit.”
Guy Walenga, director of engineering, commercial products and technology at tire-maker Bridgestone/Firestone Tires North America, echoed Miller’s advice.
“Buying price . . . is not going to be the lowest cost per mile” for fleets, Walenga told TT.
Maintenance chiefs at several major trucking fleets agreed with Miller and Walenga.
“We buy a premium product upfront,” Pat Martindale, Penske Truck Leasing’s vice president of maintenance for the north-central and south-central regions, told TT. “If you start with a solid premium casing and maintain the air pressure, it’s going to live a longer life,” he said.
Penske aims to stretch the life of a casing over six years, retreading it several times before scrapping it, he added.
The key to keeping a casing sound for that long is “using a premium product and maintaining air pressure,” Martindale reiterated.
Penske, Reading, Pa., has more than 66,000 tractors and 55,000 trailers in its fleet. The company ranks No. 7 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.
Likewise, Jeff Bryant, vice president of maintenance for truckload carrier Celadon Group, told TT the carrier starts each tire life cycle with a premium casing, in spite of the higher upfront cost.
“Price is important, but we use only premium tires,” Bryant said.
Tires are among the top three expenses for Celadon, he said, but the company’s tire maintenance program makes some concessions to diesel-fuel costs — Celadon’s No. 1 expense.
“We use fuel-efficient steer, drive and trailer tires and fuel-efficient retread compounds,” Bryant said. “We will compromise some tire life and change more tires to be able to get that fuel efficiency.”
Fuel-efficient tires typically wear out about 100,000 miles before a comparable “deep lug” tire, he said, noting that a typical deep lug tire, if properly maintained, can last for about 320,000 to 400,000 miles before being scrapped.
Bryant estimated that fuel-efficient tires help improve mileage for Celadon’s fleet by about 2% for every gallon of diesel burned. Celadon, Indianapolis, ranks No. 56 on the TT 100 for-hire list.
Though manufacturers and fleets interviewed for this story agree that a top-tier tire is important to starting a life cycle on the right foot, both groups said that maintaining proper air pressure is still the most important part of saving on tire wear.
“The largest contributing factor [to a tire’s life span] is air pressure,” said Penske’s Martindale. “It was years ago, and it still is today.”
Doug Jones, Michelin North America’s customer engineering support manager, said tires that are overinflated or underinflated wear unevenly, forcing fleets to pull them prematurely and incur extra maintenance costs.
An underinflated tire is prone to wear and tear on its shoulders, potentially leading to “zipper ruptures” along its sidewall that cause rapid air loss and, eventually, flats, Jones said.
Air pressure as little as 10 pounds-per-square inch below a manufacturer’s specification can increase tread wear by 7% to 15%, he said.
Overinflation, in contrast, causes a tire’s shoulder to lift off the ground, Jones said, resulting in increased wear on the middle portion of the tread.
An overinflated tire also has a smaller road footprint, which means less traction and a stiffer ride for drivers, said Jones. It also makes the tire “less forgiving” if it rolls over a sharp object in the road.
Bridgestone/Firestone’s Walenga said that fleets also must be careful to maintain equal air pressure in tires running side-by-side on a truck’s drive and trailer axles.
“Pressure between two [tires in a dual configuration] can’t vary by more than 5 psi,” said Walenga. “If you have a difference of more than 5 psi, one tire is larger than the other, and the smaller of the two won’t roll and deflect as designed.”
For fleet-maintenance personnel, maintaining proper air pressure means constantly checking trucks passing through shops for routine maintenance, vigilantly maintaining accurate pressure gauges and performing periodic surveys of on-road equipment.
“We’re very strict on the air-inflation side of the business,” said Celadon’s Bryant.
Celadon requires its technicians to test their air-pressure gauges once a week at a master calibration station, he said.
The practice ensures that each technician’s gauge is accurately measuring tire pressure, because shop personnel check air pressure on any truck entering Celadon’s maintenance facilities for any reason.
“You can check tires all you want, but if technicians have gauges that are inaccurate . . . checking, checking, checking won’t necessarily help,” Bryant said.
The carrier also has a program with Goodyear, under which the manufacturer checks air pressure on about 800 of Celadon’s trailers and 550 of its tractors every quarter, “to get that outside opinion on how we’re doing on inflation accuracy,” he said.
