July 4, 2007 Vol. 3, No. 13

Let me open with a stunner, not about a product but a much needed service. A dog wash. Or, presumably, a raccoon wash. Skunk wash. Even — if you’ll pardon the expression — mouse wash. Take your pick of pets.

If a trucker hauls a critter along for the ride, he can get him spruced up in Iowa.

It seems the Truckomat Corporation has built a stand-alone pet wash facility, appropriately named ‘Dogomat’, adjacent to its truck wash located at the huge and famous Iowa 80 TA truckstop in Walcott, Iowa.

“So many drivers travel with their pets we felt this was a natural extension of our truck washing business”, says Rodney Pugh, Truckomat vice president. “The Dogomat Pet Wash is one more amenity that we can offer our customers to help make their lives easier.”

The self-serve mutt bath is set to launch in a week or so and will be open 24 hours, 7 days a week. Prepare for lineups.

Amusements aside, I find it interesting to note all the activity on the light end of the medium-duty world these last few months. I’ve led this newsletter, for example, with the Peterbilt 325 conventional, the company’s first entrant in the class 5 market. Production has just begun in Ste-Therese, Que., and it joins a pretty broad lineup of medium-duty trucks — the conventional models 330, 335,
and 340 plus the cabover models 220 and 210.

A couple of weeks ago it was the new class-3 Sterling 360, which joined class-4 and 5 versions of the low cabover based on the Mitsubishi Fuso Canter from Japan. The 360 is available for order now, with delivery in the fall. With a gross vehicle weight rating of 12,500 lb, says Sterling, the 360 is for people who just don’t need a bigger truck.

So what seems to be happening is that some buyers who might normally have ordered a class-6 truck are re-thinking their needs and going one or two steps down the weight ladder. At the same time, some people who have been stretching the limit with lighter trucks have seen the expanding breadth of selection and the sophistication of slightly larger vehicles. For not much more money.

It looks to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy of some sort – build them and buyers will come. There’s just never been so much choice in this part of the truck market. Buyers should be overjoyed.

And if you want proof that this market is solid as a rock and maybe even set to boom, check this: I learned today that GE Capital Solutions’ Transportation Finance unit has launched itself into the medium-duty truck sector in a big way. They’ll offer a “full range” of financial options from leases and loans to wholesale floor-plan financing. Their targets are operators of small and medium-size
fleets, and the dealers that support them.

(Sorry, by the way, about that ‘solutions’ thing above. Last week I promised you’d never read the word here again but in this case it’s part of the company name! I’m snookered.)

Anyway, if GE Capital with its US$100 billion in assets and more than a million clients is attracted to the mid-range market, that’s a sure sign of good things to come.