Updated:
6/16/2009 7:00:00 AM
Products, Practices Save Fleets Money, Improve Fuel Efficiency, Execs Say
By Frederick Kiel, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the June 15 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Chief executive officers of three major fleets said their companies have saved substantially by using several of the products and methods designed for the most fuel efficiency.
The fuel-saving products their companies used included auxiliary power units, computer-optimized routes, super-single tires and mud flaps “that look like Venetian blinds,” they said in a June 4 teleconference with fleet executives and industry financial analysts.
Max Fuller, co-chairman and CEO of U.S. Xpress Enterprises; Harry Muhlschlegel, chairman and CEO of New Century Transportation Inc.; and Randy Marten, chairman and CEO of Marten Transport Ltd., spoke in the teleconference organized by the Stifel Nicolaus Transportation & Logistics Research Group.
“We have used generators and APUs on all of our trucks for the past four years to increase our truck life,” Muhlschlegel said. “By doing this electronically, we shut the truck off after it runs three minutes, so the driver cannot idle the truck.”
“Essentially, our trucks went from a 52% idle time to less than 2%,” Muhlschlegel said. “When you consider the fact that every hour a truck runs [idling] can mean 45 miles, we essentially took a truck we were trading in at 500,000 miles and keeping them an additional 300,000 or 400,000 miles now.”
Marten said that APUs also cut his company’s costs significantly.
“We started installing APUs in May of ’07, and the faster we got involved into it, the better we saw it,” Marten said. “We experienced an 80% savings, based on running each truck about 10 hours a day and 20 days out of the month.”
He said the company recovered the $16 million upfront cost in just 13 months.
Marten Transport, Mondovi, Wis., ranks No. 47 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada. Muhlschlegel said New Century also has been running super-single tires for four years.
“We think they work well in highway operations, but in local operations, we’re not seeing any advantage except for weight.”
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