On the Ground Realities for Truck Companies Looking to Go Green

On the Ground Realities for Truck Companies Looking to Go Green

Maria Stamas, RMI

The long hours and cumbersome work truck drivers, operators, suppliers, policy creators, and financiers do on a daily basis get no appreciation.

Yes, trucks are responsible for considerable greenhouse gas emissions and they are difficult to share the highway with, but we will need trucks for as long as we need materials and goods-especially if we want them to arrive in a timely manner.

With this underlying assumption, industry stakeholders convened recently to determine how best to increase freight efficiency system-wide.

The timing couldn't be better. Trucking industry executives want to drastically improve the sector's efficiency, perhaps even more than government officials and environmentalists do.

Like several participants at the April 14-16 event, John Woodrooffe from University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, was encouraged, "I'm surprised by the general agreement amongst the delegates that we need to change the rules and the way trucks are configured. There's an openness and willingness that I have not seen in the thirty years I've been involved in this industry and conducting research. You know, I've never seen this before. It's quite a significant change."

But wanting to change and having the flexibility to do so is very different.

Many expressed sincere puzzlement over why new technologies with very strong business cases lay untapped.

"Many components immediately make money for those who build and sell them, but still there's a snail's pace of transformation," said Don Baldwin, Product Marketing Manager at Michelin Tires. "Not a single new technology is needed to get to 1990 emissions levels."

Steve Wulff, Vice president and General Manager at BMI Corporation, emphasized the difficulties in getting new technology out to the marketplace. "It's very complex, especially for a small firm," he said. "It often takes just as much time or more to get technology out as it does to develop it."

While the barriers to adopting new efficiency technologies are many and varied, participants boiled them down to two categories: a serious lack of credible information and misaligned, inconsistent, and priority-competing policies.

The Difficulties in Adopting Efficient Technologies

With low, 1-2 percent margins, a truck fleet can't afford to take a lot of chances.

Using new technologies presents reliability and liability risks, plus a new component's service and maintenance infrastructure is all but guaranteed to be immature.

To stay in the black, companies have to keep their trucks running round the clock. What if a new aerodynamic trailer device breaks down or a wide, single-based tire goes flat? Getting a replacement as well as a technician who understands how to install it could be a huge challenge.

Typically, between acquiring a part and a finding a mechanic, it takes 48 hours to repair a broken component. New parts can take longer, and if they break down more frequently, that's lots of lost time and money-not to mention the speed with which the poor employee who specked the new parts would be out of a job.

What if a new aerodynamic device falls off a truck? If it causes an accident, a company could be tied up in court for months if not years.

Fear of such problems might seem overblown, but the risk is simply not worth it for companies with limited capital. It's hard enough for a purchaser to keep track of new technologies, let alone undergo a lengthy and costly testing process. Plus, relying on the word of a salesman with obvious interests in selling his or her new product, would not be wise.

On the flip side, without guaranteed demand, suppliers have little incentive to invent. "Capital outlay in the OEM industry is huge," Katherine Miles from HybridsPlus pointed out. "It takes millions of dollars and an average of six years to develop new products."

Inefficiencies Created by Current Policy

The external environment facing truckers is perhaps even more daunting than the industry's internal barriers.

Between February 2007 and October 2008, diesel prices rose nearly 100 percent, from $2.40 to $4.70 a gallon, and then came down to $3.00. Business plans had to change accordingly, and due to the unpredictability, many companies suspended investments in new fuel-efficient strategies altogether.

In the words of Andrew Smith, CEO of AT Dynamics, "The solution to doubling freight efficiency is creating a new playing field where we price oil appropriately, and then allow the private sector to compete." Several participants advocated a stable price floor. The feeling was that a high price for diesel is manageable if one can plan for it.

Extraordinarily varied, state-by-state policies are equally frustrating for the industry. State regulations range from how much weight a truck can carry, how long it can be, the position of its axles, and what equipment is allowed on board-from aerodynamic efficiency all the way down to chains.

Any given trucker might therefore have to make changes at state borders, like moving an axle, or even dropping one of his trailers if he was carrying three and now can only carry two or if he was carrying two and now is only allowed to carry one.

According to Mike Ogburn of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the opportunity extends beyond harmonizing current regulations. "If you do manage to harmonize, it'd be best to include some new opportunities like higher weights, managed to make sure bridges are still protected, or longer lengths, managed to make sure safety is preserved," he said. "These are efficiency steps available to the truck industry without actually having to go make giant vehicle investments."

Sometimes truckers carrying windmills have to wait two weeks before they can get a permit to pass through the next state noted Baldwin. "It'd be great if states could agree to more consistent regulations on interstate highways at least," he said. "It's true that states get revenue in permitting operation and they share in the costs of damage to their infrastructure, so it makes sense for them to regulate. But it's an insane environment today for trucking fleets."

Baldwin used the example of old single-tire restrictions based on a belief that the technology damaged the roads in the 1980s. Today, single tires replacing duals all of a sudden come under those restrictions when they don't do the same amount of damage, he noted. "Michelin and its competitors have gone in and educated state departments of transportation and state trucking associations to the facts and the science," he said. "But it's like one state at a time. It's a very, very lengthy process. And there are still five states out there that have restrictions on weight-per-inch-width of tires."

This directly affects us, as taxpayers and consumers, he noted. "By the way, we pay for the inefficiency in everything we buy carried by trucks," he added.

Next Steps

Determining what's preventing the trucking industry from achieving their interests-reaping more profits by delivering freight more efficiently-was just the first step taken at the Transformational Trucking Charrette. (See all 10 barriers industry participants agreed upon here.)

Fortunately, says Baldwin, "Paradigm shifts in the industry have happened before. We spent years convincing the market it was safe and cost-effective to eliminate the spare tire, and that, in fact, you could go for 50 or 100 miles with no air in our newly designed run-flat tire. Our efforts went fairly well. By the time we were done persuading, our competition had sold more than we had."

The real goal of the three-day event was crafting tangible and effective solutions. To see what the group converged upon, read the final charrette notes.