18 Wheeler Gets More Than 12 MPG

Looks like a test bed showcase of what's possible. Co funded by the US DOE.

No detailed info on the batteries or cost (looks like an A123 product were used). I wonder how the MPG figures look if the battery life time cost is taken into account and what the actual MPG value would be.

"The SuperTruck managed 12.2 MPG on a 312 mile road test in Texas with a 65,000 pound load, which doesn't sound great compared to a road car (or even a pickup truck) but it's actually 115% better than the average big rig on the road right now."

Hell most of us pickup drivers would be happy with getting those average fuel mileage numbers with our new diesel pickups that weigh 1/10 as much and have 1/4 the aerodynamic drag as that truck.

Oh yes, the joys of modern efficiency regs and emissions controls...

Yesterday I filled up my 2002 diesel pickup (the low fuel light had been on for about 25 km). Put 93 litres in and then drove for just over 700 km of highway and country roads, and the light still isn't back on. That's about 20 US mpg.

Maybe they need to trade them in for OLDER vehicles, unless they really need the 15 to 35,000 lbs towing capacity (mine is only rated for 9,200 , which it will do fine).

Still doesn't beat a train....which pales in comparison to barge transport...maybe we should build an interstate canal system...cheap transportation and water management system...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation

http://intelligentreasoning.blogspot.com/2008/10/interstate-canal-system.html

Well, we have this choice: build a mile-deep ditch through Denver, or a mile-high aqueduct above New Orleans....

...or we could use a lock system....

http://www.eriecanal.org/locks.html

Maybe that is both of the best worlds? Even so, basically a ditch on one end and an elevated aqueduct on the other.

The resulting falls and rapids to the ocean level would be a thrill ride.

Here's another solution: http://www.thefalkirkwheel.co.uk/

Comparing efficiency across various modes of transport seems to need more than just weight distance per volume of fuel to reveal much.

Speed is important and frequency of stops also has a significant effect.

Perhaps something like (Cargo Mass) * (Distance) * (Avg Velocity)^1.5 * (Avg Stops in an hour)^0.5 / (Fuel Consumption)

Water is scarce in CO already, do we use thousands of gallons just to transport freight when we are limiting water for agricultural irrigation? If you recycle the lock water, that uses more energy to pump it back up. Barges require labor and fuel to load and unload cargo. I notice that canals are no longer viable means of transport. And mules are also scarce.

Those are some tiny mirrors! Just one (I assume on each side) too.

Truckers seem to like a lot of mirror real estate. I'm guessing adoption of tiny mirrors will be a slow process.

Also, what is there to hold onto to climb in? For that matter, I don't see much to step on to climb in, either.

Rear-view CCTV could suppliment the mirrors - apparently a lot of car manufacturers are working on replacing mirrors completely (can't find the reference, but I was reading about it yesterday - maybe IFLS linked to it).

Edit - I was prompted by SolarEagle's comment.

I believe cameras should be able to completely replace side mirrors on many types of vehicles. Noticeable gains in efficiency at highway speed are certain to result.

The manufacturer also have the hurdle of exterior mirrors being required by law in many places.

Truth is not a compromise is following the logical path of criticism.

As a professional driver with over 1 million miles experience, I can easily see a number of faults with this design.

1. First, it is a Freightliner, known unaffectionately in the trade as a " freight shaker " , these trucks are the worst to drive, everything inside the truck shakes and vibrates, from the door panels to the dash board to the bunk area storage bins, even the steering wheel is about the worst ergonomically designed there is.

2. The mirrors are way to small to be practical, truckers need mirrors that allow a full range of vision, top to bottom and side to side.

3. This design will be a nightmare trying to drive through anything more the 6" of snow.

4. Try doing a pre-trip inspection during a - 40 f northern minnesota morning while crawling on your belly on an ice covered drop lot.

5. When a rear or side tire blows ( and it will ) at 70 mph, motorists behind you will pay hell trying to dodge 60 feet of flying plastic debris as well as the tire carcass !

6. When your running I-80 crossing Wyoming with a load of bananas and there's 4" of solid ice on top of the trailer, no amount of solar panels are going to keep anything in the box cold enough for the trip to Jersey City.

A better truck to start off with would be a Peterbuilt axle forward design or a Volvo 780 VN.

An even more logical path of criticism is to listen to those who have real world experience using this type of equipment, like you. Thank you for the perspective,

How do you propose keeping the lens clean on a camera mounted at the rear of a vehicle in dusty and muddy environs? Without a clean lens you have no view.

The ones we had on our trucks required nothing more than a squirt of water every few days. But we were on pavement, and only drove a short amount of time. They were mounted high off the ground, about 8 feet.

