Pumpkins and APU

No Sir..........

 

El Cheapo Orange?

Hardly! They wouldn't put seats in them if they thought they could get away with it!

 

No, we don't have APU's on the normal company trucks. The guys that do the IC thing thru SNI usually do tho. But, yes, almost all of the SNI trucks do have a bunkheater. It's a clunky/crappy Wesbasto. I've had the Espar in another companies truck, and it seemed a much higher quality and had better dependability than the Webasto, but SNI will replace the Webasto for you when it quits without any heartache.

 

I thought Roehl was cheap but I think Schneider nudges into first place with that.

 

Yeah, it may be on the cheap side a bit. I've all but given up on my quarterly bone-us. Some of the trucks I get have such weak batteries I have to idle just to be able to use my 12 volt coffee maker. Won't even think of leaving in the AM without my shot of caffiene. An APU would sure take care of that issue with the batts.

 

They have around 15,000 trucks or so(when i worked for them) Now figure $7,000 for each APU, thats a lot of money, but it would pay for itself in a year or two. I saw a couple of team petes that had a APU(SNI loves there test trucks) but i dont know anymore about them.

 

In my opinion and I know everyone has one, all trucking companies should be required to have APU's. With many if not all states limiting the time trucks can idle or ban idling all together (not to mention companies base bonuses on idle time) a driver's comfort is compromised in order to meet these regulations. I don't know about anyone else but I can not sleep in a stuffy and hot cab. Fans help a little but all that's doing is blowing hot air around.

 

Alot of carriers dont put apu's on there trucks due to the maintence on them and when the trucks are turned in, they gotta take em' off and put them on the new trucks. Its a never ending cycle Alot of extra work for them. There just putting it off but will eventually come around. The company I drive for has apu's and inverters on all of there 2,500 trucks. Im sitting in arizona right now and its 97 degrees outside, and it sure is nice having one. Nice and cool in here. It cost the company about $17,000,000 to purchase 2,500 apu's. Im kind of curious, when these apu's wear out are they gonna rebuild them, or are they gonna spend another $17,000,000 for new ones. Time will tell.