Current Technology

Existing Technology Enhances Freight Efficiency

NACFE has identified 86 technologies and practices that fleets can use to help them improve their freight efficiency.

NACFE has published Confidence Reports on existing technologies and practices in eight categories: chassis, idle reduction, operations practices, powertrain, tires and rolling resistance, tractor aerodynamics, trailer aerodynamics and trailer general. 

Confidence Reports provide insight into each technology’s primary benefits and consequences, and in most cases, organize the findings into a suggested payback calculation, delivered along with a transparent payback calculator tool, for fleets to plug in their own specific metrics for improved decision making.

Confidence Reports include decision-making tools such as a Confidence Matrices and in some cases Payback Calculators.

Practices

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Fleet Adoption

Every year fleets in this study make decisions on their new truck and trailer purchases that affect freight efficiency. In some cases, they started buying new technologies, stopped buying some, continued to buy others, or increased or decreased the percent of trucks and trailers with fuel economy devices.

Over the course of the study, five fleets have had adoption rates of more than 50%, as defined in this report, while 11 have been between 40% and 50%. It is important to note that no fleet could adopt all technologies on a single tractor-trailer combination, as some are “competing” solutions for a single function. The maximum adoption by a fleet would be around 65%, depending on the set of technology combinations.

The fleets in this year’s study range from having about 22% to 59% of the available technologies in use on their tractors and trailers.

Adoption Curves

Adoption Calculations Methodology

The percent adoption of a technology is a measure of the rate at which fleets purchased a given technology or implemented a given practice in any year. These technology adoption curves, commonly called S-Curves, given their shape, are used to describe how a new product is purchased over time.

Fleet DECISION AdoptionTechnology UNIT Adoption
Counts each piece of equipment with the technology equallyCounts each piece of equipment with the technology equally
Counts each fleet’s decision equallyCounts each piece of equipment with the technology equally
Counts each fleet’s decision equallyCounts each piece of equipment with the technology equally
Table 1: Comparison of Adoption Methodologies

Armed with this powerful data, much can be learned about the past and inferred to help forecast the future uptake of these features. The opportunity is enormous as there are about 1.7 million tractors operating in the U.S. consuming approximately 26 billion gallons of diesel fuel. Every 1% reduction in fuel use, saves 260 million gallons of fuel or about $0.85 billion per year.


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Participating Fleets