TORONTO, (May 30, 2005) — Becoming president and chief executive officer of Freightliner LLC would never have occurred to Chris Patterson during the teenaged summers he spent driving a five-ton Chevrolet C60 freezer truck delivering popsicles, ice cream, and bricks of butter in rural, small-town Ontario.

Nor later when he spent summers hauling groceries around Toronto in a Louisville LT9000 tractor-trailer while attending the University of Western Ontario. He even flirted briefly with the idea of becoming a full-time truck driver.

Patterson talks of those days with much of his trademark irony, and not a little self-deprecating humour, and would likely say that they prepared him for his new job almost as much as the MBA degree he won at Western. Not to mention the lessons learned in 27 years with Freightliner in Canada and the U.S. and with Canadian Kenworth and Volvo Trucks North America.

Last month, the 50-year-old Toronto native was named to succeed Rainer Schmueckle as head of Oregon-based Freightliner. His predecessor is now chief operating officer of parent company DaimlerChrysler’s Mercedes Car Group in Stuttgart, Germany.

Some observers expected that another German would follow Schmueckle. So the appointment of a North American — and a Canadian at that — is a huge vote of confidence in Patterson’s abilities to manage a very large and still growing enterprise. He was, by all accounts, recommended by Schmueckle to head the NAFTA Trucks Business Unit (Freightliner, Sterling, Thomas Built Buses) within the Commercial Vehicles Division of DaimlerChrysler AG. Freightliner represented 26 percent of the division’s worldwide revenue last year and 21 percent of its unit sales.

Schmueckle masterminded the company’s dramatic turnaround from what he recently called “the dark days” of 2001-2002 when it faced severe financial and strategic challenges. Many “tough decisions” later, Freightliner revenues reached US$12.4 billion last year — the most successful in the company’s history.

Patterson, who was Freightliner’s senior vice-president for service and parts over the past three years, notes that 2005 plans call for revenues of US$14 billion. And he says the company’s dramatic resurgence is far from over. “One should never be satisfied,” he told Today’s Trucking. “Rainer took Freightliner from its deathbed to being a good solid company, and his next mission was to take it to greatness. And that’s what I’m challenged to do now, to go from good to great. So no, the work is far from finished. We have a huge number of challenges in front of us.”

And the biggest of them? “Getting the company ready for 2007,” Patterson said. “There’s going to be a sizeable drop in production in class 8 and class 6 and 7 once the emissions standards take hold. There will be a significant increase in prices for the new engines and there may be some performance impact. It’s not going to be huge but there’s nothing that you can argue is of significant value to customers. It’s just straight cost. So there’s going to be a decline in production and revenue, and my priority is to make certain that the company is well postured so that we don’t suffer a dip into the red.”

A major project on his agenda is to fully roll out an innovative new program that he spearheaded as parts and service chief. Called the “Parts Cart,” it’s only used by Federal Express now but will soon expand to other large customers and dealers.

“What we do is take the parts documentation on an individual vehicle, put it in front of the technician in the shop, and then he identifies the part that requires replacement,” Patterson explains. “He points and clicks on that part and it drops into a shopping cart, like when you buy a book on Amazon.com. Things accumulate in the shopping cart and then he clicks and we fulfill the order. It fundamentally alters the way that we’re going to do business.”

On the warranty front, Patterson says they’re in the “scoping” stage of a new system to replace the existing one first installed in the early 1980s, “…when we had one brand sold in two countries, and two models — a cabover and a conventional. We now have to accommodate the complexity of today’s offerings to a greater extent.”

Patterson takes on the leadership of Freightliner LLC under the shadow of personal tragedy. In February he and his wife Tina suffered the loss of their only child, 14-year-old Scott, to a congenital defect in a blood vessel near his heart.

“I intend to fully embrace this new opportunity,” he says, “as a way to remember our son, and to leave some mark behind in this world — secure employment for a fine, hardworking group of people, fine products and services to move the nation’s goods in an increasingly competitive global economy, and vehicles that tread lightly on the delicate planet we must preserve for our successors.”

Those who know him well will tell you that Patterson has the savvy — and then some — to pull this off exactly as promised.