Quote:
Originally Posted by Arminius
|
Update:
I have been on vacation (at home being sick this week). My truck was left at the terminal 5 hours away in Nashville supposedly getting fixed/serviced. I hitched a ride back yesterday to pick it up, and low and behold, the first thing on the list, the A/C, wasn't fixed, so I stayed around till this morning when they came in. While they were working on my truck, I was talking to the mechanic questioning him about the suggestions of blocking the bumper openings on my truck which led to my reading up on ecomodding, etc. He said he just got back from the home terminal in S. TX and the guy that specs the trucks they buy, is a engineer wiz of some sort and has working test trucks and trailers with alot of the mods mentioned in these couple of truck threads. The boattailling mockup linked above, they supposedly have it where when the truck is at road speeds, it extends into a boattail kinda thing. When stopped, it automatically closes. It's attached to the doors, so it doesn't have to be removed to load/unload. I asked about over length laws. He said, it's not illegal if it closes when you're stopped. Not sure if that's true or not.
Other aero mods they're working on are placing wedges infront of the landing gear and in front of the trailer axles.
This is exciting news, BUT, if they're making it (almost) foolproof to for trucks to automatically get a minimum mpg, how long will they keep paying a bonus? We'll see.
On a final side note, the guy that I rode back with was driving my truck. He joked that he was going to watch me drive, because he cannot figure out how I have been getting 8.5-9mpg, and in the three days he drove the truck, the best he did was 7.7, and the worst was in the 5's. lol. But, when it came to it, he drove back. It took every thing in me to keep my mouth shut and not be a back seat driver. I thought, as long as the computer system is recording this mpg under his name, I don't care. We were empty and he would start in second and max out every gear -- hard. I was going nuts. I'm back to work now (well, sunday) and going to try to get back into the mpg groove...