Volvo fires up new hybrid heavy truck
03/10/2006

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — The Volvo Group unveiled new hybrid heavy vehicles today, which the company says provides maximum fuel-saving effects on routes with frequent braking and accelerations.
“We envisage opportunities to accelerate developments in commercially viable hybrids for heavy vehicles. This can be significant for both our customers and for the environment,” says President and CEO of Volvo, Leif Johansson.
Fuel savings can amount to 35 percent, the truckmaker says. Maintenance costs for vehicles can also be reduced through reduced wear on the braking system.

It goes on -

The electric motor offers smooth performance at low speeds, the company
explains, supplementing the diesel engine’s performance as speed rises.
This solution allows the truck to accelerate under electric power
alone. This promotes lower fuel consumption, lower emissions and lower
noise level

 “Thanks to the electric motor’s capacity, the diesel engine can be

automatically switched off when the truck stops to make deliveries,
pick up loads or pauses at traffic lights,” explains Lars Mårtensson,
environmental affairs manager at Volvo Trucks
The new hybrid truck still has to undergo a wide range of tests. The
company predicts that hybrid trucks wearing the Volvo badge will be
available on the market within a few years.

In-town driving eats up the fuel mileage in a big truck. I’m sure this will be available mainly on delivery trucks, but should they should make a huge difference in operating costs. No word about the costs of the trucks

Another treat for the environmentalists -

“The diesel engine in our hybrid solution can also be operated using
biofuels, and consequently, transport activities can be conducted
without carbon dioxide emissions. This paves the way for interesting
developments toward long-term sustainable transport solutions,” says
Johansson.

I’m not thrilled about bio-fuels, mainly because the Volvo engine I have now says NOT to use any bio-fuels, otherwise I might give it a try.

Originally posted 2006-03-11 15:26:51.

I’ve signed up for three years this time. Next time I’ll probably do the lifetime membership. I’ve heard complaints from some drivers, but like anything else, you’re only hearing one side of the story. And who else is there? I believe they do have the drivers best interest in mind. Everyone even remotely associated with the trucking industry should join.

Originally posted 2008-05-27 20:36:55.

Local governments, truckers split over value of lower speed limit

Cursing a $700 fill-up at the pump, big rig driver Lance Warnacut complained some more when asked about the prospect of lower truck speed limits and lane restrictions in Tennessee.

Come on now, $700??? Even with fuel prices today in TN is $2.15 that’s 325 gallons. Most trucks either have a pair of 125 gal or 150 gal. And you can’t use all 125 or 150 gallons. It’s possible he had larger tanks, but it sounds more like an exaggeration.

“They’re killing us,” said Warnacut, a driver for Slotyme Trucking Inc. Tennessee’s transportation commissioner is considering requests from Chattanooga and Hamilton County for 55 mph truck speed limits on county interstates and rules to confine truck to the right lanes. Officials in Shelby and Knox Counties and the Nashville metropolitan area also have requested lower truck speed limits. They say the changes will fight air pollution.

Slowing trucks down to cut down on air pollution? Idling laws almost make sense, but since the safety excuse is out the window -

Keelor said a National Transpiration Safety Board report shows that separate speed limits are a “problem,” particularly for enforcement officers.Tennessee Trucking Association, said the more than 500 members have a “long-standing policy supporting uniform 55 (speed limit) for all vehicles.” He said separate speed limits result in a “much higher frequency of accidents … rear end collisions.” His group also doesn’t support lane restrictions. “It’s just less safe on a four-lane interstate if you restrict all trucks to the right hand lane,” Huneryager said.

If the excuse is really air pollution…

Transportation Commissioner Jerry Nicely in a letter to Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker and Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey said the department is preparing a uniform policy for speed limit requests and said changes should be allowed only if air quality is the primary reason. He also said any reductions would “apply to all vehicles.” “The faster an engine runs the more pollution it produces, on any combustion engine,” said Kelley Walters, a spokeswoman for the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau.

Make everyone slow down to 55. But you know that’s not going to happen. Every politician in the state would lose their ass.

If it’s not about safety and air pollutions sounds phoney what could be the real reason?

