How much are new trucks?

How much will it cost for 100000 trucks to idle their trucks overnight at the present cost of diesel?

• Answer:

  Let's assume "overnight" is eight hours. A heavy-duty engine burns one gallon of fuel per hour idling, so each truck will burn 8 gallons per night. For all those trucks, you need 800,000 gallons of fuel to idle all night. If diesel costs $2.35 per gallon(find it free at www.pricediesel.com), it will cost $1.88 million to idle all of them overnight. There are three ways we're cutting this down. The first is Idle Control. It is like a thermostat for a truck cab: when the truck gets too warm or too cold, the idle controller starts the engine and idles it long enough to get the truck comfortable again. Cummins engines use ICON Idle, Cat calls theirs Driver Comfort Control System and Detroit Diesel calls it Optimized Idle. The second is the Auxiliary Power Unit. An APU is a very small diesel engine in a box hanging off one of your frame rails. If you've got one, it runs and your main engine sits. While the elimination of idling is nice, many drivers love the APU's other feature: it provides enough electricity to run your refrigerator, microwave, coffee pot and George Foreman grill. I know more than a few drivers who are running complete gourmet kitchens back there! The third is IdleAire. This isn't part of your truck. If you go to a truck stop you'll often find this huge steel thing in the parking lot with hoses dangling down from it. That's IdleAire. They charge something like $2 per hour to hook up to it, and you buy a $10 adapter to fit in your window. Some trucking companies will pay for it, others won't. If you're on IdleAire, you don't idle your engine at all--an electric heater/air conditioner keeps your truck comfy. I've also seen this in a few of the trucking companies' yards--especially in the drop yards in Laredo, Texas. A driver pulls into the yard, drops his trailer, parks his tractor at the IdleAire stand and sleeps comfortable all night. The next morning, he hooks up to a different trailer and goes back to work. I like IdleAire.