Leaders of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s MOVE team announced that they are joining with trucking leaders to inaugurate the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), with the goal of helping reinvent the trucking industry to carry just as much freight on half as much energy.
The new group will collect, assess, and circulate information on performance and efficiency benefits to technology developers, fleet owners, and truck drivers, said leaders of the transportation research and consulting team at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Boulder CO.
The inaugural meeting of the NACFE is set for November 3, 2009, at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center.
“There is a lack of trustworthy information evaluating different technologies for fleets to make investment decisions,” said Hiroko Kawai, principal of the MOVE team. “The freight industry—and the trucking industry in particular—have been burned by a ‘snake-oil salesman’ approach to technology, and it is difficult for end-users of innovative technologies to accelerate market adoption. The same challenges are also shared by producers of technologies; they cannot accelerate the market adoption of their R&D efforts, and it is hard for them to lead the market even when they offer the necessary innovations.”
Formation of NACFE is based upon industry requests received during RMI’s Transformational Trucking Charrette, at which a group of trucking industry stakeholders met in Denver CO in April 2009 to discuss barriers to, and opportunities presented by, a doubling of trucking efficiency. The MOVE team’s name stands for “MObility and Vehicle Efficiency.”
Access www.freightefficiency.org for more information and registration.
