SOLD FOR $16,500 ON 2/21/22

Now I have a similar R65LS hibernating right next to me, bought new back in 1984. Heads have never been off and compression is still good, transmission’s never been apart, but the odometer quit at 69k miles so I installed a cheap hour meter and ran up over 1000 hours before it died. So I’ve ridden at least 100K miles with pretty much nothing but oil, filter, spark plug, and tire changes. I figure my LS is worth about $2000…

Granted, it’s covered about 100k miles more than the auctioned garage queens 7k or so, and it can’t claim $10k in repair and restoration bills because mine simply hasn’t broken and restoring a $2k bike isn’t a money making proposition, and I gotta wear it out first anyway. And while some of the work on the auctioned bike like new tires, brake pads, etc. makes sense, a lot of it my bike and the auction queen probably too never needed- The near thousand dollars worth of high power alternator and ignition upgrades is nice, but other than a couple jumps and bump starts my R65LS’ original components are doing the job just fine. Then there’s the kit with the big bore pistons and cylinders to push the displacement from 650 to 860 cc., a dubious improvement given the LS’ smallish intake and exhaust tracks, and the “peashooter” exhaust isn’t helping any. Don’t even let me get started on the color- The LS came in a mesmerizing henna red and a superb silver, too bad they trashed it with a sick yellow they probably got on sale. Here’s the link for more of the modder’s bragging: https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1982-bmw-r65ls-custom/

But what really torques me is what these inflated auction prices are doing to the affordability of BMW “Airhead” motorcycles- For a “poverty rider” the airheads are one of the most economical motorcycles and vehicles to run. For the last couple decades a good running airhead could be had for $2k to $5k and that modest price got you a durable engine and drivetrain with a vast ecosystem of parts and advice. The smallest airheads, the R65 and R65LS, were often the best value with their small engines holding prices down while under stressing the drivetrain. I bought one of the LS’ big brothers, an R80ST with 67k miles, for $2200 and it’s given me a reliable 44k more miles since.

But when the airhead price of admission rises over $10,000, loving riders are replaced with investors whose only riding might be a slow 1st gear trundle to position the poor bike for the concours. Airheads were made to ride, and the highest and best use of an airhead is happily rolling out the miles and years!

‘Twas a hopeful end to the motorcycle rally season up north here, even managed to snag the essential 3rd COVID-19 shot in September to keep my ol’ immunity up. Came just in time to see me through the Delta wave, an in person Farmers Union convention, and the holidays with my fully vaccinated family. Then thanks to vaccine supply to the 3rd world being a low priority per usual, roaring out of RSA comes the Omicron mutant.

Being a data driven Gearhead I noted that Omicron might not hit hard but it sure as hell was fast, sorta like a classic Mini Cooper S on a tight autocross course compared to the Road Train the previous strains were. Back a month ago there was also the question of just how damaging an Omicron infection could be- There was some hopeful data from RSA but it might not be applicable to America’s older population. Then there was the rate of spread- A mild case that you could survive with medication and maybe hospitalization becomes fatal when they’re out of medication and the hospitals are overflowing, and in many areas that’s exactly what happened.

Watched the case numbers rise, made a last Costco run and isolated for four weeks… Of pleasure! No schedule, no dress code, and watching racing (Daytona 24 hour) all night if I want too.

That was the days when the weather was too bad for driving, and given that with global warming winter is now a month rather than a season here in Minnesota, I got out a lot…

It gets better… Early in my solitude I noted that 100 miles southwest was bare ground, which got closer as that bare ground sucked up the sunlight and new snow failed to appear. Heck, by now that bare ground has grown to big chunks of several states and extended to my front yard, as I write darkness has fallen and it’s 42 degrees and raining!

Thus half the afternoons I hop in the Golf 7 TDI, drive a few miles southwestish, and enjoy a vigorous walk and workout in our empty parks-

Days with no races and not so nice weather I’ve been fixing up the bikes, rearranging the shop, etc..

