Too Dumb to Retire

I love to play with numbers. I’ve heard there are 1.4 million Class 8 trucks on the road. That’s a lot of heavy iron moving around the country. And we burn a lot of diesel fuel, about 100,000,000 gallons a day. (That’s 100 million). Figure the price of fuel and we contribute quite a bit to the economy, let alone state and federal agencies who grab about a third of the take. We hear day in and day out from the politicians, who do nothing to resolve the problem of supplying our needs, that we need to conserve, we need to find more efficient ways to cut back on our demand for oil. OK, I have a suggestion. Shut the engines off if you don’t absolutely need to have them running.

At any time I go into a truck stop, and depending on the temperature, anywhere from 30% to 100% of the trucks are idling. Question. If the temperature outside is above 40 degrees and below 70, why do the engines need to be running? Personally if the temperature is between those parameters I prefer the engine off, I sleep better. If I have to park beside a running reefer, I’ll nose into a parking spot so I don’t have to listen to it.
I understand some people get used to a running engine to sleep, I used to, but now I enjoy the quiet.

As I mentioned, I like to fiddle with numbers. So here goes. Let’s say that any given time 10% of the nations trucks are idling and they will burn about 0.8 gallons per hour at about 800rpm. That will work out to about 112,000 gallons of fuel being used every hour.
Let’s say a driver takes his 10 hours off duty, (which we all do of course) then over that time 1,120,000 gallons of fuel are needlessly burnt. Figure we will run 6 days a week that will work out to enough fuel to power a truck for 3 and a half years. I’d love to have someone pay my fuel bill for that time.

That’s more than a few drops in the bucket and a lot of fuel saved, which this country seems to be in short supply of right now. So here’s the question. Do you absolutely have to idle when you are shut down? It seems to me that Trucking Companies, ATA, OIDA and anyone else would champion to help save fuel.

Enjoy the day

Geezer

Category: General