No matter how you measure it, we all want more efficient vehicles
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That’s a famous line from Romeo and Juliet, for those of us who didn’t know. I think that sentiment can be applied to the trucking industry as well.
Freight efficiency is measured in different ways:
- Miles per gallon
- Liters per 100 kilometers
- Kilometers per liter
- MPG times payload (aka freight ton efficiency)
And I am sure there are others that I am missing. My point here is that whether you are in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, or Asia making trucks more efficient is something we are all focusing on.
Interestingly this is true whether the majority of trucks in a country are sleepers or day cabs, whether the electrical system is 12V or 24V and whether the steering wheel is on left side or right side.
Fleets all over the world may measure fuel efficiency differently, but they all are working to bring total cost of ownership down and one way to do that is to burn less fuel.
Recently NACFE has been spending time in Canada and Mexico interacting with fleets and learning about their pain points and about what they are doing to improve their profitability, which often means focuses on reducing fuel consumption. Through our affiliation with Rocky Mountain Institute we have a little bit of insight into the Chinese and Indian market and when we measure our www.nacfe.org website analytics, around a third of our guests are from places outside of North America!
NACFE is making an effort to engage with manufacturers, fleets, and NGOs from places outside of the U.S. to learn about their best practices and how they might be applied to our market. But we also are sharing some of our findings with those outside our borders, so they can shorten their learning curve based on our experiences in the N.A.
Miles or kilometers, gallons or liters. Or even diesel equivalent. It doesn't matter so much matter what you call it or how you measure it, what matters is making trucks go farther using less fuel.
