5 of The Latest Weight Reduction Strategies for Fleet Trucks

There are two facts that seem to run counter to one another.

The first is that the weight of your vehicle – the truck, the trailer, the cargo, even the driver – tangibly impacts your trips. This can be obvious, like having to avoid certain roads and bridges due to weight limits, simply staying under legal weight limits, or risking a fine, but it can also be less obvious. More weight means more power expended to get a load moving, which means higher fuel consumption. It also increases stopping distance, which can be a matter of safety.

The second fact is that, seemingly, there’s not much you can do about the weight of your vehicles. Your trucks are your trucks, your trailers are your trailers, and your cargo is your cargo. It’s not like you can fill your tires with helium or put wings on the side of the trailer to give you a little lift as you go down the highway.

But is it really true? Is there nothing you can do about weight, or is it a factor you can adjust to help manage your fleet more effectively, save money on operating costs, and make for a smoother experience all around?

As you’ve probably guessed from the topic of this post, it’s the latter. So, let’s get into the latest in tire-helium and trailer-wing technologies! Or, if you insist, some more realistic and tangible strategies.

Tip 1: Invest in Lighter Trailers

The first, easiest, and most expensive option is to ditch the heavy trailers you’re currently using and invest in lighter trailers. This is an excellent option if you’re in a position to be the one buying the trailers, but it’s less valuable if you’re a fleet that brings trucks to haul the trailers outfitted by your customers.

Older trailers are often built out of steel, and have interiors with wooden cross-members or steel bracing. Their hardware is built to last; it’s durable, it’s heavy-duty, and it’s heavy. It can withstand impact and other kinds of damage just fine, and it can keep on trucking for many years. 

There’s a difficult decision to be made here, and it comes down to service life cycle management. Switching to a lighter trailer will save you operating costs, but the operating costs you save aren’t going to offset the cost of a whole new trailer, at least not right away. The lighter the trailer, the more savings you’ll get per trip and per load; however, there may also be drawbacks to the choice.

The largest is the simple expense of the new trailer, of course. It’s also worth noting that some newer, lighter trailers aren’t necessarily strong enough to hold the same capacity as older, heavier trailers. Many modern metal alloys and aluminum construction are plenty strong, but the capacity can still be lower.

It also doesn’t help if you invest in a lighter trailer and then fill that trailer up with a heavier load to reach your maximum weight capacity again. 

Our advice is generally to keep weight in mind when you’re replacing a trailer (or a tractor-trailer combo) and don’t make the purchase just for weight reasons. If your trailer is in disrepair and needs fixing, or if your vehicle is otherwise nearing the end of its workable lifespan, then making the swap is more valuable.

Tip 2: Kit Trailers with Lighter Interiors

At the heart of it all, trailers are just big boxes on wheels. What you put inside the trailer matters, and we’re not just talking about the cargo you’re hauling. There are plenty of other things you might put inside a trailer: 

• Support cross-members.
• Flooring.
• Roof bows.
• Side rails and supports.
• Racks and shelving.

All sorts of different fleets have different needs and different kits for the interior of their trailers. The kit you put in – especially things like flooring – can make a huge difference in terms of the weight of the trailer.

Flooring is one particular area you might look into. Trailer flooring needs to be smooth to allow easy loading and unloading. It also needs to be durable because heavy loads and equipment will be moved through it repeatedly. Traditional materials are either light and flimsy or heavy and durable. Fortunately, more modern composite materials can be both highly durable and surprisingly lightweight, and a swap to such a floor can save anywhere from 200 to nearly 700 lbs. of additional weight from the trailer.

How valuable is that, though? Well, there are a lot of different factors, but the general rule of thumb is that a drop of 10% of a truck’s weight is roughly a savings of somewhere between 5% and 10% in fuel consumption. Most common-use trucks can range from 25,000 lbs. to as much as 80,000 lbs. for a fully loaded vehicle. A savings of just, say, 400 lbs. isn’t all that much at that scale, but it can add up in conjunction with other weight-saving efforts.

Tip 3: Obtain Lighter Truck Essentials

What do we mean by truck essentials? Well, there is a wide range of components and other elements of a truck and trailer that are essential to their operation but which can be swapped and replaced with relative ease. When you switch to lighter versions of these components, you can reduce weight while not affecting your operations.

Consider your wheels. We joked about filling tires with helium, but that was a little less of a joke than you might think. No, filling tires with helium won’t save you anything. Helium is a small molecule that rapidly leaks out of containers like tires, and its low density means you would need more of it to fill a tire to adequate pressure. Nitrogen is better, anyway.

No, instead, look beyond the tire, to the wheels themselves. Many trucks use steel wheels, but switching to an aluminum alloy wheel can make for a lighter wheel base. It’s only 40 or so lbs. per wheel, but when you think about how many wheels there are on an 18-wheeler (hint: it’s in the name) that savings can add up.

