DEERBORN, Mich. – The recession slowed the development and commercialization of hybrid commercial trucks in North America, but things are charging up once again.

That was the theme at the recent 10th annual Hybrid Truck Users Forum (HTUF) in Dearborn, Mich.

Suppliers told attendees that despite some recessionary speed bumps, it’s only a matter of time before it’s commonplace to see trucks powered by something other than an ordinary diesel engine. 

"We’re beyond science projects at this point," Dave Bryant, manager of vocational sales at Freightliner Trucks, told the record crowd of 750.

While larger private carriers like Coca Cola and FedEx have been the first to employ hybrid vehicles on a large scale, "it’s time for the smaller fleets to step up," said Bryant.

Sam Snyder, chief engineer at FedEx, said the company is committed to continued exploration of hybrid or all-electric options, and has even made one of its ‘stations’ — in the Bronx — a "100 percent hybrid site."

Coke is an early adopter of heavy hybrid trucks

The company’s purpose in all of this is partly to show leadership and a spirit of innovation, while also saving fuel — 263,000 gal or almost a million liters since 2002 — and chopping greenhouse gases.

Under a new branding — ‘Earthsmart’— Snyder said the company has committed to a 20 percent fuel efficiency gain by 2020, using 2005 as a baseline, but they’re already at the 14.1 percent mark overall and at 42.1 percent for the 329 hybrid and electric trucks they run.

Five of them are in Toronto.

Despite all that, he said a business case still can’t be easily made because the price of hybrid technology is still too high. Snyder wants to see a four-cylinder diesel employed in hybrid trucks to help with that.

He also noted that a key challenge is driver training in general, not just with hybrids. We can do it better, he said, explaining that he was looking for new ways "to get drivers to stop tramping on the throttle."

That training theme was repeated by Ken McKenney, sustainable-fleet engineering chief at Verizon.

"Half the battle [with hybrids] is not that the technology works but that the driver accepts it."

Coca Cola’s director of North American fleet operations, Steve Saltzgiver, said he was looking to improve driver skills in general too but couldn’t find a suitable ‘Smart Driver’ sort of training plan.

Given that the 32,000-vehicle fleet (480 hybrids, 629 by this time next year) consumes 32 million gallons of diesel and another 18 million of gasoline every year, even a 1 percent gain matters, he said.

In the end, Coca Cola devised its own driver "eco-training" system.

Saltzgiver said the hybrid transition was "painful at first", adding that grants and incentives remain necessary to make it all work, even for a fleet his size.

Like others, he’d like to be working more closely with OEMs. That was another common theme, as almost all panel members mentioned wanting more local OEM support.

— Rolf Lockwood