But most valuable were the lessons I learned… First off I discovered that what goes on in the rest of the world doesn’t affect me that much, thanks to living on a dead end street in a house that disappears into a hill with 2 cars, 40 gallons of diesel, 3 heat sources, and stuffed cupboards and freezers thanks to the gateway drug of preppers, Costco. Next I learned resourcefulness, from fixing minor breakdowns to learning new combinations of leftovers to break the boredom and that salad dressing makes even better tuna salad sandwiches that the usual mayonnaise. Then one night after drinking too much coffee too late in the evening and getting up to pee too quick in a cold bathroom my heart wouldn’t slow down. Google is again your friend, I already knew what tachycardia is, but the Mayo Clinic taught me how to get it under control and calmed my fears without need for a late night 200 mile drive to Rochester. Put on my forgotten Apple Watch and found that even my low end Apple Watch and iPhone could give me volumes of reassuring heart and health data. So got back to sleep, cut back on the caffeine, and with the data from Apple and the internet eased back into aerobic workouts with no problem… Technology is wonderful!

That health scare reminded me that I’ve got a lot to do before leaving this world and I’d best get to work. I’ve probably wasted too much time in politics in an area whose major function for democrats is as a republican vote sink. I’m carrying far too much history in my head that needs to get out, stayed home when I need to get out, and I need to leave behind a good legacy when I’m gone. So I’ve got plenty of living yet to do!

Omicron wave is ebbing so safe to get out again, despite my new van being stuck on the dock in Spain…

But spring’s coming early (again) and the motorcycle rally season ain’t far off!

The mainstream media is full of stories of overrun parks and campgrounds in this era of COVID. But last fall we had our county Farmers Union meeting at a quiet county park I’d been by dozens of times but never explored and I was amazed at how lovely and underused it was. Was exploring another county park on Saturday of Labor Day weekend and same deal- walked a couple miles of trails and saw only a couple fellow hikers, and campgrounds weren’t full. And that was in Lyon County, Minnesota with but two county parks ’cause the farmers didn’t want to waste even an acre of steep hills or swampland on mere recreation. Time to explore the next county over, where planted acreage takes a back seat to parks…

Lincoln County, Minnesota is a magical place with barely five thousand people thinly spread over 15 townships and a half dozen cities, incorporated or otherwise. Seems like the settlers of the county and their descendants had a thing for parks and just couldn’t stop making them, as well as a folk school, opera house, and stuff like two story four room schoolhouses for just a couple rural sections. These folks believed in investing in their communities- Heck, when the WPA went on it’s building binge they probably figured it was just the rest of the country catching up to them! Having all that civic activism take place on a glacial ridge dotted with lakes in this magical county and it’s parks are a secret too good to keep!

First stop, Anderson Park and Arco::

On to the Polish enclave of Ivanhoe(?)…

Even Marble Township got into the park building act…

Then there’s Hendricks, a town so obsessed with parks that they gave up the whole west side of town by the lake for a park… They gave up millions in tax base, and it was worth every cent!

On to Picnic Point County Park , half full campground behind the trees…

Then Norwegian Creek County Park on Lake Benton, huge campground had a few empty spaces…

Just down the road, Hole in the Mountain County Park…

Lake Benton City Park and lovely boat launch…

The old Lake Benton boat launch…

This was Labor Day weekend… We’ve at least another month of good weather left and the parks will be pretty much ours ’til the snow flies. So get out and explore!

COVID sucks! But one of the few benefits of this killer virus is increased and improved TV motorsports coverage. With the usual TV sports shutdown last year, suddenly a lot more auto and motorcycle racing popped up on free TV, which made the isolation a lot more bearable. To top that off, in car video have gotten cheap enough that it’s almost mandatory in pro motorsports- Ford’s in car cameras in four cars at LeMans last year was so good I didn’t bother buying paid coverage.

Comes 2021 and COVID has refused to leave as planned and looks like Ford is forgeting LeMans for another half century. GM is doing their best to fill the gap in American effort with their Corvette Racing team in IMSA and the LeMans GT Pro class. IMSA’s streaming video package for their series was a bargain so I binge watched the 24 hours of Daytona and 12 hours of Sebring. Nascar and the Indy Car series aren’t as exciting ‘cept for their rare visits to road courses, but they’ve mostly been free so I don’t complain much.

