Jon Fleck, best known for his Makin Bacon kitchen utensil, is at it again and this time he’s looking at the tires on semis, says JSOnline.
Now Fleck, a 47-year-old Minnesotan who specializes in seemingly simple ideas that work, has a new one: a fabric wheel cover that cuts fuel consumption of over-the-road trucks by as much as 1%.
That may not sound like a lot, but with America’s millions of heavy trucks averaging less than 6 mpg, little numbers soon add up to big ones.
They did for Schneider National Inc. The Green Bay trucking company, one of the nation’s largest, plans to buy 48,000 of Fleck’s gizmos, enough to cover the wheels of all 12,000 Schneider tractors.
The company, which is regarded as a technology leader in trucking, is doing this even though it estimates the net fuel savings will be less than 1%.
But Fleck’s covers are cheap enough that Schneider vice president of purchasing Steve Duley figures they’ll pay for themselves in six to 12 months. And they appear durable enough, he said, to last five years or so.
Duley thought Fleck’s concept sounded logical from the outset.
“On the other hand,” he said, “it seemed like such a simple idea that if there was merit there, why didn’t somebody think of this before?”
Hard to say. The math looks pretty compelling.
The Deflecktor, as Fleck has dubbed his invention, retails for $50 on his Web site. With its huge order, Schneider probably gets a discount. But even at $50 a pop, the company’s one-time capital outlay totals $2.4 million.
Now for the savings. When installed fleet-wide, the covers should cut fuel use by 1.8 million gallons a year, Schneider estimates.
Photo from Deflecktor