The success of any trucking company relies on a manager’s ability to keep their fleet in great shape. Your trucks are the heart of your business, so you need to keep every aspect of your trucks maintained and ready, so they’ll be able to keep the shipments – and income – flowing.
For this to happen continually and without fail, you need to ensure that your trucks are inspected and undergo regular maintenance. As any vehicle owner knows well, proper maintenance includes monitoring a number of aspects of a truck. When you’re talking about vehicles that get pushed to the limit on distant highways and perform some of the world’s toughest jobs, you need to take tire maintenance seriously.
Tire Lifespan and Purchasing a New Truck
Even the most rugged trucks in the world require regular maintenance. If you’re going to purchase the new Western Star 47X for your fleet, you’ll get a longer lifespan out of your truck when you ensure it always remains in proper working order.
Conducting a Tire Test
Assessing tires to determine which kind will best serve your fleet can pose a considerable challenge for trucking fleet managers because it is so difficult to maintain consistency between trucks. Factors such as
- Vehicle Models
- Routes
- Kinds and Size of Loads
- Weather Conditions
- Driver Styles
will impact the performance and wear of tires substantially. Consequently, deciding on a particular brand of tire for your fleet may be something of a wild goose chase.
Additionally, the goal of settling on one kind of tire may be counter-productive since different kinds of truck tires will be better or worse suited for different applications. As such, you may be better off going with a variety.
Keeping Records
You can’t perform a full factory tire test on all of your tires because that goal would take continual effort. You need to keep those tires in use to meet the deadlines of your company, so you can’t constantly be interrupting the workflow to perform tests.
What you can do instead is to keep careful records of the lifespan of your tires to gain a better sense of when they should be replaced. Likewise, you probably aren’t going to be able to keep track of everything that happens in the life of every single tire on your trucks.
The Value of an Educated Guess
You can compromise by asking your drivers to report significant tire events. From there, you can extrapolate the statistics to determine an average idea of the lifespan of your tires. If you keep careful records, you’ll likely be able to gain a strong sense of how much wear different kinds of tires will withstand over the years.
Assessing the tires on your transport trucks will help to ensure that your trucks are always maintained properly, but they can also provide you with perspective about the wear different tires take over the years. If you’d like more information about matching the right kinds of tires for your trucks, contact your dealer to learn more.