So comes August 2021 and a delayed LeMans 24 hour race, but with Ford shrinking from world class racing and otherwise, I had to pay up for Motor Trend on Demand’s excellent coverage. The feed comes from the Eurosport network, and the quality was excellent- informative and unsensational commentary with more high quality video than you can imagine. from multiple cameras around the course, drones, roving reporters, and even a Goodyear blimp! I confess to falling asleep for a couple hours…

The balance of power has indeed shifted, as Toyota dominated the Prototype Pro class with a Renault backed Alpine entry laps behind. Following them was a 2nd “spec racer” class of over a dozen “amateur” prototypes that backed by million dollar budgets put on a spirited race. In GT Pro Corvette Racing did their best, placing their top car 2nd and their other car a few laps back due to a 70 minute clutch replacement. A Ferrari took 1st and a Porsche 3rd, not surprising with the fleets of race cars Ferrari and Porsche brought to Corvette Racing’s two. There’s an undercard “Pro-Am” GT class too, and thanks to Aston-Martin’s, Ferrari’s, and Porsche’s upfront and backdoor sponsorship they dominated. Despite several manufacturers being unrepresented the racing was competitive and entertaining in every class, with several cars on the same lap after 24 hours of racing.

Re-addicted to racing and with a national championship Rally but 200 miles away, I was planning on watching the action live. Life intervened the first day of the rally as I had to play utility locator for my town’s water system, but I caught a few streaming videos from the rally between planting blue flags all over town. Tried to make it in person the second day, but crappy weather intervened so I followed the action on the screen again. Wasn’t the cost no object coverage provided for LeMans, but not bad for a low budget operation fighting for bandwidth in rural northern Minnesota. Results have been sketchy, but Travis Pastrana managed to beat Ken Block in the event and win the American Rally Champions, both of course in Subarus. The Suburu parade was interrupted by 3rd place Ryan Booth in a Skoda Fabia 5R (think mucho modded Golf R). Thanks to Suburu’s generous sponsorships and contingency money fully half the 60 driver field were in Suburus, that company knows what they’re doing. Ford’s vestigial Ford Performance division didn’t get the memo that cars are dead and still offers contingency money, so almost a quarter of the field was in Fiestas, the odd Focus, and even a couple of surprisingly competitive classic rear drive Escorts. Thanks to an LS repowered RX7, a ratty but competent 80s S10 pickup, a Hyundai, and a few other freaks of rallydom we had relief from the Suburu parade.

Hate missing a couple nice days in front of the screen, but a whole winter of racing is coming…

The Military Vehicle Preservation Association is convoying 40 odd old military vehicles from Aberdeen, South Dakota to their convention in Ohio, and I had the good fortune to catch them on the old Yellowstone Trail. Enjoy…

And to all our veterans and their historic vehicles, thank you again for your service!

In the 80s it was the talk of the biz courses at my “bleeding edge” university- “Just In Time (JIT)”, “lean management”, or simply “Kanban”- Components moving from factory to factory with no delays and no need for inventory and warehouse space. Then after class I went to work and spent the night fighting breakdowns, weather, and every other imaginable industrial gremlin just to move bread a couple hundred miles to store shelves by the morning. But we had a couple industrial aces up our sleeve- A crew of crack maintenance techs with their own machine shop and materials stash in the basement of the bakery, another “backup” bakery less than a hundred miles away, and extra trucks and drivers ready to go. In the name of “lean management” all the above backups were deemed unneccessary expenses and eliminated, resulting in that bakery company being eliminated by bankruptcy.

They didn’t realize it, but it was the American auto industry and especially Ford that invented JIT with a mega factory complex called “The Rouge” that took in iron, coal, rubber, sand, etc. and turned them into new Fords- When the assembly line is right next to the foundry which is right next to the steel mill, etc. blizzards and international disputes don’t slow production down. And just as the Japanese adopted the wisdom of American Professer Deming who we’d ignored, Toyota, VW, and others rebuilt their industry with giant factory complexes like Ford’s Rouge. Throw in Japan’s topography where almost every industrial area is a seaport and JIT worked like a charm for Toyota et al.

So by the 80s the Japanese were having Detroit’s lunch so the big 3 figured they’d better copy the Japanese, without bothering to consult a map to see how much more vast their supply chains were compared to their Japanese competitors. About the same time Wall Street’s “masters of the universe” decided that the vertical integration that gave the big 3 automakers a predictable and controlled supply chain was a waste of capital. Ever eager to please dim bulb investors and puff up their stock options, Detroit and America’s executives dismantled their great corporations with essential suppliers sold off to the highest bidders.