Inflation accuracy at Celadon has improved from about 80% more than two years ago to about 96%, Bryant said.
Dan Flanagan of truckload carrier Dart Transit described a similar in-house program that the Eagan, Minn., carrier conducts quarterly. Dart checks tire pressure on about 20% of its fleet during these inspections to put together a “snapshot” of tire conditions fleetwide, he said.
Flanagan also said that Dart uses an outside maintenance firm to perform tire checks on trucks that enter Dart’s shops for routine maintenance, such as an oil change, and that Dart also uses a Web-based system provided by Goodyear to keep track of all the company’s tires.
“I can go on a Web site, and I can know what stage of maintenance a tire is at,” Flanagan said. “I’ll know my exact inventory.”
Dart ranks No. 52 on the TT 100 for-hire list and has a fleet of about 2,500 tractors and 7,200 trailers.
Less-than-truckload carrier Jevic Transportation aims for an even broader snapshot when conducting periodic air-pressure surveys.
Twice a year, the Delanco, N.J., carrier does a fleet-wide audit of its tires, said Ken Adams, Jevic’s vice president of maintenance and properties.
“We blitz the yard, and we physically take the air pressure of every single piece of equipment there,” Adams said. “Typically, we’ll do it [in] one day on a weekend.”
Jevic typically gets between 199,000 to 206,000 miles out of its drive tires and about 105,000 to 113,000 miles out of steer tires, Adams said.
The carrier, No. 71 on the TT 100 for-hire list, has a fleet of about 1,500 tractors and 2,500 trailers.
This story appears in the Sept. 17 print edition of Transport Topics.
Tire wear and tear is inevitable, but carriers can minimize its effects — and help their bottom line — by choosing high-quality materials and being rigorous about maintenance and checking correct air pressures, several fleet maintenance chiefs and tire manufacturers say.
Tim Miller, Goodyear’s marketing communications manager, told Transport Topics the story of a fashion-savvy customer who wore only the finest suits but was wary of paying higher upfront prices for premium tires.
To illustrate the importance of starting a new tire life cycle with top-tier tires, a Goodyear sales representative bought a threadbare suit and wore it to his next meeting with the customer.
The suit, he told the customer, was a bargain. But like a cheaper tire, it would wear out quickly and soon need to be replaced.
“You can shop around for something that’s cheap and maybe it looks good when you book the bargain-basement price, but long-term, it could cost you more,” Miller said. “It’s like buying a good suit versus a cheap suit.”
Guy Walenga, director of engineering, commercial products and technology at tire-maker Bridgestone/Firestone Tires North America, echoed Miller’s advice.
“Buying price . . . is not going to be the lowest cost per mile” for fleets, Walenga told TT.
Maintenance chiefs at several major trucking fleets agreed with Miller and Walenga.
“We buy a premium product upfront,” Pat Martindale, Penske Truck Leasing’s vice president of maintenance for the north-central and south-central regions, told TT. “If you start with a solid premium casing and maintain the air pressure, it’s going to live a longer life,” he said.
Penske aims to stretch the life of a casing over six years, retreading it several times before scrapping it, he added.
The key to keeping a casing sound for that long is “using a premium product and maintaining air pressure,” Martindale reiterated.
Penske, Reading, Pa., has more than 66,000 tractors and 55,000 trailers in its fleet. The company ranks No. 7 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.
Likewise, Jeff Bryant, vice president of maintenance for truckload carrier Celadon Group, told TT the carrier starts each tire life cycle with a premium casing, in spite of the higher upfront cost.
“Price is important, but we use only premium tires,” Bryant said.
Tires are among the top three expenses for Celadon, he said, but the company’s tire maintenance program makes some concessions to diesel-fuel costs — Celadon’s No. 1 expense.
“We use fuel-efficient steer, drive and trailer tires and fuel-efficient retread compounds,” Bryant said. “We will compromise some tire life and change more tires to be able to get that fuel efficiency.”
Fuel-efficient tires typically wear out about 100,000 miles before a comparable “deep lug” tire, he said, noting that a typical deep lug tire, if properly maintained, can last for about 320,000 to 400,000 miles before being scrapped.
