Longing for stability in freight
Summary
I cut my freight teeth doing analysis of a light-weight, state of the art “quiet” cab-over at an OEM in 1981. I don’t recall fleets ever saying to an OEM that that truck was good enough, and not to change it for the next few years; "Send your engineers home. Option content for trucks (read that as “fleet choices") leads to literally millions of permutations of possible builds that OEMs must consider on the production line. Think of Henry Ford’s Model T: essentially unchanged for 15 years or more until his competitors started providing better choices. Standardizing components and option content can only help increase volume for costly items like batteries, motors, those high voltage orange cables with expensive connectors, controllers, software, sensors and more.