WANTED: SLIPPERY TRAILERS

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.

AERODYNAMICS, TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT, is back in the news. But some people seem surprised to realize that van trailers still offer the chance for huge aerodynamic improvements – and we’ve been ignoring these potential efficiencies for years. I made this point in a presentation on future technologies at last year’s Canadian Fleet Maintenance Seminar, saying that aerodynamic gains in the range of 25% were on the table waiting to be plucked. Wal-Mart must have been listening.

OK, I exaggerate, but it’s true that the retail giant teamed up with Great Dane, Freightliner and International to do some testing of an integrated tractor and 53-ft trailer with all manner of aero trickery at the Goodyear proving grounds in Texas late in 2006. They achieved a fuel saving of 9.8%, as my colleague Peter Carter wrote in the May issue of Today’s Trucking. They closed the trailer gap, used side fairings on the trailer, and extended the trailing edges of the trailer.

I’ve since corresponded with Brian Layfield about this and learned that his company, Laydon Composites in Oakville, Ont., did even better at the Goodyear track. Working with Con-way Transportation and using standard Laydon trailer skirts with trailer-side extenders added, he says they managed a 10.9% fuel-economy improvement.

“They also found, much to the Goodyear test engineers’ surprise, that all the rubber ran 10 degrees cooler by channelling the under-trailer air over the wheels,” says Layield. “Plus they were shaded by our wheel covers.”

Tests of a Con-way double-trailer unit showed a 5% fuel improvement.

Developed in a wind tunnel, the Laydon trailer skirt package on its own is said to reduce fuel consumption by 5 to 6% on a 53-ft trailer. Layfield says this is no experiment -- there are some 2000 trailers running around North America with these skirts installed.

I’ll write more about this in a future newsletter, but in the meantime, have a look at www.laydoncomp.com.

EUROPEAN CONCEPTS ARE MOSTLY THE SAME, judging by the spiffy truck-and-trailer combination I saw at last fall’s IAA commercial vehicles show in Hannover, Germany. Italian truck-maker Iveco was waxing poetic about a project with the comprehensively imaginative name, Transport Concept (it probably does better in the original Italian).

At any rate, the idea was to create a prototype tractor and semi-trailer, based on the company’s new flagship Stralis power unit, that would demonstrate as many innovations as they could pile on with a view to increasing efficiency. The basic premise, and a good one, was the need to haul more freight with lower vehicle running costs.

Iveco itself dealt with the trailer, and optimized the aerodynamic profile of the whole unit, achieving a 20% reduction in aerodynamic drag. That translates to an 8% drop in fuel use.

They used tractor and trailer skirts, artfully extended the front bumpers down to just 180mm above road level (practical?), and fitted unique inflatable spoilers on the back of the cab to close off the gap between tractor and trailer. Those spoilers are automatically inflated when vehicle speed is such that significant aerodynamic resistance is generated.

The trailer sports an aerodynamic underside for easy air flow from front to back; laterally positioned ‘mini-skirts’ with air traps to direct air flow to the channel created by the smooth underside; and a tail extractor to accelerate air flow from the bottom toward the rear.

There’s much more to this than I have room for here, but you might want to read more on Iveco’s website (www.iveco.com).

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If you have comments of whatever sort about Product Watch, or maybe a gizmo I should know about, please contact me at rlockwood@newcom.ca.