When it comes to fuel efficiency, the application and duty cycle does matter. Yet most discussions about improving fuel economy center on long-haul operations.
However, trends in driver attraction and retention, growth in e-commerce, the push toward immediate delivery, growth in GPS-based asset tracking systems, advances in technologies such as electric and hybrid vehicles, vehicle automation, and innovations in load matching systems are shifting some of the focus to regional haul.
Earlier this year NACFE announced that it wanted to learn more about this growing sector of the market so we launched Run on Less Regional, a fuel efficiency roadshow based off of our successful Run on Less event in 2017 where trucks hauling real freight on real routes averaged 10.1 MPG.
The NACFE team is hard at work determining baseline numbers for regional haul given the stop-and-go nature of some of it and the fact that some drivers spend time unloading cargo as well as driving not to mention that regional haul drivers are likely to have to deal with traffic congestion on a more regular basis. I’m confident we’ll come up with not only a baseline but also many important metrics to measure.
But Run on Less Regional won’t happen if we don’t get fleets to participate. We are looking for the best of the best when it comes to regional haul performance. We know there are fleets out there that operate in the 300 miles from base arena that are making investments in technology and practices to help them wring the most out of a gallon of fuel. Those are the fleets we want.
We are hoping to get a good cross section of fleets operating in a variety of regional applications across the U.S. and Canada.
More details can be found at Run on Less Regional where there are guidelines for participation as well as an application to become involved in the Fleet Selection tab. We are asking fleets to nominate themselves, but also letting manufacturers, testing groups, associations or anyone, frankly, nominate fleets they think are at the forefront of fuel efficiency in their regional operations. You know who these best of best fleets are as you help them become the best.
We are hoping to have 10 fleets in this Run and I am confident we can easily get to that number. Won’t you join us?
