With some 125 trucks and 350 dry van trailers, Sharp Transport is not a mom-and-pop trucking operation. But the carrier is not a mega-fleet either. So when it was notified back in May that it had become the first U.S. fleet to achieve EPA SmartWay Elite status, there were probably a few celebrations at the carrier’s Ethridge, TN, headquarters.
“Stemco brought [the designation] to our attention, and we filled out the paperwork,” says Jarit Cornelius, director of maintenance. “EPA sent us a letter telling us we were the first fleet in the U.S. to achieve that. We’re very proud of that.”
Whereas a SmartWay trailer features a combination of low-rolling resistance tires and SmartWay-verified components that produce a 6% or greater fuel efficiency improvement, an Elite trailer is one that incorporates two or more aerodynamic devices along with low-rolling resistance tires to produce a 10% or greater improvement.
Sharp achieved its standard by incorporating a number of technologies on its trailers to reduce fuel usage. These include Stemco’s TrailerTails, DuraPlate side skirts, Meritor Tire Inflation System, and Bridgestone low rolling resistance tires and caps.
The fleet, which makes all those items standard specs on new trailers, has 54 trailers with the TrailerTails at this point. “The Stemco team has been making the sales pitch for the last couple of years,” Cornelius notes, “but at the time, we didn’t have a way to run a pilot test with our drivers on our runs.”
Like any good salesman, though, Stemco had a solution. The company outfitted a trailer with the device at no cost to Sharp Transport and paid for the testing. Cornelius says there was a 3-5% reduction in fuel usage with the device.
Cornelius expects the TrailerTails to pay for themselves within two years. With a 10-year expected lifecycle on its trailers, a significant savings should result.
Two versions of the TrailerTail are available, but Sharp chose the manual deployment model. An automatic version extends the device when the vehicle hits a preset speed and retracts it when it slows below that speed. Cornelius says drivers must get out of the cab to open the rear doors anyway, so having them open and close the lightweight (requiring “just one finger to make it close”) device when doing so was not considered an impediment.
Sharp is not retrofitting existing trailers, Cornelius says, because of the number of ongoing initiatives the fleet has. “There are a lot of ROIs (on previously installed devices) we are waiting on, and we can’t keep adding to that (due to cost), ” he says.
The fleet is very aggressive in its efforts to reduce fuel usage. The company has been spec’ing FlowBelow’s aerodynamic panels on the tandem axles of its new tractors after seeing benefits in testing.
Those new tractors include Freightliner Cascadia Evolution models, which make up about 60% of the fleet. Sharp is also running a 36-month test of International ProStar 6x2 tractor models in its search for savings. Automatic transmissions are now the standard as well.
All this work is paying off, Cornelius notes, with the fleet-wide fuel average climbing from 6.3 mpg to about 7.3 mpg over the past few years and just recently one driver achieved 9 mpg over a month, earning a $500 bonus.
“I think at the end of the day, truck transport can put all the aerodynamic products it wants on the trucks, but it’s still about the driver,” he says, adding that the fleet believes there is a safety component to all this technology as well. “We have more drivers saying they are more rested ... they say they are not working as hard to control the truck [in windy and other inclement conditions].”
Just as important, though, is Sharp’s example that a smaller operator can achieve such grand savings. “You normally see your XPOs (formerly Con-way) or Swifts get that, but to see a small fish in a big pond achieve this hopefully shows other smaller fleets that they too can accomplish [big savings],” Cornelius says.
