iTECH: Target: Fuel Economy

This story appears in the December 2014/January 2015 issue of iTECH, published in the Dec. 15 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

By Bruce Lilly, Contributing Writer

Technology that incorporates everything from GPS location to ambient air temperature can help drivers maximize fuel efficiency, tech executives said.

There’s a science to maximizing miles per gallon through driving techniques, said Rémi Quimper, president of Virage Simulation, a Montreal-based company that makes driving simulators.

The simulators’ forward video screen, which represents the front windshield of a cab, has a section at the top that shows graphical representations of these forces, he said.

“When you press on the gas, you see a surge in the acceleration force,” Quimper said. “You release the gas pedal, and you see an increase in the braking force, right on the screen in front of you.” For example, fuel is wasted when the engine rpm are too high be-fore shifting gears during acceleration and when drivers stop too suddenly.

Virage teaches this science to drivers through “ecodriving” scenarios in the simulators. “Our fuel-efficiency training program is based on the physics of the vehicle,” Quimper said. “We provide feedback about each force that is acting on the vehicle — the rolling resistance, the aerodynamic resistance, the inertia of the vehicle.”

When drivers can see precisely how fuel economy is affected by such simple things as acceleration and braking, they start developing the driving habits that improve fuel economy, he said.

Drivers with Transport Distribution Co., in Joplin, Missouri, get real-time feedback while driving that helps them learn the subtle techniques that maximize fuel efficiency. Their trucks are equipped with PedalCoach, a device from Boston-based LinkeDrive. The device displays a green, yellow or red light, which changes to indicate the driver’s success with fuel-efficient driving.

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PedalCoach collects an assortment of data to produce a fuel-efficiency score. “The application is looking at many parameters very rapidly with data from the [engine control module], including fuel consumption, engine speed, pedal position, vehicle speed and more,” LinkeDrive CEO Jeff Baer said. The task for drivers is to keep the light green as much as possible.

Many of TDC’s drivers have improved their mpg by using PedalCoach, said Steve Page, TDC’s director of safety. “It simplifies the challenge, because you’re seeing it as you’re driving, as opposed to someone coming to you to discuss something you did a month ago or two weeks ago or last week or even earlier this week,” he said.

Data from the ECM and subsystem components are combined with external data that include high-definition GPS location, elevation, load weight, posted speed limit and ambient air temperature in the ZFuel program from Seattle’s Zonar Systems, said Mike McQuade, the company’s chief technology officer.

“It is a fallacy to evaluate drivers on mpg alone,” he said, noting that many factors are beyond the driver’s control, such as the fuel efficiency of the truck, the weight of the load, terrain, traffic and weather conditions. ZFuel takes these factors into account.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re driving up and down mountains, driving on flatlands, driving an old truck or a new truck,” he said. “We’ve created an efficiency score that levels the playing field.”

May Trucking Co. operates out of Salem, Oregon, and is using ZFuel in about 30% of its fleet of over 1,100 trucks.

“We take each driver through a standardized training,” May Trucking President David Daniels said. “They leave that training session, get in the truck and literally within two to three weeks, we see an 8-9% improvement in their fuel economy.”

The drivers get feedback once each week. Drivers will hear what they’re doing well and where they need to improve, Daniels said. “‘You need more time in cruise, less time in this. It’s in your middle gears that you’re killing yourself. There were some hard braking events.’ We’re seeing incredible improvement, and it’s sustained improvement,” he said.

Many trucking companies offer bonuses to drivers who succeed in achieving higher mpg goals, and one example is Raider Express, which operates out of Fort Worth, Texas. Raider Express uses a performance-monitoring application from Omnitracs to track fuel-efficiency metrics on the drivers and the equipment.

“With Omnitracs, we can set up specific benchmarking groups within the fleet to measure driver performance or equipment enhancements equally,” Raider Express President Mike Eggleton said. “There’s no blaming the trucks. We use the charting features to identify the top or bottom performers in terms of mpg and determine if it’s a truck or a driver issue.”

All of the trucks in the Raider Express fleet have automatic transmissions, so shifting isn’t an issue, Eggleton said. The areas of focus are average speed, idle time, top gear time, coast time and cruise-control percentage.

“Normally, the drivers respond really well,” he said. “We give them bonuses that are tied to their mpg, so the better their mileage, the more money they’re going to make. Because everything is almost real-time data, the driver knows that if he changes the way he’s driving today, his paycheck will be bigger next Friday.”

According to Jim Sassen, Omnitracs’ senior manager of product marketing, the program works in three key ways.

“One is real-time information that can be viewed by drivers on their in-cab unit regarding their performance,” Sassen said.

The second is the program’s ability to send alerts to driver managers whenever drivers exceed thresholds established by the fleet. “This allows driver managers to have timely conversations with the drivers to improve their performance,” he said. “The third is having detailed reporting on the back end that allows fleets to compare performance across the fleet, spot performance trends and quantify the financial impact of the performance.”

Carrier Web, in Atlanta, gives data through in-cab displays. “Drivers can see trip distance, fuel used, fuel economy, number of brake applications, number of harsh braking events, idle time, fuel burned while in idle and time spent coasting,” said Keith O’Brien, director of product management.

Video footage of what’s actually happening behind the wheel is available through the DriveCam product from San Diego-based Lytx (formerly DriveCam), which provides forward- and inward-facing cameras in the cab that capture video immediately before and after safety events.

The DriveCam camera attaches to the windshield and provides feedback immediately to the driver through green, yellow and red lights on the camera. “If a driver starts to accelerate hard or brakes hard, the green light will go to yellow or red,” said Del Lisk, Lytx vice president of safety services. “For idling, we can tell if the engine is running and the vehicle isn’t moving. A time threshold can be chosen, and the driver will receive an alert if the threshold is crossed.”

When meeting with drivers, captured video can be used to “put substance to the numbers,” Lisk said. “Our clients are telling us that when coaching drivers, it’s more powerful to have video than just a report with numbers.”

In-cab cameras from SmartDrive, in San Diego, also capture events around safety and can provide real-time feedback through green, yellow and red lights. “If you’re overrevving as you’re shifting while merging onto the freeway, once you start doing that, it will flash a little yellow light or a red light that’s on the inward-facing camera to indicate that you’re operating fuel-inefficiently,” SmartDrive President Jason Palmer said.

In the end, the key element to helping drivers learn to reduce mpg is a consistent effort, said Yves Provencher, director at Performance Innovation Transport, an independent membership-based organization in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, that provides engineering services to the transportation industry.

“It doesn’t matter what training you do to help drivers learn to drive more fuel-efficiently if you don’t monitor their behavior and do follow-up training,” he said. “Without monitoring after the initial training, your drivers are going to be back in their same rut within three months.