Allison Transmission has announced the findings of a three year customer survey it commissioned to calculate total cost of ownership, revealing a two per cent reduction in total ownership cost compared with AMTs.
Allison claims that operating data for the survey was collected over 12 months while the maintenance data was compiled over three years, across a fleet of 19 waste collection vehicles with the Derichebourg group’s French waste collection company, Poly-Environnement.
Allison claim’s the customer study allowed it to calculate the total cost of ownership(TCO) for vehicles using an Allison fully automatic transmissions or automated manual transmissions (AMT) for their entire operating life, which is seven years.
Based on the study’s findings, Allison says its automatic transmissions reduced calculated TCO by two per cent compared to the AMT solution.
This was despite an apparently much more severe duty cycle for the Allison-equipped trucks, the company claims.
It says the trucks stop-start duty cycles included more than 1,100 bin pick-ups per day and says the difference in TCO lies in the advantages of Allison transmissions, including lower maintenance costs and maximum uptime, while controlling fuel consumption.
The purpose of the study was to define the impact of the Allison automatic transmission on the TCO of a fleet, compared to an automated manual transmission.
In order for refuse fleets to make the best decisions, a full TCO was calculated to make the most comprehensive comparison for return on investment when purchasing a refuse truck.
Allison said the TCO calculation did not include other less easy to evaluate advantages for a fleet such as ease of operation resulting in reduced driver turn over, a smoother ride for the driver and crew, more precise truck control and manoeuvrability in narrow city streets resulting in “less broken truck mirrors”, and increased productivity by loading more weight in a single job shift.
Allison Transmission carried out the large-scale TCO study in partnership with the Poly-Environment fleet and the Derichebourg group, which is a global operator of international environmental services with a presence in 10 countries and more than 42,000 employees.
“We equip most of our refuse collection vehicles with Allison transmissions. They bring advantages of handling, reliability and performance,” said Emmanuel Brun, deputy managing director of Poly-Environnement
“As the owner of a large fleet, we also wanted to precisely know their economic impact. An especially important point for Poly-Environnement is the possibility that external electrification equipment can be plugged into the PTO (power take-off) pad of the Allison product,” said Brun.
“This external system drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions during body use,” he added.
The study area was centred around the northern suburbs of Paris, France, an area of more than 250,000 inhabitants.
Nineteen vehicles, seven with an Allison fully automatic transmission and 12 with an AMT, were tracked. The vehicles had been operating in the area for 28 months before this study and the study was based on 12 months of standard data from Poly-Environment across more than 9,600 shifts was used for the survey.
“The results guarantee total neutrality because the routes associated with vehicles and usual drivers have not been modified. For maintenance, we were able to collect 40 months, including 28 months before the study of real data,” said Michel Dos Anjos, technical manager of Poly-Environment.
This field study was based on a fleet with real activity, identical bodies, vehicles of the same age, but of different brands, and with heterogeneity of refuse collections per vehicle, depending on the choice of the operation.
“In addition to this study, we also wanted to compare the fuel consumption between two vehicles equipped with the Allison fully automatic transmission and two vehicles equipped with an AMT,” said Brun.
“These four vehicles were followed for a month with the usual drivers, on strictly identical journeys, the same routes and the same types and masses of waste collected. The fuel consumption of vehicles equipped with the Allison were measured to be nearly 1 per cent below the AMTs on this test,” he added.
During the 12 months of collection, vehicles equipped with Allison fully automatic transmissions collected a per shift, average load more than nine per cent higher than vehicles equipped with an AMT.
Allison Transmission’s Development Manager for France,Stéphane Gonnandsaid that after analysing the data, Allison transmissions managed to maintain their TCO advantage despite much more severe operating conditions.
“This is made possible thanks to reduced maintenance costs, which limit downtime while controlling their consumption,” he said.
“In our next step, we will focus on calculating the exact impact of Allison’s productivity and the higher average load per truck on TCO. We’ll focus and give more insights on reduced “litres/per tonne” collected, which is the adequate metrics for refuse trucks consumption” said Gonnand.
