PRESENT interest in ways and means of improving the speed at which many slow-moving vehicles climb grades, springs from a real necessity and an honest desire on the part of all agencies concerned to produce a practical solution.
The United States Bureau of Public Roads recently has undertaken to develop apparatus and a procedure which may be used to secure a large amount of data on current hill-climbing practice. It is planned that this method will be applied shortly through the agencies of several of the State Highway Planning Surveys.
The apparatus and procedure referred to were used during the past summer to secure a limited amount of “trial” data. Both the tests and data are discussed as well as certain plans which are now being formulated to make a special study of both new and used trucks in the dynamometer laboratory of the Motor Transport Division of the Army, and to correlate these data with actual hill-climbing tests.
The purpose of these experiments is to establish the optimum performance which may be expected of modern trucks, to evaluate the rate of decline of grade ability, and to check certain factors used in performance formulas.