Page 29 - Newcom

A fleet of six Mack Anthems hit the road for a 1,000-mile test drive in pursuit of excellent fuel economy.
to get to spend three days and nearly 1,000 miles behind the wheel. I learned a few things during this opportunity from watching our fuel economy so attentively. One is that small decisions have big con- sequences. It can take hours to gain 0.2 mpg, only to see it all vanish within a couple minutes if pulling out to pass a truck going uphill or increasing your speed by just a few miles per hour.
We also confirmed that today’s technology can bring relative parity to the fleet, allowing even novice drivers to compete with veterans – provided they take advantage of the technology that’s available to them.
On the truck side, we learned that Mack’s ERT really works as advertised. The blue trucks
with ERT were on average
4% better in fuel econ-
omy than the non-ERT red trucks, and the white trac-
tors came in at a super-impressive 14% advantage. Mack took a risk and showed tremendous faith in the technology by allowing ustoputittothetestinthis manner, and I’m sure they’re pleased with the result.
I also learned that the 10-mpg truck is here today in the form of the latest model highway tractors, even for someone who has
never put in time as a professional driver. It took the better part of the final leg of my drive to get it up there, and it happened on the last few miles before arriving in New Orleans, where I quickly slammed the truck into park and shut down the engine before even the slight- est time spent idling had the opportunity to push me back into the nines. (Who’d have thought 9+ mpg could be a disappointment?)
Finally, I learned that a truck can boast traditional styling, some hard edges, and still deliver tremendous double-digit fuel economy. And oh yeah, I learned that Memphis really does have the best barbecue. TN
grades and rolling terrain. I kept my speed at the speed limit, or against the top cruise setting of 68 mph in 70 mph zones. And I tried to mini- mize the number of times the active braking feature of Bendix Wingman Fusion brought a stop to my momen- tum, by dialing back the cruise speed when approaching traffic.
Getting comfortable with the technology
The Mack Anthems we drove were loaded with technology, including the Bendix Wingman Fusion colli- sion mitigation system with active cruise control. It can take some time to get used to active safety systems, such as those that monitor pre-set following distances and apply the brakes when necessary to maintain them. But I clearly became more comfortable with the technology in short order, as evidenced by my increased use of cruise control on each leg of the drive – from 74% on the first leg to 78% on the next, and finally into the mid-80%s by the end of the drive, when I achieved my best fuel economy.
The key to the getting comfort- able with the technology is to trust it, but not to expect it to do your job for you. Of course, ideally you can avoid brake applications altogether by dialing down your cruise speed when approaching slower-mov- ing vehicles. It also seemed to pay at times, following a brake appli- cation, to deactivate cruise and feather the accelerator to return to the set cruise speed rather than letting the truck do so in a hard- er-charging manner.
One mild annoyance is that any- time the adaptive cruise applied the brakes, I had to manually re-engage cruise control. This is going to be addressed with the next version of Wingman Fusion that Bendix will release next year. While adaptive cruise control isn’t meant to replace the driver, it was an aid that helped me achieve better fuel economy while also providing peace of mind that I had some assistance with me in the cab in the event a sudden stop was required. These active safety systems are proven to react faster than a human can.
By contrast, Park admitted to spending more time out of cruise
control, and his driving experience enabled him to achieve better fuel economy than I did while spending almost my entire drive in cruise. It goes to show an experienced driver can still outperform the machine at times.
It should be noted the Anthems on our drive should get better fuel economy once they are fully broken in, and when the predictive cruise feature “learns” the route we were traveling, committing the terrain to memory and then taking further advantage of the truck’s momentum when cresting and descending hills.
What we learned
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November 2018 • Truck News 29