As many of you know, we’ve been hard at work these past several months vetting fleets to participate in this fall’s Run on Less – Messy Middle. It’s been a bit more challenging than usual because we are showcasing four different fuel types—diesel/renewable diesel, CNG/RNG, battery electric, and hydrogen fuel cell—in long-haul applications.
Finding diesel fleets willing to participate in this Run was probably less challenging than finding fleets using some of the other alternative fuels, largely because, in many cases, there are no fueling/charging networks needed to operate over longer distances.
The other issue is that we ask a lot of the fleets participating in the Run. This summer NACFE staff will descend on the various fleet locations with a video crew and spend a day interviewing the fleet manager, the maintenance manager, the driver, and others. We will document the configurations of their tractors and trailers and understand deeply the new technologies they are using. We’ll tour their depot and climb in and out of their trucks. We’ll even fly drones over the locations.
See also: Roeth: Join us in the Messy Middle
But probably the biggest ask is where we outfit the trucks being tracked in the Run with a telematics device from Geotab, our telematics/data partner for the Run. By agreeing to allow us to install the Geotab devices, fleets are allowing us to publicly share data on how their trucks are performing in the real world. Basically, anyone can then see how well the trucks are performing—or if there are problems.
Not all fleets are open to publicly sharing in-depth performance data, and we are very grateful to fleets that are willing to do so for the betterment of the entire industry. It takes a bold fleet to give the industry a glimpse inside its operations, and none of the previous four Runs would have been successful if forward-thinking fleets had not figuratively signed on the dotted line to participate.
The same is true for the upcoming Run, and we thank the fleets for giving the entire trucking industry a peek behind the curtain. We will all be better for it.
