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Natural gas paper offers refuse fleet inspection list

TomTom delivers truck-specific navigation to North America

DALLAS. -TomTom, a global provider of navigation devices, has now created a GPS designed for professional truckers in North America. The TomTom TRUCKER 600 features accurate, vehicle-relevant navigation, map updates and traffic analysis— for the lifetime of the device—all in one package, as company representatives demonstrated at the Great American Trucking Show here.

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3 Trends in the Spot Freight Market

As FTR and Truckstop.com apply "big data" analysis to spot market pricing, Noel Perry, FTR transportation economist, offers some insights into the volatility of spot pricing and how spot prices correlate with contract pricing.

The data being analyzed starts in the first quarter of 2008, just before the big downturn. Since the bottom of that recession, contract prices have averaged a 1% quarter over quarter growth (annualized). Even with the big decline last year, spot prices have averaged 2%. This is consistent with the big move of random freight from the edges of contracts into the spot market, Perry notes. Volume has built, and so have rates.

"I expect this trend to peak in 2019 with the coming crisis in regulatory drag," Perry says. "After that is unclear."

2. Spot prices are way more volatile.

This is no surprise, Perry says. The spot market is defined as the home of swings in random demand. The capacity pressure indices calculated by Truckstop.com and DAT both swing widely in almost lockstep. It follows that price changes swing widely.

The standard deviation of spot rate changes since the bottom of the last recession is five times larger than that of contract rates. "In case you have forgotten your college stat definitions, that means spot rate growth varies five times more than contract rate growth," he says.

With spot prices, the lags between market events and price response are short, perhaps up to a quarter, Perry says. The response is not instantaneous because truckers and shippers take time to realize that a change is required. There are also some small delays in the statistics. As big data (and forecasting tools) emerge, this lag should be shortened because market decision makers will ...Read the rest of this story

Drivers Are Key To Maintenance Success

The first line of defense for well maintained trucks are your drivers. They are required to do pre- and post-trip inspections and submit DVIRs, but the way those inspections are completed varies widely.

There are things you can do to make sure that all inspections are done in a thorough, consistent manner. If you are still using paper forms for pre- and post-trip inspections, you are unwittingly part of the problem.

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Speed limiter proposal: 6 slides on the basics

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Stemco adds three new management positions

Stemco announced it is “strengthening the support, engineering and training capabilities” of its Wheel End division through the creation of three new area manager positions.

These new area managers will be responsible for bolstering the wheel end division with technical training and sales support at the fleet, distributor and OEM levels, and marketing and engineering initiatives through field testing and end user interactions, the company said.

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