Kevin Rutherfrauds $200000 Signature glider truck has complete engine failure!!!

A lot of mpg variation at common weights. (These are the numbers from the FB post.)

 

A 16.7 increase per mile (your numbers) over 120,000 miles a year means $20,400 more to my bottom line.

You don't consider that eye opening?

 

That's the jump from 4 to 6 mpg. Pretty big increase in net. And rather simple to accomplish in most operations. but what happens as you try to get more and more mpg? as you can see, you get diminishing results as you gain fuel economy and it takes a much higher investment to go from 6 to 8, then 8+.

 

But there are some that say their rate per mile offsets their low fuel mileage.

Apparently they don't understand that a smart operation tries to raise both.

 

Shhhhhh, you will hurt there feelings if you tell them they have been doing it wrong this whole time.

 

It absolutely require both to maximize the net. And maximizing net is why we bought trucks right? Or most of us anyway. What rc was saying, is there reaches a point when the effort to increase fuel mileage can be better spent increasing the rate you get which would result in better net. . Only so much time in a day after all.

 

Every operation is different. Nobody does the exact same thing as the other guy. Some guys can slow down and their net increases because of the decrease in fuel cost. Some guys on a dedicated run can speed up and get one more load in per week which will net them more than if they slowed down to get their mileage up. What works for one doesn't work for all.

Back to the signature truck...if they're driving it the same way I don't like the fluctuation in fuel economy on loads of similar weight. I suspect that they're still frequently trying different ECM tunes chasing that elusive 10 mpg that they can't seem to get. They've spent a staggering amount of money on this truck. I don't care what anyone says, when you cross the half million dollar mark it will take them years of 8+mpg to ever get their money back.

Edit: quarter million dollar mark.

 

$7000 a year gross IS NOT worth going 62 mph and sleeping in a truck an extra 100 nights a year. That's what going from 6 mpg to 8 would mean to me.

 

It's funny, but I bet if you took them and had them drive Henry Albert's flat route (Carolinas to TX) with a van in generally calm winds without making any other changes, they'd be a 10mpg truck and hailed as a success...

Likewise if you made Henry Albert drive i70, 80, & 90 west of the Mississippi year round pulling random power-only trailers through Rocky Mountain crosswinds & elevation gains, he'd be an 8 mpg truck and Freightliner wouldn't be sponsoring him.

I do suspect there are gains to be made in driving technique, but my understanding is they are a husband/wife team so I would imagine some driving critiques go unsaid for the sake of the marriage.

That post said they switched to 11th and have been running 1400+ rpm lately. MPG went down 0.2...

Definitely diminishing returns, but I don't think they've ever claimed they were doing it for business reasons. They wanted to be on the forefront and experiment with technology and share the results.

From comments others have made, it sounds like they are leased to a carrier running high dollar military team freight (why they installed that mpg-killing bambi basher) so I doubt they have any complaints about revenue.

 

I based that post on $2.25 per gallon fuel. That would probably be closer to national average pump price than $2.00 a gallon. I didn't recommend idling unnecessarily for 20 hours, driving 80+ mpg everywhere you go, or siphoning fuel out onto the ground for fun. Anything a person can do to cut costs is a good thing. Being obsessive about it seems to be a tad counter-productive with a lot of people though.