Let’s Work on the Fundamentals

May 22, 2019 Volume 1, Number 5

There was some good thinking in the air at the recent Heavy Duty Trucking Exchange in Scottsdale, AZ. Much of that came from a presentation by Jeff Sass, Hendrickson’s vice president of marketing, who told his audience that as an industry we shouldn’t get distracted by the bells and whistles of the future at the expense of fundamentals that need attention now. For what it’s worth, I couldn’t agree more.

HDTX is an annual event created by Heavy Duty Trucking magazine, an “intimate” forum that brings together carriers, truck-makers, and key suppliers in the class 7 and 8 markets for frank discussions about the issues of the day.

Sass, an industry veteran who moved to Hendrickson last fall after many years at Peterbilt and Kenworth and latterly Navistar, said that trucking will have to get better at logistics and making the trade appeal to young people. Before, that is, concentrating too much time and energy on things like platooning and autonomous trucks.

As reported by my colleague Jim Park, equipment editor on HDT, he pointed out that it’s normal for trucking to give away two hours of a driver’s work shift every time a truck backs into a dock. While many people raise the issue of the frustration that causes in drivers, Sass linked it to the driver shortage in terms of time wasted.

“Shippers allow your trucks to sit at a dock for two hours,” he said. “We talk about driver shortages, we hear numbers like 50,000, 60,000 to 100,000 drivers short. Think about this: we have about 4 million drivers on the road today. Two hours out of 11 hours of driving is 18%. If we have a shortage of 80,000 drivers out of 4 million, that’s 0.2%. Could we solve the entire driver shortage with improved logistics, just by cutting down on dock dwell times and by making existing trucks more productive?”

Connected vehicles can make that happen, and the industry has already proved it with over-the-air diagnostics, automatic parts ordering and service scheduling, he said. If we can keep trucks out of dealerships for extended periods, why, Sass asks, can’t we get our customers to co-operate and reduce dwell times? He noted that we can tell where a truck is on the road to within a few feet, and we can predict pretty accurately when it will arrive at a customer’s door.

“Next-generation drivers are not going to wait two hours at a loading dock,” he said. “They grew up in a world of instantaneous data, instantaneous gratification, and having everything they buy online [delivered] in two days. They aren’t going to wait around, so we have to improve our logistics.”

Connectivity will also improve safety, he said, noting the advances made in driver and vehicle monitoring and the steps the industry has taken so far in trying to curb some risky behaviors. He said safety will improve further when vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications come into their own. But connectivity also has a downside.

“If a Class 8 truck can be hot-wired by a 12-year-old in Nebraska, then it’s a problem,” Sass said. “There has to be some sort of security on board to prevent this from happening. I know the industry is devoting a lot of resources to the issue of telematic and onboard security, but every time we build something more secure, people figure out how to get around it. Build a 10-foot wall; somebody builds an 11-foot ladder. The IT piece of these connected trucks will have to continue evolving.”

Sass is no fan of platooning, citing two key issues.

“I don’t see it in the marketplace. It’s the most mature technology we have and it could be implemented tomorrow, but there are too many reasons not to do it,” he said.

“The first problem is driver safety,” Sass said. “I don’t know if any of you have had the opportunity to be in a platoon, but when you’re driving at 55 mph and you’re 30 feet from the trailer in front of you, it’s unnerving to be doing that, especially because you really don’t have control of the truck. Drivers do not want to be put in that position. That’s reason number 1. Number 2 is the commercial aspect.