Products, Practices Save Fleets Money, Improve Fuel Efficiency, Execs Say
By Frederick Kiel, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the June 15 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Chief executive officers of three major fleets said their companies have saved substantially by using several of the products and methods designed for the most fuel efficiency.
The fuel-saving products their companies used included auxiliary power units, computer-optimized routes, super-single tires and mud flaps “that look like Venetian blinds,” they said in a June 4 teleconference with fleet executives and industry financial analysts.
Max Fuller, co-chairman and CEO of U.S. Xpress Enterprises; Harry Muhlschlegel, chairman and CEO of New Century Transportation Inc.; and Randy Marten, chairman and CEO of Marten Transport Ltd., spoke in the teleconference organized by the Stifel Nicolaus Transportation & Logistics Research Group.
“We have used generators and APUs on all of our trucks for the past four years to increase our truck life,” Muhlschlegel said. “By doing this electronically, we shut the truck off after it runs three minutes, so the driver cannot idle the truck.”
“Essentially, our trucks went from a 52% idle time to less than 2%,” Muhlschlegel said. “When you consider the fact that every hour a truck runs [idling] can mean 45 miles, we essentially took a truck we were trading in at 500,000 miles and keeping them an additional 300,000 or 400,000 miles now.”
Marten said that APUs also cut his company’s costs significantly.
“We started installing APUs in May of ’07, and the faster we got involved into it, the better we saw it,” Marten said. “We experienced an 80% savings, based on running each truck about 10 hours a day and 20 days out of the month.”
He said the company recovered the $16 million upfront cost in just 13 months.
Marten Transport, Mondovi, Wis., ranks No. 47 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada. Muhlschlegel said New Century also has been running super-single tires for four years.
“We think they work well in highway operations, but in local operations, we’re not seeing any advantage except for weight.”
“We’re seeing a fuel advantage of 0.2 to 0.4 mile per gallon on highway operations,” Muhlschlegel said. “We also have a weight reduction of 400 to 500 pounds per set of tandems with aluminum rims, versus double steel wheels, which is very important as gross vehicle weights have grown from 73,000 to 83,000 pounds.”
U.S. Xpress Enterprises, Chattanooga, Tenn., No. 18 on the for-hire TT 100, has experienced significant fuel economy from single tires and is putting them on all its tractors and trailers, CEO Max Fuller said.
His company has used computer programs to make routes more efficient.
“We were able to take some of our lanes and be able to optimize where we buy cheaper fuel by what routes they travel,” Fuller said.
He pointed out that U.S. Xpress “took some technology we produced internally” to reduce “out-of-route and, in some cases, unaccounted-for miles by almost 80%, and we were actually able to see improvement on our bottom line.”
The company added the technology in October 2007, and “it showed a major impact by March,” Fuller said.
U.S. Xpress executives believe in using trailer attachments to increase fuel efficiency, he said.
“You can add some really neat fairings that can make a big difference,” Fuller said. With the assistance of a university research center, U.S. Xpress “built a concept trailer and got a little bit more than a 9% increase in fuel efficiency,” he said.
Fuller said that increase includes a 2% to 2.5% boost from a fairing at the front of the trailer, 4.5 % from the fairing at the belly and the balance from the dovetail at the back. New Century has installed automatic transmissions on its trucks to increase fuel efficiency.
Hitting “the exact shift points really takes the thinking away from driver, and I’m very pleased with them,” Muhlschlegel said.
New Century also is adopting a new design of mud flaps, produced by Anderson Flaps Inc., Chattanooga, Tenn., on all the company’s trucks and trailers, he said.
“At first blush, we thought it couldn’t really work,” he said. “They sorta look like Venetian blinds.”
When the company tried them, it discovered that they improve mileage by “an additional tenth of a mile to as much as four- or five-tenths of a mile per gallon.”
Jeffrey Averbeck, owner of Anderson Flaps, told Transport Topics at the Technology & Maintenance Council convention in Orlando, Fla., in February that he designed the flaps, which have dozens of slots up and down the length of the flap to let air pass through, as safety devices to prevent the snow and rain clouds that trucks throw up in storms. Only after putting them on trucks, however, did he discover that they improved fuel efficiency.
