Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Rigs shifting to automatic transmissions
Move saves fuel, improves safety, trucking firms say
For 44 years, Jerry Whittenburg drove more than 4 million safe miles in a truck with a manual transmission. He had no reason to change anytime soon.
But when the owner-operator’s own truck broke down, he switched temporarily to a company vehicle. That company, Stallion Transportation Group in Beebe, recently changed over to automated transmissions, following a growing industry trend.
Despite some early frustration and skepticism, Whittenburg has decided to permanently switch to automated.
“I’m going to go ahead and do it because, hey, it is coming,” he said. “We’ve got to learn to quit fighting it. We’ve got to learn to accept it.”
The trucking industry is rapidly changing over to automated transmissions for a variety of reasons. Fuel economy, safety and an increased potential driver pool are among them, and despite some push back from veteran drivers, it seems the technology is here to stay.
His first time in the hills without a manual transmission, he said it was frustrating to not have the familiar control. After some reflection though, that changed.
“I started thinking about what I was doing wrong,” he said. “I was trying to push it. I was trying to make it do something it didn’t want to with the gas pedal.”
“The truck did perfectly,” he said. “I didn’t because I didn’t let the truck work until I finally realized I needed to.”
“Automated transmissions are going to be the future. Stick shifts are going to be the past,” Whittenburg said. “Peterbilt told me on a tour last fall that by 2018 you will have to special order a stick shift truck. It will be all automated.”
“I think the future is already here and passed us,” said Shawn Smith, regional sales manager at the Larson Group-Peterbilt. “We just have got to wait for the market to catch up.”
Steve Tam, vice president of Americas Commercial Transportation Research, said from communications with manufacturers he has concluded, “the consensus is that roughly half of the trucks sold today are equipped with [automated transmissions].”
Scott Manchester, vice president of truck sales for Truck Centers of Arkansas, estimated that 70 percent of Freightliner’s backlog orders are for automated transmissions.
The transmissions in heavy duty trucks are different from those found in passenger vehicles. The automated version in trucks still has a clutch controlled by the computer, while fully automatic transmissions have a torque converter.
“Every Camry Toyota builds has the same transmission. Passenger car man-
ufacturers have that economy of scale while Freightliner probably offers 50 different transmission options for different applications,” Manchester said. “We don’t have the economies of scale nor the raw numbers to produce a true automatic transmission.”
As to what has spurred this recent trend, both Manchester and Smith point to Environmental Protection Agency regulations on diesel exhaust. The federal government began regulating diesel exhaust in 1993 and has gradually increased its restrictions over time.
Manchester said that around 2010, manufacturers started reaching the limit of what they could change on a diesel engine to make it more efficient. In 2014 and 2017, he said, “They started talking about weight and overall efficiency. When they did that, now all of a sudden we are looking at everything on the truck, like aerodynamics and weight. One of the places that we could create efficiencies was automated manual transmissions, saving fuel there.”
Smith said that “forced” automated manual transmission manufacturers to improve designs and production. “You didn’t see any quality [automated] transmissions prior to that.”
A June 2015 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fuel efficiency technology study found that 10-speed automatic manual transmissions increased fuel efficiency by 5 to 9 percent compared with 10-speed manual transmissions.
Manchester said the two main reasons fleets switch include fuel efficiency and improved performance, as the technology removes human error by automatically shifting gears at the optimum moment.
“Safety is a big portion of this, too,” he added. “You keep the driver’s two hands on the wheel.”
Butch Rice, president and CEO of Stallion Transportation Group, said recently that he decided to switch his entire fleet to automated transmissions because, even though they cost around $5,000 more than manuals, “If we can save a gallon and a half, that’s a lot of money over time.”
He called it “the new wave of trucking.”
USA Truck’s fleet is now about 25 percent automated and the company plans to continue investing in them for fuel economy and maintenance reduction.
Chris Shilhanek, vice president of safety and driver recruiting at the Van Buren company, said they will continue to invest in automated transmissions. He explained they can help the less experienced driver.
“If a driver is relatively new, understanding and executing the shifting patterns in a standard transmission can take some time,” Shilhanek said. “With an [automated] transmission, a driver won’t have to take his/her eyes off the road to make sure they’re shifting into the correct gear.”
It also “reduces the anxiety that comes with shifting,” he said.
ArcBest Corp. began investing in automated transmissions in 2014 and will continue to because of lower maintenance and fuel economy, improved driver safety and an edge in recruiting, said company spokesman Kathy Fieweger.
For an industry that has been complaining of a driver shortage for years, anything to increase the driver pool is a big deal. “If you think it’s easier to drive an automatic, in theory, this increases the general population pool of drivers,” said Manchester.
“I don’t know any man or woman who would want to sit there and use their left leg all day when they didn’t have to and could get the same performance out of not doing it,” Smith said.
Several states have begun offering restrictions on commercial driver licenses that allow drivers to test and be licensed exclusively for automatic transmission vehicles. Arkansas began offering it in July 2015 and about 1,800 people have opted for it.
But both USA Truck and ArcBest say they do not accept drivers with restrictions on their licenses. Smith attributed this to the absence of automated transmissions in the rental operations used if a company truck breaks down.
As to reasons for resisting the technology, Manchester pointed to past struggles with previous iterations of the technology.
“The first auto shifts in the early 2000s had all kinds of maintenance issues and the resale value of that product was very poor,” he said. “It shied a lot of people away from auto transmissions. Now the performance and the reliability is much better, and we’re starting to see resale and residual values be very strong with automated manuals.”
Smith also said that the warranty package with the automated used to be about half that of a manual, but it has improved over the past few years.
The final stumbling block is the perception among veteran drivers that after years of practice, “He could do it better than an automatic and real truckers shifted,” explained Manchester. “We have had to work pretty hard to sway that emotion and sentiment.”
After four decades, Whittenburg said he has learned a new way of driving. “You’ve got to feather the accelerator,” he said. “When you’re in a stick shift, you give it what you want to give it.”
“We have to understand that we are not computers. We are human beings,” he said. “We do everything by our instinct, our mind, the sound, the feel of the truck. I can feel the truck through the seat of my pants and the steering wheel.
“But the computer is a heck of a lot smarter than we are,” he said. “It knows where to upshift. It knows when to downshift.
“If you just back off and let it do its job, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us drivers.”