Hybrid Yard Dawg.
Posted on May 09, 2009 - 5:03pm by Everitt Mickey in Hybrid Trucks
Unless you’re a trucker you probably have NO idea what I’m talking about. And no, the Yard Dog I’m referring to is not Fido.
Yard Dog is trucker lingo for little short specialized power units used to move trailers around big holding yards or distribution centers. Years and years ago I worked at a WalMart distribution center and one of my buddies drove the yard dog. He’d go outside and move the empty trailers away from the docks and replace them with full trailers.
Some one has now hybridized a yard dog.
Capacity of Texas has introduced a Pluggable Hybrid Electric Terminal Tractor (PHETT). The PHETT is a charge-sustaining series hybrid that utilizes a 40 hp constant rate generator to supply power, reducing fuel consumption by 60% and audible db by 30%.
This makes quiet a bit of sense to me. Yard dogs generally don’t go very fast nor very far. How can they being that they normally never get on a road way. They spend their lives in the “yard”, a big parking lot. Such being the case electricity could be made readily available. When not actively working the yard dog could be recharging.
In fact I’m not sure why they even made it a hybrid. But they did.
Read the whole story at Green Car Congress.
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Everitt – thanks for the info. But I’ve got to disagree with your description of yard tractors. They’re not slow moving and in places like Chicago they’re moving trailers from lot to lot in the street competing with traffic. There is nothing like the sound and smell of a smoke belching yard tractor with its bumper and exhaust stack about to fall off and its windows cracked moving close to the speed of sound through the terminal. “Get out of the way!” The yard tractors I’m familiar with take about ten minutes to start. Twenty in the cold. They leak oil and hydraulic fluid. The drivers seat is ripped. The floor is filled with old coke cans and roach coach sausage sandwich wrappers. One of the mud flaps is missing. Its CB or VHS radio is blasting with some “dispatcher” yelling instructions to move this or that trailer. “What ya say Jake? – 34587985 or 34587956? Whare da ya want it? Huh? Ok,ok – I got it.” The company bought the yard tractor used – you can see the outline of the original owners logo on the side of the drivers door. Their using the same number as the other company did. Many yard trailer tilt to one side. I never know why, but they do. Driving the yard “dawg” is almost always a promotion up from forklift driver until a truck driver’s job opens up. The “electric” psuedo “thing” is a green scooter. It says it’s a yard truck, but it’s really not. It’ll be some time before we’ll see it in action at a company that can afford and put up with its “inefficiency.”