TeamsterGrrrl

The ones I've seen had a separate dolly leg, gearbox, and crank on each side as the truck's frame got in the way of the usual cross shaft. Didn't see any stability problems with them, but I only ran that stretch of I-80 for a few months back in '78.

Dumb we americans may be, but lazy we ain't! Heck, lots of us are "working' fools", damn near giving away our labor and assets instead of demanding the fair pay and value we deserve. KS has the benefit of seeing trucking from a worldwide viewpoint instead of with the "blinders' on like many americans do. Look at trucking from a worldwide view, and it's pretty obvious we're the oddball 5% that buys light "trucks" with a cab bigger than the cargo area, high ground clearance, and four wheel drive to handle the occasional pothole at the shopping mall. This stupidity percolates all the way up to what we think is a big rig, an overpriced 600 horse too long conventional with more blind spots than visibility and a sleeper that darn near rates it's own zip code just to haul 10 ton loads in a country where only 36 tons is allowed nationwide. We make a virtue of wasting fuel, bragging that our 600 horse truck with it boxy hood and cab and parts sticking out everywhere gets only 5 MPG, when it should get 7 or better. Is it any wonder that BNSF railroad hauls 20% of all the freight in America, UP almost as much, and neither even serves the eastern third of the country? And how does UPS manage to pay Teamster Union wages and benefits, yet turns a profit while the guy showing off that 600 horsepower truck is dining off the 99 cent menu at McDonalds and racing to stay ahead of the repo man? Just saw a FB post from Sluyter Logistics, the company my relatives started in the Netherlands, advertising for drivers. Full time job, local work, hourly pay, late model trucks, and of course health insurance... If I was young and unemployed I'd be putting in my application!

Agreed, hopefully Ford won't "package" the diesel Ranger like Chevy has done with the diesel Colorado. I was working for a Mercury dealer when the Capri came out... Great car, liked it better than the Cougar!

I've been wondering if the false rumors of Ford shutting Michigan Assembly down will force Ford to formally announce the Ranger and Bronco products for that plant before the election. My guess is that Ford plans to make that announcement at the NAIAS after the first of the year to begin the usual couple years build up before production starts, but Ford may have to make their PR moves sooner.

Agreed- Our trucks are inefficient. And if you really need a pickup, we make some of the best, once you spec the truck up to 3/4 or 1 ton and take the pickup bed off and substitute a flatbed with toolboxes and removable or fold down sides. Harley has made decent engines like the V-Rod and the new 500/750, but hobbles them with dysfunctional chassis. Harley even built a decent bike once, it was called a Buell, and they killed it off. In vans, it took the Sprinter to show us how it's done, so after a half century of hiding their best in Europe, Ford finally brought the Transit home to America.

Well, they are beating us in a lot of those areas. Except for the military, they leave that and it's funding to us...

Why is the American market the "odd man out" in almost every vehicle class? Rest Of the World (ROW) has gone for heavier and longer trucks, B train couplings, cabovers, etc.. ROW buys little front wheel drive cars that carry 4-5 people and get 30 MPG or better, we buy huge pickups to do the same job but get half the MPGs. Same with motorcycles... HOG(NYSE) has biggest market share in America, worldwide they're a bit player. We still use obsolete AM HF CB, ROW has gone FM VHF and UHF. Same with measuring systems, "english" dimension stuff is becoming crap because it's oddball and nobody else uses it anymore. And have you ever wondered why full sized pickups, the best selling vehicles in America, aren't even sold in most of the ROW? It's because Europeans and Asians won't buy them! If they need a work truck, they get a van and enjoy lockable storage and better manueverability. If you live with the blinders on, America looks like the best place in the world. But once you've seen road racing and WRC, racing around an oval with only left turns is kinda boring. And once you've driven a hot hatch like a GTI that is faster than most 60s "supercars" while able to haul as much or more than many SUVs and use half the gas doing it, SUVs and big pickups seem sorta wasted. Sorry if you have to live with the blinders on, but I prefer to enjoy the world's best!

The Postal Service let themselves get scammed in a similar manner. They supplied their trucking contractors fuel, via the "Voyager" federal credit cards. A lot of these Postal contractors have other diesel trucks on non postal work as well as diesel pickups, off road equipment, etc.. Suffice to say, some of those trucks contracted to the Postal Service got extremely poor mileage!

The american trucking industry is best defined by a simple term= "cheap". Last I checked a curtainsider costs $20k or so more than a van trailer, so they do the cheap thing and ignore the productivity benefits of a curtainsider for multi drop distribution work.

