Question: Why Do Companies Choose The Trucks They Choose?

Like with any business, its where the owners/company can get the best deal.... even if its a couple thousand per truck, if they are buying 500-1000 at a time, it can add up pretty quick.... I work for werner, and most of the newest trucks we have are kw's and petes..... and if they replace the entire fleet over 2 years, your talking hundreds of thousands to a million or more dollars.....

That is funny you mention Western Stars going down more frequently than the Freightliner. Other than the cosmetics, pretty much same truck! Daimler owns both. I good comparison ,using another company that Daimler used to own, is Chrysler. Freightliners are the Dodges and Western Star are the Chryslers. I guess you could say Sterling is the Plymouth. Both lines are discontinued.

You have the exact same availability of engines and transmissions choices for Western Stars and Freightliners. That is why every Freightliner service point is also a Western Star service center.

Volvo and Mack are both own by the same company.

Peterbuilt and Kenworth are both owned by the same company.

International are kinda the only one that stands alone of the class 8 truck manufacturers.

My technical knowledge is nil, anytime you hear me talk about engines and such it's just me parroting what I've heard from others, but WS's being extended family makes total sense given we've bought the Chrysler family several nice homes given how big we are and having probably 95% of our trucks Freightshakers.

But yeah, during one of our winter safety teleconference calls it was asked why we never see any new WS's rolling out and the answer was that, whatever they stuck under the body kept getting the truck sent in the shop. Basically, the England WS's were a decent size trial run given to some of the top drivers at the time. That was several years ago so I'd imagine we'll be seeing some other testing coming up before too long, though we did just order a sizable number of the new 18 Cascadia's. We do quite a bit of testing, though. If you run around our terminals you can see CRE colors on pretty much any kind of truck you'd like. There's an old Mack sitting in our Stockton drop yard that they use as basically a yard jockey that is absolutely gorgeous.