It gets worse… Remember NASA’s amazing mission control? Ford built it, built TVs too. GM developed the high power semiconductor technology for their Electromotive Division locomotives that made hybrid and electric cars possible, then sold off the whole division. So when cars needed computer chips to pass emissions the automakers didn’t invest in making said chips, and as cars evolved into smart phones on wheels they still haven’t invested. Then two of the big three lost even more of their captive supply chain in bankruptcy and Ford got smugger. Meanwhile, Toyota’s supply chain was all across America and the world, and after a couple natural disasters broke that supply chain Toyota deciding that keeping stashes of components around wasn’t such a bad idea.

So the world’s automakers are happily cranking out vehicles by the millions despite stressed supply chains… Then a pandemic comes along and shuts down the factories for a couple months, followed by double digit changes in consumer preferences and outright panic buying. Consumer electronics demand becomes so inflated by a suddenly stay at home populace that intermodal rail becomes more expensive than trucking last peak season and canned goods disappear from Costco shelves to prepper’s pantries. Meanwhile manufacturers of every thing in the potential “internet of things” from a toaster on up gets chips so it can be called home… It takes years to build a chip factory, and automakers were competing for chip making capacity with consumer electronics and even lowly appliance makers. With the pandemic hopefully over (get vaxxed if you haven’t), Ford has over 100,000 orders each for the Bronco, electric F150, and upcoming Maverick pickup. A year after it’s announcement Broncos are finally crawling off the assembly line and Ford has lost half their production capacity for conventional vehicles, never mind chip rich electric vehicles. GM having lost most of it’s semiconductor capacity isn’t doing much better, and both GM and Ford have promised around $25-30 billion each investment in electric cars, assuming they survive long enough to build them.

And Toyota, the trend setter that abandoned JIT and went back to old skool “keep stock on hand”? Headed for another year as the world’s biggest volume car maker!

The quest for more payload and with it low operating costs is eternal- No doubt a few millennia ago someone built a really big canoe or row boat that required a double digit sized number of paddlers, only to fail to deliver or worse when most of the paddlers were disabled by drunkenness or worse. Then came the railroads…

Union Pacific is a brute force kinda railroad- When their tracks across Great Salt Lake were sinking a couple decades ago, they just dumped two trainloads a day of ballast there until the tracks quit sinking. So no surprise that UP has been the major offender in pushing the practical limits of how big a locomotive is “too big”. While the “Big Boys” hauled plenty of freight for UP, they were so heavy that most other railroads tracks couldn’t handle them. Then along come the “little” diesel locomotives and you just couple 2 or 3 together, hook up the control cables, and you’ve got as much or more power than a “Big Boy” with a lot less expensive drama. UP’s megalomaniacs weren’t about to settle for that, so they tried 8000+ horsepower gas turbines later fueled with coal, the “Centennial” with two Diesel engines in one locomotive, and finally EMD’s ill fated 6000 horsepower SD90MACs in the 90s. All of the above since the “Big Boy” were failures, even the SD90MAC had no advantage over the “normal” 4400 horsepower locomotives because it had the same six axles to put power to rail and a newbie lemon of an engine to boot. UP is still pushing the limits, trying to run 3 mile long trains on tracks where the longest siding is 2 miles long. Worse yet, many of the other railroads are following UP’s lead.

Of course, some of the truckers too are feeling out just where the point of diminishing returns is… That’s an efficient rig for hauling from pit to plant, but good luck making a U-turn on even a wide road or getting through a muddy site with barely 20% of the weight on the drive wheels…

But ships don’t have to fit into standard 12 foot wide lanes or keep their back trailers back wheels out of the grass on freeway interchange loops. Despite UP’s challenges, the practical length of a train is limited by siding length and it’s weight by the strength of the couplers to around 7500 feet and 20,000 tons. Here in Minnesota barge tows on the Mississippi and “Lakers” on the Saint Lawrence Seaway are limited by the size of the locks they have to fit through, but none the less a barge tow can swallow a couple unit trains of grain and a “Laker” four or more, for some pretty impressive productivity. But the big container shipping lines weren’t satisfied…

Let me put the scale of this ship in perspective- It can carry over 20,000 TEUs, which is shorthand for “Twenty foot Equivalent Unit”, though the 40 foot long containers are now more common, and it can carry 10,000+ of them. Being a quarter mile long more than one granary crane can load/unload it at a time, but that’s still 10,000 lifts and 10,000 moves to be made, and then the same number again to reload. Probably the busiest railroad intermodal traffic lane is Southern California ports to Chicagoland, and about 25 intermodal trains travel that route every day carrying about 200 40 foot containers apiece… And it would take two days for those 25 trains to haul this ships load away! It gets worse- about half the containers coming into the SoCal ports get trucked out, that’s 5000 trailers and chassis to get hooked up, pre-tripped, and out the port’s gates, and the same number of containers and chassis returning a few days later.

