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Future trucks * UK - Cleaning up the kings of the road
London,UK -New Scientist, by Phil McKenna -12 August 2009: ... So what of those kings of the road - the heavy trucks that move some 70 per cent of all freight in the US and a similar slice in the UK and much of Europe? With the global economy in recession, fuel prices still high and ever-tighter emissions laws ahead, you might imagine that they too would be heading at full tilt towards an economical, low-carbon future. You'd be wrong. "The truck industry has been stagnant for a very long time," says energy-efficiency advocate Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Colorado... While the average fuel efficiency of the US car fleet has almost doubled in the last 40 years, today's heavy trucks guzzle the same amount of fuel - roughly 30 litres per 100 kilometres - as they did in 1969 (see graph). In 1990, America's truckers burned the equivalent of 1.6 million barrels (254 million litres) of oil per day, about 10 per cent of the nation's total consumption. By 2007, this had risen to 2.5 million barrels... Even small improvements can bring big benefits. A concept vehicle called the Innovation Truck unveiled in April by Daimler Trucks North America is designed to show what is possible by tweaking a vehicle's aerodynamics. In wind tunnel tests it used 3 per cent less fuel than an unmodified truck - which rolled out across the entire US truck fleet would save about 4.3 billion litres of fuel annually. This translates into an annual cut in CO2 emissions of over 11 million tonnes... (Photo from Daimler TNA: Freightliner Innovation Truck)Labels: future trucks
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