Proof that trucks can appeal to more than truckers is the "Designs of the Decade" silver award conferred on Volvo's VN Series highway tractor line by the Industrial Designers Society of America. The professional group said the awards honor "icons of design" from the past ten years. The VN was cited alongside such groundbreakers as the Apple iMAC, IBM ThinkPad, and Volkswagen's New Beetle.
Wake-up call? According to one of our favorite sources - good ol' Anonymous - trucking should wake up to reality and scrap mileage-based pay:
"Our most important employees are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. ... How difficult would it be to recruit factory workers for a 70- or 80-hour week with no overtime compensation? Now imagine these workers being required to sit around for 30 or 40 hours before they would even start getting paid. Can you imagine anyone accepting this? So why are we surprised at driver turnover and recruitment problems brought about by our pay-per-mile scheme?"
What do you think? Is pay per mile something best left in the 20th century? Get your thoughts into "The Last Word." And if you supply it, we'll even print your name.
Take that, Leo "It is decidedly not true that 'nice guys finish last,' as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was once alleged to have said. ... Material success is possible in this world without exploiting others, and clearly, having a reputation for fair dealing is a profoundly practical virtue. We call it 'good will' in business and add it to our balance sheets." -Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, addressing the Gerald R. Ford Foundation
Streets paved with gold... "I wanted to buy a truck - and eventually lots of trucks. I'm still not sure how, exactly, I began to get that urge. But I decided I wanted to build a trucking business." -Bhupinder Singh, recent immigrant and founder and fleet owner of Pacific Business Connections, a Colton, Calif.-based produce hauler fielding 75 Kenworths
"B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce is expected to be nine times the size of the B2C (business-to-consumer) market." -According to analysts at Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown
