Comments By Isaac H.

Yes, my fifth wheel is pretty far back. I just got a new truck with 33 miles on it and waiting to get a decent load of 40-44k to set my fifth wheel. Have happened yet. Lol.

My tare weight? Last truck i weighed with an empty trailer was like 34k.

2 Questions:

What's your tare weight?

Why is your fifth wheel that far back?

We got it reworked before we left obviously.

Yes, the tandems were slid all the way up.

This is just to show that even a load of 33k can put you over if it's all loaded on the drivers.

Here's our scale ticket. Bills said 33,000.

Steers:10620 Drives:36880 Trailer:22940 Gross: 70440

Thanks for your responses matt. It's a great help knowing your truck is the same way as mine. I'm pretty much going to suck it up. I think i got spoiled with the pete, lol.

I run reefer too, and if the truck is costing you 50 miles a drive shift, or close to an hour, then I would agree that you have a problem.

I run team with the wife at Prime, and we have a freightliner with most of the same features (locked into economy mode yada yada). I dont like a lot of these features, and the truck is a dog taking off. But when I look at our miles they are the same as my manual before. If we are straight running for a day, we are gonna cover around 1300 miles in that 24 hour period. Give or take a little for traffic and such, but that's a pretty common number for us when we're doing cross country runs. That is governed at 62 mph. That has not changed at all with the economy mode automatic. Now you may have had a bad arse Pete (I've only driven freightliners), but if they are governed the same speed and you aren't driving the Rocky Mountains all day long it shouldn't make much of a difference.

If the truck is slowing you down here and there, doesn't pull hills quite as well as the old truck, I could see 10 or 15 minutes in a drive shift. I just cant understand those little things costing you 5mph over a 10 hour drive period. There has to be something more to it.

Art, you do not get back your full clocks after an 8/2 split. You get back the clocks MINUS what you used on the first part of the split.

Also, with you on recaps you really have to watch out how much time you have left to drive because you could have to sit and wait until midnight if you're low on time. Say you have 7 hours to get where you're going and you have 6 hours after the split at 3pm. So now you're going to have to sit and wait until midnight to get that 1 hour you need to complete the trip.

Matt, i will conceded a couple points. First, i understand this is not truck exclusive. This is on everybody's truck not just mine.

Secondly, 2hours is probably an exaggeration, but running reefer means appointment times or coming back after reschedule and mess up all further trips.

However, i disagree with you on the amount of time you lose. Sure, I'm losing speed on a 20 mile stretch of road i wouldn't care, however losing 5mph in 10 hours is 50 miles. Multiply that twice because our trips sometimes need both of our clocks so that's 100 miles lost. Going 65 mph that's like 1.5 hours. I think that may is right although i may need errol to check my work.

Isaac, I can get that you aren't wild about these safety features but I can't imagine they are costing you that much time.

The fueling issue seems odd, and may be an issue. I would track your mpgs, newer freightliners should be getting at least 8 or 9 mpg. Your company will be highly motivated to fix that if not.

Can you override the following distance sensor by putting your foot on the pedal? That's how I deal with merging traffic and such where I don't want it to slow me down, but it's a different company.

Regardless, I think you may be overestimating how much time those safety features are costing you. It's like when somebody gets all hot and bothered running through a construction zone 10 mph below the speed limit because the truck in front of them is going slow. Even if that zone is 20 miles long, they lost 3.3 minutes off their day. I just don't see how those issues could add up to hours (although extra fuel stops would definitely add some serious time).

Thank you brett and g town for the quick responses.

I max out all the miles per week. I get about 5500 between the student and i. Trips average 1k miles.

I brought it to freightliner of harrisburg in pa and had them look at it in which i was confident they did absolutely nothing and told me it was doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Here's the things it does. I'm not going to argue if these features are safer or should be required for trucking I'm just stating what it does that makes it go slower than my old truck. I am also not an expert on freightliners.

It gets worse miles per gallon. Before i could get 50gal and run a full clock without a fill up. Now i make 3 trips for gas instead of 2. Not really that big of a deal I'm not paying for it and I'm getting more points.

Apparently there's two modes the truck can be put in to drive. One is performance the other is economy. I called our tractor shop and verified that we only have economy mode on our trucks. Which i understand is for saving money but when you're climbing mountains everyday in economy mode it's terrible both on fuel economy and takes forever to do.

Following distance is set at 3.5. I don't know if that's truck lengths or seconds but i do know it's pretty far ahead. Old truck was set at 1.5. Safer yes and i would love it at a further distance and have it beep at me but instead it applies the Jake's by itself whenever it sees any vehicle at that distance. A car could enter in the lane at 2.5 and be accelerating away me but because that vehicle is in the 3.5 it starts braking.

Turns on Jake's while coasting.

I feel like I'm complaining to a service writer.

There are a couple other small things. But these probably take a good 5-8 mph off multiply that by 10+ hours is where I'm kind of getting the reduced time per trip.

The reason i care about these things isn't how much money i lose. Honestly, i could care less about the money i just really like training so far. It's because I'm feeling stressed making trips on time. We only have a couple hours of leeway on our trips as it is and that's getting eaten up by this trucks performance.

I'm going to call up the fm in Monday and hope to discuss some things with her anyways and I'll bring it up and see what she says. Thanks for listening and reading this long reply.

Greetings tt. Been a while. Quick intro. Been driving for 1.5 years now. On a dedicated account hauling a reefer with werner. Recently became a trainer about to graduate my third student. Love my fm, love the account, love training.

Werner has been good to me and i would recommend them to anyone that is starting out. However, lately i have become somewhat disenchanted mainly due to the fact of my truck. I came out of a 2016 pb into a 2017 fl cascadia. This truck is so restricted with safety and economy features that it is totally crippling. I lose 1.5 to 2 hours on every trip because of how it runs.

My plan was to save somewhere close to 100k and buy a truck outright and run the account I'm on because i really don't want to be caught up in any kind of financing. Right now i have 30k saved up which isn't that much.

I don't know if werner could give me a new truck since all i saw at the terminal were freightliners as far as the eye can see.

I'm kind of looking for advice because i really don't want to buy a truck or switch companies, but push is coming to shove. I'm just not real sure of anything right now.

I do a pretrip everytime I'm about to leave shippers, stops, cons, basically everytime i start rolling onto a highway so that may mean 2, 3, 4 times a day.

I have a my own method. I don't look at anything under the hood because every 60 days the truck goes in for preventative maintenance.

It usually takes a good 10 minutes and i don't mind doing it at all.

Some hack pulled my blue air line just last week that i found on my pretrip.