Your favorite company

DOT 508195 , 300 a day wether you work or not , 3 meals 2 snacks, and a hotel of your choice Ho Inn or above , all paid on a company AMEX.
Blue Beacon when i get a bug on my windshield.

 

Old Dominion only has manual transmissions on their trucks, though, right? If so, what's the reasoning behind keeping manual transmissions and not upgrading to automatics?

 

Yes, only manual. I have no idea, but I'm glad.

 

Not really sure it’s an upgrade.

 

Amen to that. Might be nice for around town though.

 

@REO6205


You have one of these on your desk?

 

Nope. I never drove a set of doubles there but if I could find a conventional truck and trailer tanker I might think about it.
Besides, I still have mixed feelings about that company. They had some great people in middle and lower management, and the drivers of course, but they sold them down the river without a second thought.

 

We have some automatic team trucks and we're currently testing automatics in other tractors. Our regional VP said it's costing OD more for manual transmissions than it would for automatics. At some point in the very near future we will start getting the auto's in our fleet.

 

My last company had automatics the last 5 years I was there and we hated them. They break down a lot. Get stuck in gear while driving and will not shift up or down. Sometimes they won't go into gear. It happened so often, we had sheets in the trucks with instructions on how to reset the transmission. When starting off, they are very jerky. They won't go until you give them throttle. Sometimes you have to give them too much throttle for it to move and it will just dump the clutch. Then instead of gently bumping the dock, it's bam and you slam into it. We hauled packaged milk and lost thousands and thousands of gallons because of dumped loads. Not just from slamming into docks, from just taking off from a stop too. We even found that drivers become lackadaisical which caused more accidents. I hate to hear OD is looking at them. Luckily, my terminal doesn't get new trucks. We get hand me downs. So hopefully it will be years before we see them.

 

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