Bickner Trucking runs a fleet of 62 tractors and about 100 trailers, including some aluminum B-train tankers for hauling fertilizer. A few years ago, John Bickner set out to improve the fuel efficiency of those units. His obsessive focus led to a 25% improvement in fuel mileage and a 300-kilogram increase in payload. Early efforts included optimizing the aerodynamics of the tank trailers.

Bickner: I’m not an engineer, but when you look at the efficiency of a truck, you’re bringing the air up over and around, and you don’t want air underneath. So we look closely at how we can clean that up, number one is you gotta get rid of your gaps. Number two is you gotta streamline down the side. Keep it out of the axles. You don’t want those turbulences in the axles.

Streamlining the trailers involved moving the large square boxes that held the unloading pumps from the side of the trailer to a position beneath the barrel.

That allowed better access to the pumps from either side of the trailer. They then built an aerodynamic cover for the pump box. They added a gap extender to the rear of the front tank and a tail fairing to the rear tank. And if the visual evidence is anything to go on, the modifications worked.

Bickner: One thing we noticed in the mirrors is our view behind in the snow is much better. That air is coming down, down around the side. My brothers really noticed the difference of the spray patterns on the trailer. We call mosquitoes part of our wind tunnel testing out there in Western Canada because where the bugs hit is catching air.

Over the years, we’ve been following a few American drivers that were making big strides in improving their fuel efficiency, folks like Joel Morrow, Henry Albert, Jamie Hagen, and others. And despite pulling nearly twice as much weight as they do, Bickner figured what worked for the Americans should work for him, too.

Bickner: Took their numbers, and what I kept seeing is our weight and our axles, and I kept doing the math of the statistics of weight and axles and drag and kept saying, ‘We’re really missing it here. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table.‘

Went to the Volvo dealership one day and said, ‘We feel that we can do 22.5% better than where we are already at our 6.81%’, which was a tremendous number. We were beating everybody as it was. And they thought we were being rather aggressive.