June 4, 2008 Vol. 4, No. 12

There’s nothing like the pressure of rapidly rising fuel prices to engender creativity in both the engineering and marketing offices of companies that supply the machinery of trucking. But they only succeed, of course, when users finally see the need for efficiency and slap money down to buy it. Collectively, we haven’t really seen that need for 30 years plus, not since the oil embargo of 1973, when all hell broke loose. One result in the U.S. was the emergence of the ‘double nickel’ speed limit of 55 mph. That’s long gone.

What we’re seeing now, and we’ll see much more of it, is a voluntary reversion to such slower speeds and more conservative vehicle specs. As an industry we slipped badly in the intervening years, spec’ing big engines when smaller ones would do, for example. Cruise speeds crept higher too, though I contend fervently that there’s utterly no need to mandate the mass activation of speed limiters on heavy trucks by law. Speeding trucks are not an issue, period.

Fact is, nearly every day I hear about Carrier X sensibly reducing its fleet-wide governed speed to 60 mph from maybe 65 or 68. And of course there are many outfits that never moved the needle up that high in the first place. Some even stayed down at that 55 mph mark, or call it 90 km/h here in Canada. I know many owner-operators who have routinely made a buck in large part because they run that slowly.

But it’s not as if slowing down counts as innovation. Hardly. And it won’t do the trick on its own anyway, not with diesel prices where they are and unlikely to drop by much in the foreseeable future. So truck operators will be looking elsewhere for survival tools, inwards if they’re smart.

We’ll see efforts to improve dispatch, I hope, routing trucks intelligently with a view to fuel efficiency by avoiding high-traffic areas and times. It’s been widely reported, for example, that giant parcel carrier UPS saved more than 28 million route miles in 2006 by simply avoiding left-hand turns. Amazing, and that represented 3 million gallons of fuel. With some 90,000 vehicles in the UPS fleet, it’s obvious that small savings can build up to big ones across the board. No reason why the rest of us can’t approach things in the same detailed way.