The last Jeep mail van was retired and crushed years ago. The Jeeps were replaced by the Long Life Vehicle (LLV), which is probably what you saw. The newest LLVs are 19 years old and the oldest around 29 years old, and they were ONLY designed for a 25 year life. The LLVs have held up well, especially the aluminum bodies. But in the rust belt states the frames are rusting out, and it's not worth the cost of replacing a frame. So USPS has RFPs out for a replacement for the LLVs but that's a couple years out yet. In the meantime they've got mail to move, so they're buying some vans to fill the gap until the LLV replacement comes. This is nothing new, USPS bought some GM and FCA minivans a few years ago too.

It'll be fast enough, but not as fast as the C12s... But it will last a lot longer!

You'd be switching the next gear down from direct to an overdrive, so you'd end up with a huge gap between two gears down from direct and direct.

While Volvo's effort sounds impressive, consider for a moment that Scania's last generation cabover was getting 10 MPG at 40 metric tons weight, 10% heavier than this Volvo is even designed for. Scania's cabover, even with sleeper, is about 10 feet shorter, so in the same overall length Scania's now superseded truck can carry around 20% more freight than this Volvo experimental truck while getting similar MPG. Wonder how many decades it will take for Volvo to catch up?

Here in beet country they're putting in side lift hoists at the "piling stations", they use a flatbed trailer with hinged sides and drop the side that they're unloading off of. In central Florida I know of at least one orange juice processing plant that uses a spotting tractor with a high lift 5th wheel to dump trailer loads of oranges out the rear of a flatbed with sides.

Problem is, they're wasting their time on an undersized 80k pound truck with only a 53 foot trailer. To get real ton/mile efficiency, they need to allow the biggest and heaviest combination that the roads can accommodate.

Perhaps running on "contractor plates" in the northeast, and thus exempt from axle weight limits?

This is why my blog has been advocating for keeping the Ford GT in production and reducing it's price by mass production... It'd be damn embarrassing to have your $400k supercar matched by a less than $100k mid engined "Vette!

Those rows of generic switches we got used to seeing in flat panels were that way because big trucks were low volume products, same with the boxy cabs. And being low volume products, they couldn't afford the tooling to have switches and dashboards custom made, so they had to use off the shelf junk for switches, dashboards, and cabs. Scania has invested a couple billion dollars in making these trucks right, and Scania is going to easily make over a million of them to pay off that investment. Don't complain, enjoy...

If you look at Consumer Report's owner's reliability survey, the Ford 1/2 tons and Super Duties both rate a bit above average. Chevy's 1/2 ton rates below average, and their 3/4 and 1 tons are about average. This leads me to suspect that a lot of Chevy's problem is their wimpy 1/2 tons getting overloaded, as their standard GVW is so low that a bunch of typical older Americans in the crew cab and a few coolers full of beer in the bed will overload it before they even hook on the big boat and trailer. Ram is pretty much hopeless, the surveys seem to show that the joke about the Cummins powered Ram pickups being a "million mile engine wrapped in a hundred thousand mile truck" are true!

Wouldn't fit with the "one Ford" strategy. Ford is dropping out of partnerships and joint ventures, and has cut back to just two brands, Ford and Lincoln.

Very impressive! Next time Scania is looking for an out of the way test site, consider South Dakota, where 75 to 85 metric ton GCWs are an everyday event and 100 tons is possible with a 5 axle tractor and 20 axle 21 meter long B-Triple trailers. Would make a great test for an 8x8 Scania tractor, and I promise I won't blog about it and spill the beans 'til the story is un-embargoed.

IIRC, back in the early 80s Ford had a 30% stake in Cummins for awhile, and there were test Econolines running around with Cummins B series engines. Perhaps Navistar offered their V8 diesel for a lower price than Cummins to lure Ford away?

Actually, that's one of the biggest issues for VW... How do they fit all these corporate cultures into the VW culture? I like VW, but they're a mass marketer, and I'd hate to see the qualities of Scania and Ducati watered down to VW's mass market lowest common denominator. That said, I'd like to see VW teach Ducati how to build a reliable bike that doesn't make a valve adjustment an all weekend job, and International's cab isn't exactly inspiring...

Bankruptcy is unpredictable... Of the 30 odd Hostess bakeries still operating when the bankruptcy began, only 8 have been reopened. Most of the rest have been stripped and will never be bakeries again. In the case of Navistar, I suspect the major asset is dealer and customer goodwill, which would disappear as soon as the supply of new trucks disappeared and dealers and customers switched brands. Navistar's own engines are getting obsolete, and anyone buying the MAN design engine tooling would have to pay VW to use those designs. Springfield assembly plant is old too and probably wouldn't ever build trucks again. If you can pull off a pre-pak bankruptcy like GM and Chrysler did, it generally ends halfway well. But throwing a corporation to the wolves via liquidation is usually a disaster.

Most of us americans are of european descent... I'm proud to be dutch, and a smattering of german and norwegian too. So letting our european relations buy up a bit more of Navistar and save it from bankruptcy is no big deal.