The Case for 55
We are going to talk about perhaps one of the least fanciful parts of the job within the trucking industry: driving slowly. Not the agony of being at a standstill in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but going 55 miles per hour. There are two major benefits to putting a limit on your speed: fuel efficiency and safety, and each is worse off the faster and faster you drive.
Fuel Efficiency
There are hundreds of factors that impact how many miles to the gallon your diesel truck gets, but one of the biggest ones is overcoming drag, or air resistance. The formula for drag is (.5 * Drag Coefficient * Velocity * Velocity * Air Resistance * Area). That is a lot to take in, but you may notice that velocity is mentioned twice; that is not an accident. As a result, it is the most impactful on the amount of drag your truck feels, and how much fuel is needed to overcome it.
For comparison, sixty-five miles per hour would be about 40% more drag than fifty-five miles per hour, and seventy-five miles per hour is 33% more than sixty-five and 85% more than fifty-five. Fifty-six is about four percent faster.
The natural conclusion you might take from this is to go only one mile per hour to minimize drag, but there are other factors in play such as the base fuel consumption from running the engine, so fifty-five miles per hour is the estimated best balance.
Safety
Like drag, the amount of kinetic energy a truck has increases tremendously with each additional mile per hour. The formula is (.5 * Mass * Velocity * Velocity). Because velocity is counted twice, the same percentage changes apply as with drag: seventy-five miles per hour is roughly 85% more deadly than fifty-five miles per hour. Nobody intends to get into an accident, but it is better to get into one moving as slow as possible to minimize damage caused.
Conclusion
We have one final tidbit for you to consider when deciding how fast you should go; the Internet has a calculator to show how much time you save by speeding, and it is a lot less than you may imagine. Traveling fifty-five miles in an hour naturally takes an hour, but going up to seventy-five miles per hour only saves you fifteen minutes. With today’s diesel prices, that is a hard amount of time to justify saving for eighty percent more fuel!
There has been much talk in the halls of Congress about speed limiters, though that has been put on ice until the end of the Trump Administration. While there is nobody forcing you to go fifty-five miles per hour, it is a good rule of thumb for managing risk, financially or otherwise!
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