THE LOCKWOOD REPORT

January 4, 2012 Vol. 8, No. 1

First off, let me wish you all a productive and prosperous new year. A happy one too, of course. Wish I could tell you what sort of year it’s going to be, but Santa failed yet again to deliver a crystal ball to the tree in our front room.

There are those who claim the world will end in 2012, as I’m sure you’ve heard. It’s unlikely to happen, and I’d certainly rather it didn’t. Too much left to write. Too much innovation yet to come.

There’s actually one striking piece of innovation that I might have written about in my last newsletter but didn’t. In that one I looked at 10 products that I’d first seen in 2011, things that I thought could make a difference because they did something especially well. Obviously it was tough to get down to just 10 of them, and frankly there could have been 100 worthy choices.

One reader wrote to ask why I didn’t include a particularly striking trailer out of Quebec. While he had a point, I also had a ready explanation: I’d first seen it in 2010 at the Truck World show in Toronto. But I suppose that’s a bit of a technicality because it wasn’t on the market until last year, formally launched at last fall’s American Trucking Associations conference in Grapevine, Texas. So I’m renaming my ‘Top 10 Picks’ the ‘Top 11 of 2011’. And here’s the extra one, a deserving nominee…

ALUTREC’S ‘CAPACITY’ FLATBED really is a pretty remarkable piece of work, the world’s first aluminum ‘monocoque’ trailer. That means it’s all of a piece — no parallel beams, no crossmembers, no flooring planks. It doesn’t so much have a frame as a ‘hull’. And rather than hanging boxes and racks off the trailer sides, the company incorporated a slide-out drawer compartment at the rear for the straps and wheel chocks and stuff that such boxes usually carry.

Five years in development, it’s said to be 1500 lb lighter then the company’s standard trailer and, at just 6950 lb, Alutrec says it’s 2500 lb less than the average aluminum trailer in its category. An international patent is pending.

With its aerodynamic design, thanks to an uncluttered underbelly, and its low weight, Alutrec says the trailer can save quite a bit of fuel. It says SAE-regimen tests performed by F.P. Innovations on its Quebec test track confirmed fuel savings of between 6 and 9%.