Similarly, aluminum axle hubs rather than steel can save you as much as 120 lbs. with a simple replacement.

Brake drums are another area where switching to a lighter and simpler option, such as centrifuse brake drums, can save some weight. You don’t want to skimp on your brakes, of course, so make sure what you buy works for your needs.

Aluminum clutch housings are also an area of savings. It’s, again, not much – only around 50 lbs. compared to an iron clutch housing – but when you do all of these changes, it adds up.

There are all manner of similar changes. Lighter leaf springs, lighter cab frames, lighter seating, lighter interiors; many different changes made throughout a truck can shave off a few dozen pounds here and there, and those benefits add up over time.

It’s also worth mentioning that all of these save fuel, but they also save on emissions because of that lower fuel consumption. This can help make your company meet green initiatives and lower your carbon footprint. In some cases, it may even help qualify you for subsidies and grants, if those are available, which can also help out or cover some of the cost of the upgrades.

Tip 4: Angle for Newer Vehicles

Much like how replacing an old steel-frame trailer with a newer aluminum-frame trailer will save you weight, so too will purchasing newer vehicles.

There’s a huge caveat to this, which is that not all newer vehicles are necessarily lighter than older vehicles. An older steel-frame vehicle will certainly be heavier than a modern aluminum-based vehicle, but engines have gotten larger and more powerful, and there are often more complex systems that also add weight to a vehicle on top of it all. If you want to maintain or increase your driving and hauling capacity, a lighter vehicle might not be effective.

There’s also one gigantic trap involved in purchasing a new vehicle, which is going for an electric vehicle. An electric truck isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it’s always important to remember that electric vehicles are significantly heavier than their diesel counterparts. The culprit is the batteries, which are immensely heavy, dense, chemically-infused loads that take up both space and weight in an electric vehicle. 

Now, we say “trap” here, but electric vehicles are not strictly traps or bad decisions. They can be a good investment, especially for regions where they can operate at peak efficiency and where you have easy access to charging infrastructure. There are also ongoing tests to experiment with highway infrastructure that can charge a vehicle as it drives. While it’s many, many years from being a viable infrastructure project nationwide, it’s certainly an interesting avenue of study.

Tip 5: Don’t Let Weight Override Other Benefits

One of the biggest tips we have is to not get too caught up in the weeds of weight reduction that you fail to see the forest for the trees.

Don’t make a significant new purchase for over-time savings. Buying a new truck should be done when it makes sense, not when you think one attribute of the purchase will be more efficient over time. While that may be true, the overall cost can outweigh that benefit for years to come or even be significant enough that you never fully break even. 

Don’t sacrifice safety for efficiency. You can make a truck very light if you cut out all of the safety features, but it will likely be both illegal to operate and extremely dangerous. Obviously, no one is going to cut out their seatbelts to save a few ounces, but it’s worth keeping in mind that steel was the standard for a very long time for a reason, and that reason was related to durability as much as anything. 

Don’t make decisions that won’t actually help. One of the biggest traps here is actually just carrying lighter loads. While this does certainly reduce the amount of weight you’re putting on your vehicles, it can lead to not having the capacity to haul the loads you need to, which could require an extra trip – and an LTL trip at that – which can waste more in fuel and time than you saved by taking lighter loads previously. In extreme cases, the lower capacity might even make you ineligible for certain contracts. It’s worth investigating, but it’s not an easy decision to make.

Consider other sources of weight. There are a lot of small, relatively minor habits and areas where you might be able to save a bit of weight here and there.

• Use pallets made of lighter and more durable materials rather than the usual wooden pallets. If this is a change you’re able to make (as opposed to one your clients make) then it can save a bit of weight with every load.
• Consider your fuel. A long-haul trucker likely needs to top up their fuel before a lengthy trip. But if you typically operate for only a few hours each day, do you need several days’ worth of fuel on hand at all times? Fuel adds weight, after all. However, be careful here because the time spent traveling for refueling trips can add up as well.
• Consider the type of truck. A sleeper cab is larger and heavier than a day-trip cab, and while you might need sleepers for certain trips, you might not in general, so make sure your fleet is scaled appropriately for your needs.

Finally, it’s definitely worth keeping maintenance in mind. A well-maintained truck isn’t necessarily going to be lighter than a poorly-maintained truck (though the build-up of road dirt and grime can add a pound or two); a truck in better condition will operate more efficiently and more effectively. That means you save on fuel and other costs out of hand rather than needing to optimize the thread count of the vehicle’s upholstery to save ounces.

At Epika, we’re happy to help provide both proactive and reactive maintenance through our national network of service providers. Find a local service provider and get started with great maintenance today!

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