Western Express trucks.

Is joe farrell still at western express good guy good dm.

 

Idaho has new endorsement / restriction, I think its the "E" endorsement, means you tested out on a auto for your CDL and are not allowed to operate a manual.


Knight is doing the same thing, ordering all new trucks with auto and 1% of the will have a 9 speed for the trainers, there reasoning is 4800 trucks between both sides and break downs will be less without people grinding gears, on the other note it takes the power out of old timers hands that think you have to keep the motor at 2grand to climb a hill.

Glad mine is a 13 and ill keep her that way!

 

Yes, the reason autos came out was because drivers can and still do operate / abuse standard transmissions and other pieces of equipment. I like Automatics and would spec 50% or more if I ran a company, but if the truck conks out somewhere and the rental company has no autos to tow out.. your dead in the water.. same with the driver with the auto only endorsement/restriction (they also have them in OK)

 

what do they start you at? cpm?

 

i can ad some infor here. lat time i was there it wa 27 CPM(might have gone up) far as the autos getting better milage will have to disagree. what kills the milage is catrating the hp/tq out of hte trucks.

the truck im in now is governed at 70 mph, and i get 6.5-6.8 MPG puling flatbeds with an avg wight of 77k lbs

forgot to add, i do drive a Cummins ISX and a 10 spd

 

That is not new nor is it an Idaho thing. This is a federal rule.

Only if you let the auto do everything for you. I drove one for 2 weeks and within 100 miles I knew how to handle the auto. It was the 3 pedal version. I was not happy with the truck but I can not say that it was the transmission. It was more the weak jakes on the Mack than anything else. I had no problem taking over the shifting. You do use your brakes a lot more than a standard because of the need to get the RPMs down to where it would shift. The only negative I can think of about the autoshift transmissions.

 

Western Express has a hard time maintaining what they have now

Good luck making money there when they cannot cope with all the reliability issues of their new automatics.

 

They need to for all the steering wheel holders .

 

The company is switching to all autos in the next couple of years for fuel economy; the current manual fleet average is 6.5 and the autos are averaging 8.0+. All new tucks are coming in as autos. Lease operators will keep the truck they have (manual) until their lease expires or they buy it. Trucks are governed at 63 on the foot and 64 on cruise. Flatbed drivers get more to start than van drivers.

They give both route and fuel solutions; company drivers have to follow them and there are benefits to lease operators following them, too.

My Day 2 is 1½ hours from being done -- at 1730 local.