A new ship like this costs about $100 million, but that’s only about $10,000 for each 40 foot container hauled, an intermodal unit train and locomotives cost around 10 times as much and a truck 15 times as much per container capacity… So there’s nothing holding back the growing size of these ships, and thus not a whole lot of motivation for the shipping companies to draw a line at “too big” and buy nothing bigger. For the ports and canals that have to deal with these floating behemoths, the costs are much larger- Multi-million dollar gantry cranes have to be replaced with even bigger and more expensive new gantry cranes, harbors have to be dredged, and in New York harbor the taxpayers paid over a billion dollars to raise a bridge so these behemoths could fit. The Panama Canal just spent $5 billion to put in a new set of bigger locks, and this behemoth of a ship is too big to fit… But the Canal is being pressured to spend $17 billion plus cost overruns for a new even bigger set of locks, which will be obsoleted the day they open by even bigger ships. And The Suez Canal, where the above behemoth’s twin is now stuck and plugging up much of the world’s commerce? They just spent $9 billion to widen their canal, and it still wasn’t wide enough!

I think the container shipping industry has found what “too big” is, now the world’s governments need to unite and firmly tell them their behemoth ships can’t grow any bigger.

I’d forgotten just how long a truck show takes to “digest”, even a virtual one. The American grand daddy of truck shows is held in Louisville every march and it’s literally millions of square feet of trucks and anything related. I’d make it if work allowed, which tended to be about once a decade. Back in the 90s I made the pilgrimage and was driving home, got sleepy around 9 or so in northwest Indiana, only to find they’d had an ice storm and the power line workers had filled all the motels. So next rest area I opened up hotel VW, folded down the Golf’s back seat, and unfurled the air mattress and sleeping bag that is standard winter carry for Minnesotans. Nothin’ else to do as Hotel VW has no cable, so started reading through the usual pile of brochures I’d collected in these pre-HTML days. Didn’t get to sleep ’til midnight and barely made a dent in that pile of brochures. As I’m now finding out, even a “bite sized” show like Work Truck in virtual form takes a while to digest, so here’s the rest of my take on the rest of Work Truck Show 2021:

Ford got a little more specific, the F600 belatedly gets a diesel option, probably because an air compressor for the 7.3 liter gas (hog) isn’t available yet. That fugitive from the last millennium, the E-series, is still being tweaked. More details on the E-Transit: 67 KWH battery capacity, 200 KW motor, +600 pounds weight over IC engine version, 33-3800 pounds payload.

Freightliner showed why they’re having Ford’s lunch, opening with a background pix of an M2 Hi-Rail truck. Econic low cabover is a world truck targeted at refuse/recycling with high or low roof, left right or both drive, and all round air suspension that enables standard axles scales. If the price is competitive, they’ll own this market! The M2 gets some tweaks, but the bigger news is Freightliner is giving techs more access to program their trucks for upfits. For the electric(?) future Freightliner showed an eCascadia conventional tractor with 300 mile range and an eM2 conventional straight truck with 250 mile range with the biggest 475 KW of battery packs. For any big truck e-rodders, Freightliner is offering up to two 135KW motors per axle, and 6x4s will be available… That’s a few KW shy of Scania’s top V8’s rating, would make an interesting drag race…

Kenworth predicted electrics will eventually get 25% market share, they’re developing electric versions of several models for production in 2023 like K270e and K370e class 6 and 7 cabovers with 100-200 mile range. The T680e Conventional class 8 will have 150 mile range, and all have regenerative braking. The 6×4 hydrogen powered tractor KW is developing with Toyota will have a 300 mile range after a 15 minute refill.

Mack presented their LR low cabover electric with refreshing honesty- Price will be about 3x that of IC, and heat rejection is so high that the liquid cooling system uses the same radiator as the IC version! 334 KW motors with 400 KW peak power, 264 KW battery capacity and recharges in 90 minutes if you’ve got 150 KW available…

Hinos class 6, 7, and 8 conventional have been MIA and a new factory quiet as they tried to get their big diesel past EPA’s finicky certification. Once again, Cummins to the rescue with their B and L series diesels becoming standard and only power until Hino’s electrics become available. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the reliability of Hino trucks, they’ll now be available with 6×4 drive and heavy front axles, and the L series can produce up to near 400 HP- If these trucks are attractively priced and Hino can supply them, they’re going to take market share.