The rear and side camera lenses could be kept clean in the same ways exterior mirrors, rear window glass, and headlights (all of which will degrade visibility today if dirty) are kept clean today: manually or with miniature versions of the wipers and sprayers that are used on headlights and rear windows.

.

Just to be clear, the exterior mirror delete is probably much closer for passenger vehicles than commercial trucks.

This is a cool setup on the new BMW...looks both ways

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/2013/driver_assistance/intelligent_vision.html

Cameras in bigger fire equipment are becoming more common. Extra large airport fire trucks have a rear mounted camera to help with backing and general rear views. Most are equipped with a microphone to allow hearing if someone is yelling at them. A common trick is to use the same in cab display for the FLIR, and switch the display when the truck is in reverse. ( An extra switch allows rear view on demand.)

Also seeing more use are side mounted cameras to augment the side mounted rear view mirrors. They have a display above each side door where the eyes can see them when the eyes go for the normal mirrors.

On elevated platform fire trucks that have extensions that are above and in front of the driver, it is common practice to have "intersection" cameras to the bottom of the extension to see the side traffic, same as the BMW, only mounted higher.

The drivers all seem to adjust easily to these cameras, BUT, as far as I have seen purchasers seem reluctant to eliminate the side mirrors yet.

What suggests it is the purchasers who are reluctant to lose the side mirror?

Emergency equipment might not be affected by the same regulations (not sure), but vehicles used on highways here in the US are required by law to have a side mirror.

I realize airport fire trucks probably don't spend much time on the highway, accordingly aerodynamic concerns are not a huge driver in the design process. Are you saying mirrors have been eliminated by cameras, or just supplemented?

In the last FAA advisory circular, I recall that the wording was something to the effect of an option to have side mounted cameras with or without the mirrors. The mirrors were the standard requirement for the truck, but the airport had the option of cameras with or without the mirrors. I understood that it was permitting the mirrors to be deleted if the cameras were specified.

Interesting, thanks. Do you know if it is much trouble to drive those vehicles for short distances on regular highways?....or are they similar to farm equipment in that respect?

.

I can understand why purchasers of fire trucks for airport use would stay with the mirror plus camera option. Mirrors aren't very expensive, the benefits for going without are hard to define for that use and there are some additional risks for going without.

Well either my mind is gone, or there has been a revision to the mirror-camera option. The circular now reads "cameras and monitors designed to be used in place of side mirrors are not an eligible option." This now means that the cameras would have to be paid for by the agency purchasing the fire truck. It is common practice to use federal airport improvement money for these trucks.

As for driving these trucks on public roads. It is a big pain in the butt. The width of these trucks are permitted to be 122 or 124 inched without mirrors. Driving on normal width traffic lanes is like pushing a pencil through a straw without touching the straw. But at traffic speeds. The last truck I was involved with was 120,000+ pounds 10 feet wide, and about 45 feet long. While at the factory for final inspection, the factory test driver took us on an interstate, and got it up to 70 MPH.

If you are interested, the specifications for airport trucks are at faa.gov look for advisory circular 150/5220-10E.

Look for the step under the door recessed into the tanks. Big Boys Don't Need No Steps!

I remember an Onan generator I believe was called the OX or AUX, that was supposed to provide electrical power (AC and DC) and heat to a rig so as to allow shut down of the truck instead of idling. It was a small liquid cooled diesel who's cooling system was tied into the trucks engine. If I remember correctly it fit between the frame rails in its own housing. I guess it didn't pan out as I have not seen one in a long time.

I wonder if this could be improved with some sort of idle-stop set-up?

I would guess that heating or cooling the cab can use a substantial portion of total fuel consumed. The cab often has cooling or heating requirements for many more hours daily than drivers are allowed to actually drive in a day.

Heating the cab has no shortage of solutions.....or maybe living in a hot humid climate has biased my perspective.

Using the excess heat to provide cooling for the cab, as well as chill water for all the rigs cooling needs might provide a much less complicated and lower pressure (than the boiler/turbine generator/condenser used on this test vehicle) option to harvest waste heat. A lithium bromide absorption refrigeration system could be a good fit.

In addition, anytime the engine was not running, a small auxiliary burner could be used in place of waste heat.

The larger problem behind that design was the fact that the onan engines were expensive junk and had really poor service lives which made their purchase and operating costs not the least bit favorable.

The problem with the onan flathead gas engines was nobody would de-coke the heads due to the horizontally opposed design and the compression would climb until something broke. This would piss off the retired tight budgeted RV owners as just another expense like paying for a brake job or tires that cost way more than the Buick.

The onan (now cummins/onan) diesels have long service lives.

If long service life requires the owner to accept rather involved regular maintenance (like de-coking the heads) as if it were changing tires of brake pads....it probably makes more sense to say 'Onan diesels can have long service lives if a schedule of special maintenance is adhered to.'

