Listening to John Pangborn speak, you get the sense that truck stops and lube jobs go together like coffee and chocolate-silk pie. For the better part of four months, Pangborn and other senior managers at Freightliner Corp. have been working overtime to expand the truckmaker’s capacity for preventive maintenance and minor repairs by some 2800 trucks a day and 700 ASE-certified technicians.

How? In March, Freightliner bought an ownership stake in Travel Centers of America (TA), which operates the largest national network of full-service truck stops in the United States. Freightliner plans to augment its existing network of 300 dealers with an express parts and service network at 162 TA locations. The new integrated TA/Freightliner shops, the first of which opened in Ohio in June, will focus on express service: jobs that take an hour and a half or less.

“The most critical element in the supply chain is the truck driver’s time,” says Pangborn, Freightliner’s senior vice-president of customer support. “If a driver can go into a TA location and get fed, fuelled, and have his truck’s warranty work all done in two hours, he’s time ahead and down the road.”

TA shops will bring much-needed service capacity to Freightliner, where sales of trucks are going gangbusters but have also raised questions about how to ensure that those vehicles are maintained as they age-and how to ensure that Freightliner captures as much of that service business as it can.

The deal goes beyond the shop floor. TA is also being incorporated into Freightliner’s 24-hour customer assistance centre database, and will be a referral point for funnelling emergency and roadside repairs to dealers. They will also have access to Freightliner parts distribution, service, and information systems. Freightliner’s dealer network, meantime, will remain the front-line of service for Freightliner trucks.

Freightliner’s arrangement with TA highlights one way truck stops are evolving beyond their traditional role as places to fuel up, grab a bite, and bunk down. Order a burger these days and you might be asked, “You want tires with that?”

Indeed, nearly a month after Freightliner announced its deal with TA, Volvo Trucks North America said it would pay about $30 million US for a stake in Petro Stopping Centers, a chain of 51 full-service travel plazas in 29 states. Volvo plans to aggressively expand the degree of products and services available at existing Petro outlets, including using the truck stops as a sort of second-tier dealer network to offer new- and used-vehicle sales and financing.

“Reaching the end-user of a long-haul truck is a daunting challenge,” explains Volvo Trucks CEO Marc Gustafson. “Truck drivers are constantly on the move-except for a few hours each day when they’re at the truck stop. That’s our chance. They’re a captive audience.”

A more direct payoff for Volvo is the ability to offer around-the-clock PM and minor repairs through Petro’s 225 quick-lube service bays, called Petro: Lube.

Gustafson is careful to point out that Petro: Lube shops will complement Volvo’s full-service dealers, who rely on warranty and maintenance work to pay the bills. “We’re very conscious of the dealers’ role and how they might feel about this partnership,” Gustafson concedes. “We’re trying to impress upon them that we’re extending their reach into an environment where their customers and prospects spend their free time.” Volvo truck dealers can become new Petro: Lube franchisees, and will be encouraged to put satellite showrooms and maintenance bays near Petro locations.

While canadian truckers will benefit from these new arrangements when they’re working south of the border, both Freightliner and Volvo have said it’s only a matter of time before they expand their partnerships here, where there are no TA’s or Petro’s, and few large-scale truck stops catering to commercial truck drivers.

Ahead of them is travel-plaza pioneer Flying J, which plans to open at least two locations in Canada before the end of next year, both along Hwy. 401 on either side of metropolitan Toronto. The company operates 121 travel plazas and fuel stops with another 30 under construction, and has just one established travel plaza in Canada, at Vaudreuil, Que., near Montreal. A second is scheduled to open near London, Ont., within the year.

“When we look at strategic, high-traffic corridors, Toronto has been under-served,” says Alan Stewart, vice-president of restaurant operations at Flying J. “Canada is an important market because of the volume of commercial traffic, the proximity to other Flying J locations, and the lack of comparable services. What relatively little exposure we’ve had there has been very successful.”

Flying J, the architect of the sprawling, diversified, service-oriented travel plaza, knows something about success. The company became a leader by developing unique ways to market diesel, including “frequent fueller” discounts long before anyone had heard of Air Miles. It created ways to improve the speed, control, and accuracy of transactions at the point of sale, including fully automated fuel desks and fuel islands.

Recently, Flying J has been distributing a specially encrypted radio frequency (RF) tag that mounts inside your fuel tank. The company is equipping its fuel nozzles with a tiny RF antenna that, when inserted into the throat of the tank, recognizes a unique identification number from the RF tag inside. Proper identification allows for immediate authorization of the transaction from your billing company before the fuel begins to flow. Remove the nozzle from the tank and the antenna will lose contact with the tag inside. The fuel shuts off automatically, and your account is billed. The system requires no fuelling cards or extra information from the driver.

“We’ve tried to focus on convenience for the driver and control for the fleet,” Stewart says. “We need to satisfy both groups.” It’s the kind of customer-driven thinking that has propelled Flying J from a sleepy company with four gas stations 20 years ago to a diversified, $2.5-billion US operation that ranks No. 98 on Forbes magazine’s list of the 500 biggest private companies in the United States.

Truck stops are going high-tech in other ways, scrambling to meet the growing communications and entertainment needs of their customers. At many truck stops, drivers can get trip-routing and load-matching information, scan and transmit a bill of lading or proof of delivery, or plan a route.

Earlier this year, Volvo promised to deliver an “Internet-ready” truck-a VN tractor with receptacles for cable television, Internet access, and telephone service concealed behind a panel on the outside the truck. The connections take advantage of an in-cab entertainment and communications service offered by PNV.net (formerly Park-N-View Inc.), which has hard-wired about 220 truck stops and plans to expand to 600 more across North America. The company will launch an interactive Web site later this year, giving truckers access to trip routing, load matching, and driver log documentation, among other things.

Gee-whiz technology means nothing to someone standing in a filthy washroom or a parking lot that resembles a Mardi Gras parade. “Little things matter-cleanliness, consistency, convenience, fair prices,” says Stewart. “If you can’t do those things right, perhaps ripping up your parking lot to install Park-N-View hubs isn’t where you should be directing your resources.”

There’s a lot to be said for old-fashioned customer service. It’s part of the mood, the spirit, the sense of camaraderie that defines a place where you feel comfortable. Take the story of Matt Dollaver. He recalls arriving at the 10-Acre Truck Stop on Hwy. 401 near Belleville, Ont., on a raw December day, with wind and sleet lashing out from a dark sky. “I was not happy about being on the road, I was not happy about having to stop,” he says, “and I was not happy about having to walk from the back of the lot to the restaurant in that weather.”

Intent on scrambled eggs and bacon, Dollaver was doing his best to kick the mud from his boots when a van pulled up beside him. “This fellow rolled down his window and said he was from the truck stop. He wanted to know if I’d like a lift,” Dollaver says. “Isn’t that great? That guy earned a customer for life, and all it took was a two-minute car ride. Now whenever I pass through, I try to work out my schedule so I stop there.”