Optimizing Medium-Duty Commercial Trucks
For vocational fleet operators, your medium-duty vehicles are often the workhorses of your fleet. These commercial trucks and vans play a critical role in your day-to-day business operations, delivering goods to your customers or transporting tools, equipment, and workers to various job sites. For organizations who rely on these medium-duty vehicles to fuel their success, acquiring the right vehicle and properly maintaining it is critical to operating a productive and efficient fleet.
Recently, Holman’s Joe Birren and Dave Broadwater spoke with Fleet & Mobility to share their insights and strategies for optimizing medium-duty commercial trucks. In the first article, Joe offered several recommendations for ordering, and properly spec’ing your medium-duty trucks to ensure these units are well-equipped to handle their intended role. Joe noted that this process typically begins with a ride-along to understand precisely how the truck is being used in the field.
“My question, from the outset, is what’s the mission of the truck? Is it for dry freight goods, is it last-mile delivery, is it refrigerated, and so on. I ride along to really understand how they are using the truck, how they are loading and unloading it.”
Joe shared how this insight from the ride-along influences everything from lighting and door options to liftgate and storage packages. In the other article, Dave discussed why many medium-duty units incur excessive wear and tear as they often are pushed well beyond their limits.
“Fleets often have light-duty trucks that tend to be overloaded because someone doesn’t want to jump the gap into a medium-duty truck, and the same can be said about medium-duty vehicles. You have some units that can be subject to overloading and abuse, because the company may not be in a position to jump up weight classes into a heavier-duty truck, even though that’s what they really need.”
The article also examined the importance of partnering with the right maintenance vendor to properly repair and maintain these medium-duty units. Dave also highlighted that this sentiment applies to upfit vendors as well and you need to align with upfit and equipment specialists who are well-versed in the complex medium-duty vehicles.
To read the pair of articles, please visit FleetMobility.ca and be sure to learn more about how Holman can help you build a fleet that allows you to drive revenue.
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