Most engines could have a long service life adhering right maintenance schedule, but rebuilding a engine ever 100 hours would get old fast.

That's one of the reasons that Onan got a bad rep for their engines. That and the parts are expensive and hard to get.

The two cylinder gas Onan engines were a dismal design failure that earned them a bad reputation for build quality right from the start where many went to bits literally before they ever managed to log in enough run time to ever coke up.

Onan has a well documented legacy of being a poor low service life engine. Their gas one were the worst but their diesel were not so far behind them and when they built items like larger generators that were too big for their own engine line they had a knack for taking a solid well designed model and adding crap to it making it high maintenance and far less reliable.

I have seen many larger Onan gensets with industrial Ford and similar engines where they made stupid design changes like taking the Ford factory electronic ignition system out and replacing them with their own points and condenser systems that look like they were designed for push mower engines. On top of that they seemed to have some bizarre fixation with using low grade cast aluminum for exhaust manifolds which meant that if a genset ran for a extended time at high load the aluminum exhaust manifolds would actual melt and fall off the engines.

I actually have a buddies 70 KW Onan genset behind my shop right now that has the industrial Ford 460 engine and it does in fact have the melted aluminum manifolds plus cheap ass points and condenser type ignition despite the unit's serial number corresponds to a builddate some 20 years after Ford went exclusively to electronic ignition on those engines. WTF kind of step back in time and quality is that about?

What was Cummins thinking?

A lot of generator manufacturers used those engines for Standby duty sets usually on natural gas or propane, and I have seen a lot of them f..ked up using them for continuous duty, especially for motor loads. Kholer had an ROZ series that was intended for fast response standby. The excitation field would collapse on a motor load start and using a soft start would confuse the voltage regulator. IR tried to rent them for construction, it didn't go well.

Any flat head horizontally opposed air cooled twin running on gasoline has cokeing issues, due to the nature of the design (now outdated). They were usually mounted on rollout racks to facilitate service and maintenance which in the case of onan, included a kit with head gaskets and plugs so that the flat heads, which were easily accessible, could be cleaned. My point is the new RV owner is usually surprised to learn the expense of maintaining what amounts to a truck chassis.

The list of possible reasons that might explain a high frequency of problems with a brand of motors is endless:

outmoded design;

a design that creates difficulty in performing vital maintenance;

marketing an engine that requires maintenance to which the prospective group of owners will often fail to adhere, due to its onerous and usual nature;

poor collaboration with manufacturers of other components meant to operate in conjunction;

low quality construction;

inadequate communication up front of what would be required to maintain operation;

on, and on, and on.

.

My point is, providing an explanation of why something commonly didn't experience a long service life and then following that, stating it does have a long service life, should spark at least a little cognitive dissonance.

.

If one owner has a problem with an engine, it might indeed not be the fault of the manufacturer. If an atypically large percentage of owners have problems with an engine, then with rare exception, the manufacturer bears a good portion of the responsibility.

To be clear, I specified the diesel as having long service life.

Their diesels were better than their gas engines but still they were not the best by any mean nor were or are they cheap and easy to work on.

The best onan gen sets out there use non onan generator heads and non onan engines but too often they are still plagued with small but critical faults on parts of their design where onan cheapened up a factory part with one of their own like my buddies 70 KW gen set that has the crappy onan points and condensor systems rather than the stock Ford electronics which BTW as I found out getting the original onan parts to rebuild points ans condensor costs almost as much as getting the parts to put the Ford electronics in. If you factor in going to a auto salvage yard and pulling used parts the switch to electronic would be cheaper.

As their diesel units go I have seen that for whatever reason they insisted on using the the most expensive and hardest to find fuel and oil filter systems they could come up with.

BTW here's how onan scored major negative points with Hydra-Mac and International Harvester with their bad engines some years ago.

Hydra-Mac and IH sue Onan for known bad engine designs.

I'm not saying all onan gen sets are junk being many are only onan in badge and color but I do know form personal experience that anyone who has had one never had much good to say about them and most of it came from cheap/poor engineering and over priced parts.

What brand(s) would you recommend?

depends on what size you are needing.

Around here in the commercial applications where constant load and long running is standard like in light plants or low power remote site power applications where it's necessary to run for days to weeks at a time with no servicing I see Kubota and Deutz being the most common.

Larger stuff in similar working environments I pay attention to seems to be primarily Cummins, Cat or Perkins.

Onan only seems to be popular with the RV and light use crowds who apparently have lots of money to waist.

I am pretty much in agreement, except for the Deutz, unless you can stand the noise.

I brought up onan to talk about the aux power plant because I thought the concept was good. I had the turn-key start up on an onan standby at a laser eye surgery center. The Indian engine went into overheat after about 10 minutes, the thermostat was installed upside-down.