Putting the shoe on the other foot: NACFE's New Year’s resolutions

Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter to Santa telling him what I wanted him to bring me for Christmas. The letter mostly focused on things I thought other people in the industry should be doing.

For the New Year, I suppose turnabout is fair play, so I am going to share my resolutions for the things NACFE wants to do in 2022. As an added bonus, I promise a midyear review to assess how we are doing with our resolutions. This is intended to keep us from going all-in for the first few weeks of the year—as many people do with their New Year’s resolutions—only to lose steam by mid-February.

So here is what we at NACFE promise to get done in 2022:

• Publish four market segment reports from Run on Less-Electric and a report on the analysis of all the data and metrics we tracked.
• Publish updated Confidence Reports on automated manual transmissions, downspeeding, and maintenance. We have been promising these for a while now, but I am committed to getting these updates out in the new year and will even commit to having all three out by midyear.
• Guide the adoption of electric tractors in regional haul. We will update some of our prior Guidance Reports, starting with an update of the Charging Infrastructure report. Other electric truck tools will be developed, such as a total cost of ownership tool for HD electric tractors.
• Continue our work on autonomous trucking so we can help the industry navigate the rapid developments that are occurring with this technology.
• Figure out a plan for Run on Less 2023. People have already been asking us what is on tap for the next Run. We do plan to keep our cadence of a Run every other year, but we need to figure out what makes sense for the 2023 version. Please feel free to let any of the NACFE team know what you think the focus of the next Run should be. The Runs have been great ways to gather real-world data that fleets can use to create their own strategies.
• Complete a new Fleet Fuel Study. We took a hiatus for two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic and because we are revamping not only the way we are going to collect the data for the study, but also the way we are going to present the data. We are hard at work with a web developer on moving away from a PDF version of the study results to something that will allow each user to define which of the 85 technologies—alone or in combination—they want to see the data on. We want the reports to be customized by each fleet based on which technologies are most relevant to them.
• Continue to be out and about in the industry speaking at events and learning from other people who are presenting at conferences, meetings, conventions, shows, webinars, etc. As of this writing, our team is ready, willing, and able to travel to speak at industry events. We will, of course, continue to monitor COVID-19 developments to ensure the safety of our staff and meeting attendees. Let us know if you want us to present at an event you are hosting. If at all possible, we’ll be there.

2021 presented the trucking industry and NACFE with a host of challenges. I think we all rose to those challenges, and so I lift a glass to all that we accomplished last year. But I also promise to stick with my resolutions for a full 12 months, no matter how hard that may be. Feel free to ask me how we’re doing.

Michael Roeth has worked in the commercial vehicle industry for nearly 30 years, most recently as executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. He serves on the second National Academy of Sciences Committee on Technologies and Approaches for Reducing the Fuel Consumption of Medium and Heavy-Duty Vehicles and has held various positions in engineering, quality, sales and plant management with Navistar and Behr/Cummins.