Truckonomics: Something to take some of the 'ouch' out of trucking.
By Advance Business Capital
Big Hopes on a Wingliner and a Prayer

Take two guys and a gee-whiz trailer concept, and you've got a welcome sign of truckonomic green shoots. Bob Hakken and Duke De Leeuw of Holland, Michigan recently signed a licensing agreement to establish Wingliner North America. They’ll be sole distributors of Wingliner products in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Part Transformer, part back saver, Wingliner trailers streamline loading and unloading.  Push a button and in less than 10 seconds the sides of your trailer lift and fold flat on the truck roof. No awkward loading from only the back, no battling with curtains or tarps. Press another button, and the sides smoothly and securely return to place. A hydraulic lift system does all the work.

(To watch videos of it in action and see other configurations, including fold-and-go viewing stands, click here, here and here.)

Inventor and entrepreneur Johann Strasser of Salzburg, Austria came up with the Wingliner concept in 1996 at the request of a 60-year-old customer with a bad back: how could he keep driving and making deliveries? Six months later Strasser delivered the first Wingliner to the lucky trucker.  Strasser’s Wingliner International now manufactures thousands of trailer kits a year, with a presence throughout Europe and in Australia, South America and Japan.

Of course, side access is not a new idea. Curtainside trailers evolved from tarp coverings and are widespread in Europe and the U.K.  In Texas in 1987, Fred Ufolla’s Nu-Van Technology company produced curtainsiders, and in 2004 Ufolla purchased six Wingliners for company use. Four years later, Ufolla said in Trailer/Body Builders magazine that the motorized folding mechanism on each was still going strong. (Nu-Van has since been sold and renamed EHS Industries.)

Hakken and De Leeuw have used a Wingliner for five years to deliver and haul goods in their wood-products business. "I could literally run my business out of the cab of that truck," Hakken says. The Wingliner dramatically increased efficiency -- adding the equivalent of an extra day's worth of invoices per week without increasing clock time. Hakken and De Leeuw think fleet managers will be similarly impressed by the technology’s potential. 

If they can make enough sales to fleet managers, the partners say, they hope to work with local manufacturers that now have extra capacity. In 2010, they’d like to see some, and eventually all, of the Wingliner kit components locally made.

Ambitious goals? Yes, but these two are operating on more than a wing and a prayer – they’ve got technology to back them up.

This article was drawn from information at Wingliner International , Grand Rapids Press, and Trailer/Body Builder.

Brought to you by Advance Business Capital, www.advancebcap.com