…said the proposals are nothing but a government “moneymaker” to let traffic officers prey on truck drivers. “You can run by them going 85 and they don’t come,” he said. “They’ll sit there till they see a truck in the left lane.”

reduced speed limits and lane restrictions are just “picking on truckers.” “If the trucks in the United States shut down for two weeks they would do what the trucks want to do instead of what the politicians want to do,” he said. “Everybody wants to take it to the trucks.”

There we go with that strike thing again. It’s that “let’s show them who’s boss and then we’ll get our way” attitude. How professional is that? And what politician or anyone is going to listen to that?

Originally posted 2004-11-08 04:32:00.

New trucking rules irritate nap takers – billingsgazette.com.
The goal of the hours-of-service rule is to synchronize a driver’s
daily work and rest schedule as closely as possible with a circadian
rhythm, said Patricia Lee of the safety administration.

Excluding the two-hour break from the 14-hour duty period would allow a
driver to create a work-rest cycle that conflicts with the body’s
natural circadian rhythm, Lee said. The driver would not establish
regular, daily cycles of rest and work, she said.

Which is horse-crap and was only done to appease Public Citizen and the axis against trucking.  And what is it with all the nap taking??? If the rules included time for naps drivers would only abuse the time and give it back to the shippers as free on-duty time. The only time I had to take naps during the day was when I was driving around with untreated sleep apnea. Now that I’ve been treated and have a CPAP machine to help me sleep I don’t take naps anymore. Even stopping, eating, showering or whatever, takes a little more planning, but is possible.

The other problem trying to synchronize everyone’s hours is the trucking industry doesn’t run on regular hours. Some shippers load at night. Grocery warehouses want produce at 3am so they can get it out to the stores that same morning. Others you get loaded when it needs to get loaded and you unload when it needs to be unloaded.

Compounding the problem, a trucking company executive said, is another
regulation left intact when the sleeper-berth rule was changed. Drivers
may drive 70 hours in eight days or 60 hours in seven days, which works
out to just under six hours of driving per day. After reaching that
limit, the driver must take 34 hours off before restarting.

A common misconception out here is that you have to take a 34 hour break every 70 hours. You only have to take a 34 hour break when you actually hit 70 hours or go over. If you don’t go over 70 hours you gain the hours at midnight from the hours you worked 8 days ago, same as before. Personally I like the reset. I always hated having to set my hours from what I did a week ago.  I was always bumping up against the 70 hour rule and that’s when any of my cheating that I used to do happened.

How this affects us driving as a team has really changed the way we drive. More on that later.

Originally posted 2005-11-11 04:36:00.

PATT
New Rule Will Not Adequately Address Truck Driver Fatigue
Decades of research, both on commercial drivers and shift workers, has shown that increasing the length of time a worker must spend performing certain tasks correspondingly reduces alertness and performance. This leads to an increased risk of worker deaths and injuries, as well as driver errors such as motor vehicle crashes.

Under this final HOS rule, truck drivers will be forced to deal with personal and family matters and get sufficient sleep to restore alertness and safe driving performance in as little as 10 hours each day. This is an unrealistic demand and will likely result in insufficient quality sleep and increased crash risk.

But they want to go back to the old rule that only allows 8 hours off? Wouldn’t that leave even less time for family matters and sleep?

The FMCSA’s exclusion of on-board recording devices only goes to illustrate the agency’s reluctance to meaningfully enforce its own proposed HOS rule changes. In 2000, the FMCSA admitted that commercial driver paper logbooks were widely falsified and that a high percentage of drivers routinely violated the maximum number of driving hours permitted. Drivers themselves have admitted this fact in independent surveys, such as the survey published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The problem with black boxes is that they can only tell if the truck is moving or not. It can’t tell if the driver is working on the dock or sleeping in the bunk. A black box company is going to get rich after such a ruling. I wonder if PATT and PC have a particular black box in mind? And what their connection to the company is.

Granted the paper logs are only as good as the enforcement. My cure is to make all fuel receipts have a date / time stamp. Most have the date, but none have the time, leaving room for being creative. Every truck has to buy fuel somewhere. If a trooper asks (they don’t now) for the fuel receipt with a time stamp and compare it to the logbook, it’s just as good as a black box.