Thats all folks!

I want to thank the Work Truck Show and it’s parent the National Truck Equipment Association and all the makers for persevering through this pandemic and bring us another great show, even though it was confined to our monitors. Hope to make it next year to take advantage of the ride and drive- I want to drive some electric trucks!

Tuesdays online presentations began with “technical difficulties”, so decided I’d wait ’til Wednesday to do an update.

GM Fleet: Like Ford, one way communication, but a lot more down to earth. GM also gets credit for the high proportion of women presenters, which counts here at GearheadGrrrl’s blog. Some of GM’s offerings like the G series vans are going on two decades old, but it’s good to know they’re still updating the product with little tweaks here and there. Same with the rest of the line, as GM is offering help in integrating up fitter mounted cameras into their systems, moving DEF tanks and stuff out of the way, and preps for mounting ambulance bodies. Heck, they even have a back seat delete option to help turn the Bolt electric hatch into a micro van! But GM has also been afflicted with the ‘electric car craziness that’s going around, to the point of soon bringing to market a bespoke electric step van…

No doubt most of the electrics are shared with other future electric trucks, but there’s got to be at least a hundred million $$$ invested in that assumed unit body. That’s a lot of investment for a step van market that’s not even a hundred thousand vehicles a year where thousand vehicle a year customers like Hostess are gone while other fleets have upsized to separate bodies on chassis cabs or down to vans and van derived cutaways. And in a market where fleets are demanding and getting aluminum bodies and galvanized frames so they can get 20+ years from a vehicle, will they accept replacing batteries that cost more than the vehicle is worth after 10 years? GMs spun off step van operation, Workhorse, tried going all electric and is going up in flames and taking a lot of capital with it, the other players are proceeding cautiously. So how the heck does GM think they’ll grow the step van market and squeeze out enough competitors to every pay off the cost of tooling up this thing?

Freightliner Custom Chassis: The actual market leader (Ford may contest that) in step vans is being much more cautious, experimenting with electric power in their existing chassis while offering evolutionary upgrades to their current products. And remember the story that Daimler was switching to Cummins B series power in their medium duty trucks? These guys didn’t get the memo and are still pushing Daimler’s 4 cylinder diesels!

International- Some minor tweaks like factory lift axles and improved rustproofing, but the cab is two decades old and Traxon (VW Group) just bought the whole company… Is a Scania cab and maybe powertrain too in International’s future, and how soon?

Ram: No EVs, but a lot of useful tweaks like up fitter access to the OS to connect added on cameras, even camera’s mounted on trailers and a back up assist system that top’s Ford and GM’s. Even plow packages for the half ton pickups that tie into the OS and shut off front collision warning when a plow is mounted!

Isuzu: Saw my first Isuzu straight truck at the old Convention Center dock back in the 80s and inquired of the Canadian owners their opinion- They couldn’t be happier, even with a tag axle and resulting heavier load their Isuzu was still dead reliable and easy on fuel. Isuzu’s cabovers are downsized big trucks with real work truck cred, an almost unknown alternative to the beefed up pickups that dominates light end of medium duty. Big news this year is Isuzu is joining the medium duty majority in offering the Cummins B series with Allison Automatic in the Class 6 and 7 chassis.

Peterbuilt: Has built electric semi-tractors, tandem refuse trucks, and class 7 straight trucks, and has even put on staff a grant writer to fund customer’s buying more. That said, the stats are sobering- only 100-200 mile range, 300-400 KWH batteries, a few tons extra dead weight, and they don’t even mention prices. In more reality based news, they’ve got a new “pick your gauges” programmable dashboard display and looks like the legacy cab is slowly getting a well deserved retirement.

Fontaine Modification Centers: Another little known company with a big impact in the truck biz- They modify 36,000 trucks a year, probably at least a tenth of the heavy duty market they modify. They’re doing electric repowers, and if you see an a big truck with a chopped cab roof, twin steering axles, front driven axle, or even right hand or dual steering, chances are they built it.

