It is a fact of life in operators in the car carrying sector, that working at heights has become an ongoing issue for many trucking operations. PowerTorque spoke to Goran Koviloski, Fleet Manager at PrixCar to find out some of the issues and the smart solutions the company has come up with to get the car transport task done as safely as possible.
Goran has been fleet Manager at PrixCar for four and a half years and in car carrying for 20. He worked for the Patrick and Autocare operations, before they became part of the PrixCar operation. After serving his time as a mechanic he worked his up through the business driving trucks and developing his career into his current role. He works out the company’s head office based in Altona in Melbourne.
Another factor, which is a priority for the operation is no injuries, and PrixCar has managed to operate this year without any lost-time injuries in the transport division.
The trailers have been designed so that the driver will never have to go above 1.2m off the ground to load a trailer. The first car will be driven onto, what looks like a flat trailer, but the hydraulic rams with lift the frame it is attached to up and over the prime mover’s cab frame. Subsequent cars will be similarly lifted to the correct height after being driven onto the trailer, before the last cars are driven onto the lower floor.
“Working at heights has been eliminated from our operation, and that’s something we are very proud of,” says Goran. “What we have in Australia is quite unique. We can design our own trailers and they work better for us.
“We have trialled trailers built overseas in the past, but we weren’t successful, because they are a totally different build and too low to the ground. They are designed to drive on the autobahns in Europe, whereas Australia’s quite harsh on trailers. They are just not robust enough for us.”
“We take great pride in making sure that we look after our equipment and keep them correctly maintained on regular programmed schedules, which ensures that we have the latest uptime of trailer usage possible, while trucks can be in the PrixCar fleet for around five years or 1,000,000km, whichever comes first,” says Goran.
The recent spike in work as the covid era car buying boom has continued, and this has meant the fleet has been refreshed earlier than normal, keeping maintenance costs down and drivers happy.
Because unhooking the car trailers from the prime mover is quite awkward PrixCar organise the maintenance schedule with the whole combination getting worked on at the same time. This tends to see the prime mover getting services at shorter intervals than normally expected, but Goran reckons the this is a more effective way to organise things, and definitely minimises breakdowns.
