Sean Kilcarr

In many ways, Secretary Chao’s family history is not only a quintessentially American story but is one also tied closely to the transportation industry itself.

Her father, Dr. James S. C. Chao, was born in a small farming village outside Shanghai, China, and worked hard to pursue his dream of becoming a sailor. In 1949, in the middle of the Chinese Civil War, he boarded a ship for a seagoing apprenticeship—a short voyage that represented the last requirement for him to become a full-fledged sailor.

But in a way, that voyage never ended.

As the “traditional” make-up of the U.S. truck driver population is rapidly aging and heads for retirement new efforts must be made to attract younger and “non-traditional” candidates to the job of piloting commercial vehicles for a living, according to a panel of trucking executives at the McLeod Software 2017 User Conference in Atlanta this week.

ATLANTA. Tom McLeod, founder, president, and CEO of McLeod Software, is fond of saying that, “one of the more immutable laws of the universe is that we reap what we sow.&rdquo And at least from his perspective, motor carriers will need to do an awful lot of reaping based on the amount of change now rapidly occurring in the trucking industry.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) recently sponsored a two-day demonstration of three-truck platooning on public roadways in Northern Virginia; the results of four years’ worth of research and testing. Guided by police escort, the three tractor-trailers took journalists and other industry experts from a staging area in Centreville, VA, along routes established on Rt.

The International Truck division of Navistar is rolling out what it calls “major enhancements” to its LoneStar highway tractor; deliberately dovetailing the announcement with the start of National Truck Driver Appreciation Week to highlight the “driver-focused” upgrades to its LoneStar family of trucks, originally introduced back in 2008.

Journalists recently got a chance to pilot or ride shotgun in six pre-production units of the revamped VNL family of tractors built by Volvo Trucks North America (VTNA), which the OEM originally unveiled back in July. They included a high-roof VNL 860 model – considered the “flagship” of the rebooted VNL family – two VNL 760 high-roof sleeper models, two VNL 740 mid-roof units, and a VNL 300 daycab tractor.