Hm, just wanna throw some stuff out there...
I thought I heard somewhere that flat-nosed semi-trucks were outlawed from being made in the U.S. (you can still drive them though) due to safety concerns,
It's not that they're outlawed, it's because the laws *changed* and now they don't make good business sense.
Back in The Good Old Days, when the trucking industry in the US was regulated by the government, there was (amongst other things) a *very* strict 55-foot overall length limit. From the furthest bumper protrusion to the back of the Moffett hanging off your flatbed, you couldn't go a fraction of an inch over 55 feet.
Now, when you have a box van on a semi truck, there's the issue of clearance from the back of the cab to the pivot point at the fifth wheel. For proper maneuvering, you need around 200 degrees of swing, so you need a big gap between the cab back and the kingpin. So that distance is lost. Then there's the distance from the back of the cab to the bumper, known as the BBC. (Yes, snicker.) The distance between BBC to kingpin is pretty much fixed, and the overall length was rigidly fixed, so the bigger the BBC, the more you had to cut down the trailer, and thus you had less room to put paying loads. To maximize load space, cabovers were king because of the stubby BBC; Long-haul cabs had 'coffin' sleepers on cab-overs, with just barely enough room to fit a single man behind the seats for the night.
However, regulating the industry had an unfortunate side-effect of propping up the Teamster's Union, and all the unsavory characters that were embedded in that organization. Breaking the Teamsters was one of the real reasons behind the deregulation of the market in '79, for better or for worse.
With deregulation, the 55-foot overall limit was gone. In its place was a 53-foot limit on trailer length, and NONE on overall length. As long as your trailer wasn't too long, and you didn't overweight any axle, you could pull anything with anything else. Cabovers lost their big advantage, and the disadvantages (Harsh ride because you're over or ahead of the steering axle instead of bridged between, extra-nose heavy making for awkward bobtail handling, the HUGE doghouse between the seats) were piling up. About the only advantage they had left was the 'tip cab forward for engine access' freedom for maintenance, and even THAT disappeared once you got trucks like the long-nose petes showing up where everything from radiator-to-flywheel and some of the transmission were accessable with the hood up.
The real death knell for Cabovers was fuel economy. Ever since the OPEC embargo and the gas crisis, truck manufacturers were dumping huge amounts of money into aerodynamic trucks, but they were stymied because everyone wanted a cabover for trailer length, and a cabover is a bloody brick wall, aerodynamically. The '79 deregulation was like magic, especially for the Kenworth team; Suddenly they could stretch the truck out as long as they needed. So they took the longest-nosed truck they had, the W900, and spent years making a new hood and cab. When they were ready, they ran the W900 on a test track for a fuel economy test, took it into the garage and swapped the hood and cab with the new slick one, changed
nothing mechanically, and got an immediate 22% increase in fuel economy. Burning less fuel to do the same run means less of the payday goes into your gas tank, and even though the T600 got nothing but derision when it was released in '85, your paycheck is the ultimate final argument, and so the rest was history.
So with all THAT out of the way, I nominate a different truck for Road Ranger.
The Kenworth T700. The slickest Kenworth *ever*.
It's also bloody huge in there. You can sit up in the upper bunk and stretch your arms over your head, it's insane. With the biggest sleeper, you can fold up the beds and pull up a table and there's more than enough room for four people to sit around it. Not 'stuff four guys around it', but actually sit and eat a full meal.
I love it. It's this huge, monstrous, monolithic THING. It doesn't feel pain, fear, or remorse, and it absolutely
will not stop until all your stuff is delivered. The only way I could make it look better would be to replace the grill surround with a body-colour piece.
[s]I think I want to have babies with it.[/s] No, sorry, too much.
In other topics!
Loco. Loco means 'Insane'.
So let's go insane.
The Union Pacific 'Big Boy' 4-8-8-4 locomotive.
Sixteen drive wheels, 132 feet long, 567 metric tonnes
empty, it's so huge
it has to be hinged in the middle.
If that doesn't qualify as insane, I dunno what does.
). There was also another scene where he mentioned how he loved her laugh, to which she chuckled a little. I liked that she wasn't gunning for his job. In fact, generally speaking the Renegades are organized and loyal to a greater degree than the Decepticons ever were. There's not much backstabbing... if at all. 