The original HOS rule proposal from the FMCSA would have extended the consecutive driving time to 12-hours. With the support of truck safety advocates around the nation, we were able to get this decreased to 11 hours. Additionally, the new rule moves the trucking industry towards an appreciation for a driver’s circadian rhythm, which is the foundation for normal sleep patterns in people.

Circadian rhythm in trucking? Tell that to the shippers and receivers. Produce usually gets shipped late in the day after it’s been trucked in from the fields. Produce usually arrives at 3 or 4 in the morning so it can go out to the store first thing in the morning. A perfect shift isn’t going to happen while getting the job done.

I’m still looking for what kind of HOS rules PATT & Co., would be happy with. From the above statement (and on the actual web page) Driving 11 hours is too much and 10 hours off isn’t enough.

Increasing the number of consecutive hours that commercial drivers are permitted to operate their trucks is clearly an effort to trade off trucking industry economic interests against improved safety,…

In the real trucking world you don’t drive constantly, there is down time waiting to load or unload or waiting for a new load. Plus, if you only drive and sleep you will run out of hours for the week. Either wait till you have hours or you take that 34 hour break. Plenty of time to deal with family matters and such. PATT saying drivers don’t have enough time to take care of the family matters (whatever that means) plus sleep. My opinion – When I’m working, I’m working. I don’t want to be stuck at some truck stop for any longer than I have to. There’s only so many family matters you can take care of in a day, especially when you don’t have family matters to deal with. More rest time would be a boon to truck stops and disaster for the rest of us. That’s the best excuse they can come up with to keep us off the roads longer than 8 or 10 hours. They are only about keeping us off the road.

The front page of their website has a new mission statement. Saying they are doing this for truckers, to get us paid for all the uncompensated time etc… If they can join forces with OOIDA that would give them legitimacy in the trucking community. It’s only a ruse to get more people on their side. Their real agenda is to keep trucks off the road as much as possible.

Originally posted 2004-09-28 15:59:00.

ATA supports president’s fuel price initiatives
President Bush April 25 announced measures to try to stem increases in retail fuel prices, and Bill Graves, president and chief executive officer of the American Trucking Associations, applauded the initiatives.

Bush is delaying this northern summer’s deposits to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an emergency stockpile of government-owned crude oil. “So by deferring deposits until the fall, we’ll leave a little more oil on the market,” Bush said during a speech in Washington at the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for the ethanol industry. “Every little bit helps.”

"Every little bit helps?" Putting a few more barrels of crude on the market is a drop in the bucket and does nothing for refinery capacity and the process of changing blends (whatever that is). I’m full of solutions right now – How about lowering the federal and state taxes by half. That would be about 40 cents. That would make $3.00 a gallon, $2.60 a gallon TOMORROW.

The plan calls for making sure consumers and
taxpayers are treated fairly, promoting greater fuel efficiency,
boosting the U.S. gasoline supply and investing aggressively in
gasoline alternatives. Bush also has ordered a federal investigation
into possible cheating, price gouging or illegal manipulation in the
gasoline markets. And he gave the Environmental Protection Agency the
authority to suspend regional clean-fuel standards where it would help
to maintain adequate fuel supplies.

How about a plan to investigate the EPA, the IRS and DOT about where all my highway money is going, why my new truck motor is going to cost $10,000 more in 2007 than in 2006? How about boosting fuel efficiency in trucks?  What about all the cheating, price gouging and illegal manipulation of my highway tax dollars? Investing in alternatives? How about alternative drilling locations besides the Middle freakin’ East?

The EPA option does not mean the agency will
relax its engine emission requirements to allow for lower-quality
quality fuel to be sold, said John Millett, an EPA spokesman.

Did I mention new trucks are going to be $10,000 more because of stupid EPA unrealistic crap regulations?

How about drilling Alaska? Alaskans love that idea, let’s make Alaska look like a pin cushion. Screw the Caribou! The outer continental shelf offshore? Yeah, that too. Between the OCS and Alaska we could stop giving crazy dictators our hard earned money, buy American oil and tell those sand people to drown in their stupid oil. I’m ready to vote everyone out of office and start over. Eight year olds could run the country better then these idiots.

gas prices trucking

Originally posted 2006-04-27 07:14:00.