Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

A few months back, I was speculating on why Navistar bought the Monarch Motor  Coach business. I’ve been daydreaming up the ultimate luxury slide-out or pop-up tractor ever since. But,I guess I’ll be waiting a bit longer. Because it appears Navistar already has plans for the Indiana location they got with the deal.

Obama made another one of his stops in the Elkhart area today. I think he likes Elkhart because he can pretend to be way out in the sticks and still know he can jump on the South Shore Limited and be back in his old stomping grounds within an hour. Kinda like camping out in the back yard with a blanket over the clothesline. He was there to engage in one of his favorite pastimes, giving away our money and he gave away a chunk today.

Navistar got a $39.2 million grant to develop electric delivery vehicles. Compared to other grants distributed in Indiana, the Navistar grant was the smallest except a $6.1 million grant to Purdue for stuff I cant identify. All the rest of the grants appear to be geared to developing different pieces of the electric vehicle market, including lithium-ion cell and pack production for electric and hybrid vehicles, second-generation GM electric drive systems and hybrid electric motors and controls. Another award, to Allison Transmission, goes for developing hybrid transmission systems for commercial trucks, that one scares me a little bit. See all the grant awards from the DOE here .

Altogether, Obama dropped nearly half a billion green ones passing through town. How’s that for ‘just passing thru’? Of course, he wasn’t watching good ole Uncle Joe Biden, who he sent to Detroit. Joe wiped out well over a billion  there. This is probably the biggest gain Michigan will show this year for it’s renewed emphasis on tourism: the key is to only attract tourists from Washington DC who are living off the national credit card.

How long is the cord?

I’m all for Navistar developing an electric delivery vehicle. They have already put people back to work in the Wakarusa  Monarch plant (for you day-trippers that don’t make it to Indiana, most small towns in northern Indiana sound like somebody stepped on a duck). The jobs are most welcome in the upper Midwest that has seen such devastating unemployment. Electric delivery trucks just might work, as long as they take into account all the stop/start and short distance driving. That’s always seemed to me to be the killer on any battery-operated vehicle. But, it appears Navistar has a prototype or two ready as the Elkhart Truth (newspaper. . .we can only hope the name is accurate) says both a Motor Coach and a hybrid truck were on display. I’m just hoping I don’t have to call an electrician to put in a special plug-in out by my driveway for FedEx. . .I buy lots of stuff on-line, and I live 20 miles from town. All this time, I’ve been buying on-line figuring the shipping was cheaper than me driving to town and back to get stuff. Am I going to have to charge the truck now?

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A hydrogen fuel cell powered plug in hybrid Class Eight Truck.

A fuel cell is a device that takes a “fuel” (normally hydrogen gas) and produces water vapor and electricity as it’s only output.

Pretty neat.  Only problem is that they cost a LOT and that hydrogen is an extremely difficult material to work with.

Nonetheless this company has developed a short haul truck that takes advantage of same.

I wish them luck.  They’re going to need it.

I sure would like to have that kind of torque though.  Three thousand foot pounds….WOW>

Sometime back the cost of fuel was double what it is now.  At that time Hybrids were all the rage.  Everyone was talking about them.

Now that the cost of fuel has fallen Hybrid’s are no longer in the news.  The “green machines” (Prius’s, etc,  etc) sale’s have fallen off dramatically.

I’m of differing opinions as to what to think about all this.

On the one hand we should be using the cheapest fuels available in order to make a profit.

On the other hand we really should minimize pollution if for no other reason that pollution is nasty and bad for the general health and well being of folks.

On the gripping hand it would be nice if things were done in a rational and reasoned manner rather than in a panic?  Wouldn’t it be nice if someone were developing a hybrid now, while the price of fuel is low, in anticipation of later times when fuel will be higher?

It would seem that this would be the province of Big Government or Big Business.  Well they are…or so they say.  Of course we can beleive everything Big Government and Big Business say, just ask them.

But believe it or not other folks are also developing hybrids.  Hybrid trucks even.  Even better a RETROFIT system for current trucks.

Unfortunately this isn’t happening in the United States.  It seems that an Australian Dude had a sudded attack of common sense and civic responsibility and decided to “do something”.  Interestingly enough, and totally unlike our local “activists”, he decided to use his own money.  Talk about DEDICATION.

I actually talked to him a bit (via skype).  I wish him all the best.

Go HERE to see how he plans on doing things.

Truckers have long used APU technology to provide the creature comforts of climate control in their cabs.  This technology uses a fraction of the fuel of a diesel engine, but with increasing fuel prices and the push for companies to go green the savings simply isn’t enough.