Bryant estimated that fuel-efficient tires help improve mileage for Celadon’s fleet by about 2% for every gallon of diesel burned. Celadon, Indianapolis, ranks No. 56 on the TT 100 for-hire list.
Though manufacturers and fleets interviewed for this story agree that a top-tier tire is important to starting a life cycle on the right foot, both groups said that maintaining proper air pressure is still the most important part of saving on tire wear.
“The largest contributing factor [to a tire’s life span] is air pressure,” said Penske’s Martindale. “It was years ago, and it still is today.”
Doug Jones, Michelin North America’s customer engineering support manager, said tires that are overinflated or underinflated wear unevenly, forcing fleets to pull them prematurely and incur extra maintenance costs.
An underinflated tire is prone to wear and tear on its shoulders, potentially leading to “zipper ruptures” along its sidewall that cause rapid air loss and, eventually, flats, Jones said.
Air pressure as little as 10 pounds-per-square inch below a manufacturer’s specification can increase tread wear by 7% to 15%, he said.
Overinflation, in contrast, causes a tire’s shoulder to lift off the ground, Jones said, resulting in increased wear on the middle portion of the tread.
An overinflated tire also has a smaller road footprint, which means less traction and a stiffer ride for drivers, said Jones. It also makes the tire “less forgiving” if it rolls over a sharp object in the road.
Bridgestone/Firestone’s Walenga said that fleets also must be careful to maintain equal air pressure in tires running side-by-side on a truck’s drive and trailer axles.
“Pressure between two [tires in a dual configuration] can’t vary by more than 5 psi,” said Walenga. “If you have a difference of more than 5 psi, one tire is larger than the other, and the smaller of the two won’t roll and deflect as designed.”
For fleet-maintenance personnel, maintaining proper air pressure means constantly checking trucks passing through shops for routine maintenance, vigilantly maintaining accurate pressure gauges and performing periodic surveys of on-road equipment.
“We’re very strict on the air-inflation side of the business,” said Celadon’s Bryant.
Celadon requires its technicians to test their air-pressure gauges once a week at a master calibration station, he said.
The practice ensures that each technician’s gauge is accurately measuring tire pressure, because shop personnel check air pressure on any truck entering Celadon’s maintenance facilities for any reason.
“You can check tires all you want, but if technicians have gauges that are inaccurate . . . checking, checking, checking won’t necessarily help,” Bryant said.
The carrier also has a program with Goodyear, under which the manufacturer checks air pressure on about 800 of Celadon’s trailers and 550 of its tractors every quarter, “to get that outside opinion on how we’re doing on inflation accuracy,” he said.
Inflation accuracy at Celadon has improved from about 80% more than two years ago to about 96%, Bryant said.
Dan Flanagan of truckload carrier Dart Transit described a similar in-house program that the Eagan, Minn., carrier conducts quarterly. Dart checks tire pressure on about 20% of its fleet during these inspections to put together a “snapshot” of tire conditions fleetwide, he said.
Flanagan also said that Dart uses an outside maintenance firm to perform tire checks on trucks that enter Dart’s shops for routine maintenance, such as an oil change, and that Dart also uses a Web-based system provided by Goodyear to keep track of all the company’s tires.
“I can go on a Web site, and I can know what stage of maintenance a tire is at,” Flanagan said. “I’ll know my exact inventory.”
Dart ranks No. 52 on the TT 100 for-hire list and has a fleet of about 2,500 tractors and 7,200 trailers.
Less-than-truckload carrier Jevic Transportation aims for an even broader snapshot when conducting periodic air-pressure surveys.
Twice a year, the Delanco, N.J., carrier does a fleet-wide audit of its tires, said Ken Adams, Jevic’s vice president of maintenance and properties.
“We blitz the yard, and we physically take the air pressure of every single piece of equipment there,” Adams said. “Typically, we’ll do it [in] one day on a weekend.”
Jevic typically gets between 199,000 to 206,000 miles out of its drive tires and about 105,000 to 113,000 miles out of steer tires, Adams said.
The carrier, No. 71 on the TT 100 for-hire list, has a fleet of about 1,500 tractors and 2,500 trailers.
