ATLANTA. The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) is “re-branding” itself, changing its website address to www.nacfe.org, as the group plans to expand its fuel economy research efforts to include helping to “guide future change” in the trucking industry.
“We’ve been at this for eight years now, and with ‘NACFE 2.0,’ we believe we can add a great deal of value in guiding the development and eventual implementation of future technologies in this industry,” explained Mike Roeth, the group’s executive director, during a press conference here at the Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) 2018 annual meeting.
To that end, NACFE is going to start offering “guidance reports” that examine the potential of future technologies in trucking alongside its current “confidence reports” that analyze the benefit of current systems in terms of improving commercial vehicle fuel economy.
“We have issued 16 confidence reports that cover 70 technologies and we are now following 85 technologies that are undergoing constant change,” explained Roeth. “We are updating our findings on them as we go.”
In terms of NACFE’s additional focus on offering “guidance reports,” he said the group is working on two topics in the near-term: electric trucks and autonomous commercial vehicles.
“We are well on our way to delivering guidance on electric trucks by the spring of 2018,” Roeth said. “We are excited to be moving into this next phase of our progress. We will continue to update ‘confidence reports’ on existing technologies and plan to complete several on technologies we have not yet studied. In addition to providing guidance on electric trucks, we plan to study other topics such as vehicle connectivity, mode-shifts and freight-matching.”
NACFE also just released an ay released an in-depth report on its Run on Less “fuel-efficiency roadshow” conducted last September for three-weeks with seven tractor-trailers that saved 2,877 gallons of fuel and $7,193 against the national average fuel economy for tractor-trailers of 6.4 mpg.
“We pulled out some initial data when we wrapped up in September last year,” Roeth said. “Now this new report offers much more detail.”
He added that NACFE is planning to conduct a “second round” of Run on Less-style fuel economy testing to go deeper into the data, especially on the impact of wind. “Maybe there are different ways to slice the data, or to look at it more in real time; look at it in terms of traffic conditions,” Roeth noted. “We’ve been approached by Mexican carriers to do one in Mexico, as well as by owner-operators to do one on older trucks. We are not yet sure what will do.”