Delphi and Peterbilt have green in their minds with their latest innovations in APU technology.

Dephi’s new APU used solid oxide fuel cells to run a Peterbilt 386′s electrical system and AC all without idling or depleting battery power.  The test mimicked a truckers average day and ran successfully for a solid 10 hours (the amount of rest required for every 11 hours of driving).  The SOFC APU provided an average of 800 watts of energy throughout the test.

According to Delphi this new solid oxide fuel cell APU technology has a long list of benefits to the old APU technology.

It’s great that people are getting motivated to do something about our energy crisis. And yes, it is a crisis, not only because of the high cost, but the security of the country shouldn’t be dependent on foreign governments. The global oil market is not a “market”, it’s a small group of countries that control the supply while everyone’s demand is going up and most of those countries don’t like us and now that China is becoming a huge consumer of their product, they really don’t care if we live or die anymore.

T. Boone Pickens is big into wind and solar energy and natural gas. Not sure where trucking fits into any of those, but he does show that Natural Gas powered cars can and do work and would be a big benefit. But even if every single four-wheeler was running on natural gas or electricity, diesel is still a world wide commodity and is in very big demand everywhere, not just in the US. But it would lower the overall demand for oil which would lower the price of oil which hopefully would also lower the price for diesel. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since I first mentioned the idea of a hybrid truck. Since then things have been happening.

A brief search on Google provides this.

Additionally we have Peterbilt

August 22, 2007, Bellevue, Washington – PACCAR and Eaton Corporation announced today that they have entered into an agreement to jointly develop proprietary hybrid technology for heavy-duty commercial vehicles in North America. The innovative new products will be introduced exclusively in Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks in the North American market, targeted for initial production by the end of 2009.

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I’ve heard many arguments about the fuel price crisis lately. We’ve all received quite an education on oil and it’s effect on the economy. I was quite surprised to find out something new from a Hollywood type like Ben Stein. He was on Glenn Beck discussing the oil scams and debating how we could become oil independent if the will was there.

He commented that Germany ran out of oil when their supplies were cut off in World War II. Under dire circumstances and heavy bombardment, they still managed to have plentiful supply of synthetic oil from coal. Here’s a long-winded link about how they did it. I found it very interesting that home heating oil and diesel make up 90% of the content when the oil is extracted. Sure, it’s not easy or cheap, and the Germans had a plentiful supply of slave labor, but it wasn’t difficult enough to slow their war machine.

If the Germans could do this back then under bad circumstances, what is our hold back to switching technologies now? I’m not saying coal is the total answer, I’m thinking that we have the technology to use coal and numerous other sources, other than just ethanol, to come up with a solution that works well. Like Ben said, the will just is not there. The will was never there at any other time that a supply crisis was claimed either.

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As I wrote in a previous post. Fuel prices are high and they’re going to STAY high.

And this is a GOOD thing.

(boink!!!!!!!???, this is a good thing? How can that be? Stay tuned, more on that later)

Whatever can we do?

Well, buying a new truck is right out. I checked into that this last month. To replace my old KW it would cost me just about TWICE what I paid for it about nine years ago. Not quite but almost. I paid ninety something thousand in the year two thousand and the local KW dealer wants almost a hundred and seventy thousand for a very similar replacement.

And the new truck get’s worse fuel economy.

So no thank you. I’ll overhaul and rebuild for a while.

How long a while?

That’s kind of what THIS post is about.

Things are being done. It’s possible to get diesel from other places than an oil well,

from plants, algae and trash.

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This country’s fuel prices has gotten so out of hand, that our “American” truckers are going to “Mexico” fuel stops to fill up. It’s approximately $2.00 cheaper in Mexico per gallon than it is here in the USA. I do not know about you all, but this is making me sick to my stomach. What kind of country do we live in where the Government is pushing our Transportation industry to such an extreme as to fuel their vehicles in another country? It’s cheaper for owner ops to purchase the permits for Mexico, then drive to Mexico to fill up.

 

 Truckers Fuel in Mexico: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (920)

With the cost of fuel at about four dollars a gallon it’s getting pretty expensive to get a good night’s sleep. My little kitty slurps about a gallon to a gallon and a half an hour at idle. That figures to about (gulp) four to six dollars AN HOUR! The cost for idling all night will pay for a motel room many places. Which, now that I mention it, is what I, and a lot of heavy haulers do on occasion. If you’ll notice there are a lot of daycab heavy haulers. Many of them are not local they’re long haul like us, but use a motel every night.

Personally I don’t like motels, but that’s just me.

So what other options are there?

Well there’s ShorePower and a company that now calls itself ShorePower

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