The past 30 years as a Hino customer has given The Careful Carriers owner Zacc Smith zero reason to look anywhere else when it comes to purchasing new trucks.
Currently in the small but mighty fleet are two 700 Series SS2848s, a GH 500 and a GH 1728. Reliability and optimisation for the task has kept The Careful Carriers going back to Hino for the past three decades, and Zacc says that’s unlikely to change.
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“The biggest thing for us to continue with Hino is one word, and that’s optimum,” he says.
“Our Hinos are comfortable, they’re reliable vehicles and they just keep going. I’ve never been one to look for flashiness first and foremost. We ran single prime movers for many years.
“We do less than 20,000km in them a year, being a local transporter. We have different challenges to the line haul drivers. They have problems with distance related maintenance, whereas we have to focus more on starter motors and batteries.
“Our vehicles are starting 100 times a day, and our tyres are getting wear because we’re spinning around in yards. Hino have been great with the servicing side of it and addressing our specific issues.
“The 700 Series are barely a year old. We’re out of the body truck era, and we’ve just got the prime movers now.”
Matching the fleet, The Careful Carriers use the Hino-Connect telematics platform to help manage their operations across various areas.
Zacc says the data and compliance insights it can offer have been extremely helpful to the efficiency of the fleet, offering a strong link to the communication with drivers.
“The Hino-Connect telematics have been really good for the compliance side of things,” he says.
“It can track your over-speeds, over-idles, and a lot of compliance. You can manage all of your compliance KPIs through that, which has been really good for us.”
Streamlining communication with drivers by being able to monitor where trucks are has saved Zacc plenty of headaches and has made working with them easier too.
“Hino-Connect has stopped us from needing to have a lot of unnecessary communication with our drivers.
“There’s no longer the need to pick up the phone and say ‘hey, how far off are you? Where are you?’
“We know where they are. I just look it up on the app, and I can see where they are. We use it on our phones a lot.
“It also takes a lot of stress off the drivers, because whether you’re conscious of it or not, ringing a driver and asking them where they are puts a lot of pressure on them. This allows them to focus on the road and the job.
“No one wants to be micromanaged. If they can go about their job without that, it decreases the stress of the managers too. We’ve loved that the telematics have solved this for us.”
While the fleet stands at only four trucks, for the demands of The Careful Carriers’ contracts, the current Hinos are more than enough to do the job.
In combination with their skilled fleet of drivers and streamlined operations, they can constantly assess whether the fleet needs expansion.
“We’re more of an integrated transport solution, so our work tends to rise and fall,” Zacc says.
“So we increase our fleet as required by the customer. We take a lot of that from the customer themselves, what their requirements are and make sure we’re fulfilling those.”
Zacc and the team say they’re in the best hands to purchase through Hino, with Sci-Fleet Hino, who also act as their service dealership.