All in all, not much new hardware, some useful tweaks, and excessive electrification fantasies… But two days to go!

Admit it- None of us gear heads can just walk on by a decently executed bucket truck, Hi-Rail, service vehicle, or the hundreds of other variations on the “work truck” theme without eyein’ up the machinery and then spending the next few minutes or hours figuring out how it works. So when the folks that put on the annual Work Truck Show actually offered this lowly backwater blogger a press pass I jumped at the chance. But living 800 miles from the shows home in Indy or else wintering in Florida 1200 miles away, I never was able to fit the show into my travel plans…

Until COVID-19 blew the hell out of our plans, period. Thus I’be been comfortably holed up here at my Buffalo Ridge home consuming more online content than I ever could travel too- As a small town water system operator I’ve built up a stack of more continuing education credits than I’ll ever need in this lifetime and probably at least the next three. I’m learning CAD and fantasized getting an engineering degree from a college hundreds of miles away, and I’ve actually at least virtually made the Work Truck Show… Finally!

I gather that the Work Truck Show is your typical exhibition hall trade show with the big three having big chunks of prime turf on down to the newbie hopeful supplier behind a table in the back corner. Forced onto a computer display that pecking order can be seriously disrupted, and a video production savvy guy or gal from that tiny table in the back corner can outshine the big three. and they did…

Ford was the first to fall, starting with the pre-show tweets of a Ford exec promising an exciting new truck, setting us gear heads up to speculate the intro of the Maverick compact pickup or announcement of the VW sourced next generation Transit Connect. What we got was a sales pitch for Ford’s fleet management software (yes, Ford software?) and various new features of their attempts to give their so-so truck offerings all the features of a cheap smart phone of five years ago. Yes, real useful? stuff like a speed sign reader that instead of just announcing the speed limit like some of Ford’s overseas trucks have done for years actually slows the truck down to that speed. That should be a real hit on two lanes where political pressure has produced ridiculously low speed limits than sane drivers add 5 or 10 MPH too. Ford didn’t do themselves any favors- If you want software to police your fleet, best not to buy it from the vehicle maker who can turn around and use it as evidence to void your warranty. And that “new truck” tweet was wiped while Automotive News hinted that the next Transit Connect will be built in a Ford plant on a Ford platform… Who the hell is running Ford?

Next on my dance card was Mack promoting their medium duty truck and some more Volvo bits that have infiltrated the legendary Mack trucks build sheets. Modern Macks are a touchy subject for us old school gear heads who have mourned Volvo’s slow and steady substitution of their usually inferior bits for the legendary Mack bits. That said, Mack and even Volvo North America’s media reps are a joy to work with, always helpful and answering every question, even from us old Mack loyalists who view Volvo as a foreign invader. Thus Macks MD series has a Cummins B series engine, Allison automatic, and Meritor Axles under the legacy Mack cab. The B series and Allison are the best in class(es) 6 and 7 and the Mack cab is both more functional and even more aerodynamic than the 20 years younger Volvo cab, which ain’t a bad thing… Too bad most of the Mack line is stuck with Volvo bits instead. Nothing fancy, but I’d sure as heck rather be behind the wheel of one than a low bid Freightliner, International, or worse yet Ford. The new Volvo bits being fenestrated are the Volvo T-Ride tandem suspension we have known and loathed for the decade or so they’ve been trying to insert it instead of our legendary Mack suspension, and the more useful “Command Steer”, which looks to be a real useful option if not game changer for rough road trucking, here’s a link to more info: https://www.mapyourshow.com/mys_shared/wts21/handouts/210308%20-%20Mack®%20Command%20Steer%20for%20Mack%20Granite®%20Models%20Now%20in%20Production.pdf

And that little disruptor that used the online opportunity to outshine the big two if not all three? XL Fleet, a growing company that has added hybrid and even plug in hybrid capability to several brands of light and medium trucks years ahead of Ford while GM and Ram haven’t even made it to the starting line. Yup, while the big two or three are reinventing everything but the wheel to bring electric vehicle vaporware to market, XL Fleet took advantage of the Lego like layout of trucks to tuck batteries between the frame rails and motors on those long driveshafts to produce working models of the big manufacturers electric vehicle fantasies. No surprise that XL Fleet was getting inquiries from some big fleets, and they answered every one. Here’s the link for more info: https://xlfleet.com/

That’s all for today, be back with more of the show highlights tomorrow.