Diatribe: Weighing in on truck skirts

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Updated: January 31, 2012 4:23PM

Is there anything that California hasn’t had a hand in making ugly?

The latest case in point is trailer wind deflectors. These winglike skirting devices are generally found at the bottom of over-the-road 53-foot-long truck trailers. The premise is that these things save thousands of gallons of fuel per year — not chump change if you have a fleet of tractor-trailers like J.B. Hunt or Schneider Trucking Co. California requires drivers of 53-foot-plus truck trailers to use them.

I suppose these things share properties similar to the blended winglets found on many of today’s airliners — those curved-up things at the end of the wing that looks like another vertical stabilizer (a “tail” to those from Ohio).

Apparently the allowance of cutting through the wind causes less resistance when traveling at higher speeds (like jet travel and some long-haul truckers). Theoretically, all of this makes sense. Realistically, however, when is this world going to stop its weakening of old-fashioned American symbols? What’s next: Outlaw motorcycle gangs being made to ride Vespas?

I wrote a rant a while back about the once-fabled 18-wheeler quickly becoming a 14-wheeler with the advent of wider single tires instead of the dual tandem-axle truck tires normally seen for the past century. That’s bad enough. Now along come trailer skirts to further sissify those poor guys and gals who roam the country in gear-jamming rides.

I love long-haul trucks and therefore, long-haul truckers. With few exceptions they are the most professional group of drivers to ever put the pedal to the metal.

I can understand the desire to save fuel and, by extension, money. But I also ask at what price is a legend worth discarding? Just how delighted is a road warrior we’ll call “Tiny” going to be when he’s pulling into a truck stop for some food and fuel in a truck clad in skirts? All of his colleagues who are driving gravel haulers, tankers and slabs of steel will be wetting themselves from laughing at Tiny’s “darling” skirts.

Tiny likely will get mad, whip out a stiletto and gouge out the eye of at least one, possibly two, of the drivers who are disrespecting him. The person or persons responsible — the management of J.B. Hunt or Schneider’s — may be 2,000 miles away and totally oblivious to the sight of a bleeding trucker, just to save $2,153 (give or take) per year.

If trucking companies really want to save money shouldn’t they do away with paint? After all, when Frank Borman was CEO at Eastern Airlines he had all the once-beautiful blue, green and white livery removed from the company’s aircraft because it saved about 300 pounds of weight, which cuts down on the fuel bill.

Why not make trailers out of wood instead of high-grade steel? Think of the weight that would save. How about recruiting drivers from Weight Watcher meetings instead of hiring guys who look like they could beat up an SS Storm Trooper on the Western Front?

America’s truckers have an image to uphold and it’s one that should be held in high esteem, not degraded every time somebody is looking for ways to save a few bucks. That’s admirable, but misplaced, company loyalty.

For the most part, blended winglets on an aircraft look cool; trailer skirts do not.

During World War II, submariners carried faulty torpedoes during the early part of the war. The Navy’s Bureau of Ordinance was too stubborn to allow submarine commanders to deactivate the magnetic exploders and use contact exploders, which were nearly 100 percent reliable. So, being resourceful, the skippers would wave goodbye, and once they were out of eyesight order the torpedoes modified immediately. If they returned to base with any leftovers they changed them back.

Truckers should do the same thing with those skirts. Full load or not, there would still be room inside the trailer to hide the skirts until the trucks returned to their depots. Truckers would preserve their images, the “fuel savings” would be shown to not exist and eventually the entire experiment would be junked.

This country was founded on ingenuity. It’s time for truckers to employ their ingenuity. To quote Isaac Hayes’ theme from “Shaft”: “You damn right!”

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. E-mail him at vinikour@comcast.net.