NACFE’s Goal Is To Help the Trucking Industry

From Executive Director Mike Roeth

NACFE’s goal is to help the trucking industry develop and adopt efficiency enhancing, environmentally beneficial, and cost-effective technologies, services, and operational practices. We do this in a number of different ways.

From its inception, NACFE has published what we call Confidence Reports, which provide an unbiased look at technologies that are currently available to help fleets operate more efficiently. The reports focus on both the benefits and challenges of a given technology and nearly every report has a Confidence Matrix that indicates how confident we are that the technology will be beneficial to a fleet. Of course, we know that all fleets are different and we encourage fleets to review our reports through the lens of their own operational needs and policies.

As the industry started to see the emergence of alternative fueled vehicles as a replacement to diesel, we started writing Guidance Reports. These reports focus on emerging technologies but are completed using the same rigor we use for our Confidence Reports. That again means talking to the companies developing the technologies but also talking to fleets so that we can get real-world information on the benefits and challenges fleet managers face when deploying these technologies into their operation.

One of the things we have learned from our Guidance Reports is that when it comes to alternative fuels there is no one solution that is right for every fleet. Duty cycle, geography, terrain and other factors have to be considered when looking to switch from diesel to natural gas, battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

We also show up at industry events, not only to participate in seminars and panel discussions, but also to interact with OEMs, suppliers, fleets and others that are connected to the trucking industry. We look at trade shows, conventions, and seminars as an opportunity to continue to learn and gather real-world information.

And, of course, there are the Run on Less biennial demonstrations showcasing advancements in freight efficiency. These three-week long events feature fleets hauling their regular freight over their regular routes. The fleets allow us to access data from those vehicles for the three weeks of the Run that we then analyze and share with the industry to move the freight efficiency needle.

Most of our work is completed by trucking industry and clean energy experts who are committed to helping the trucking industry be as freight efficient and clean as possible.

All our reports are free to download. And if you have not looked at them, I encourage you to do so. We just published the third of five reports on Run on Less – Messy Middle and over the course of the next 18 months we will be updating many of our existing Confidence Reports.

If one of our team members contacts you to get your input for one of our reports, we hope you’ll take a few moments to share your experience. We can’t do our work without you, and we thank all of you who, through the years, have shared your insights and data with us for the good of the whole trucking industry.