Front loaders and side loaders have almost nothing in common from the shop’s point of view, even when they share a yard. That is changing, and the case for standardization has less to do with manufacturing than with what happens to the person ordering the parts, making the repair, and driving the truck.
Ask a fleet maintenance manager what ruins their week, and you will not hear much about payload or route density. You will hear about the truck that went down at 5:40 on a Monday morning, and whether the part needed was on the shelf or four days out.
That is the honest economics of collection. A refuse truck earns its keep in one place, and it is not the shop. When a vehicle is down, somebody covers the route or the route runs late. Overtime creeps in. The spare that was supposed to be a cushion becomes a daily driver. None of it shows up as a line item called downtime, but all of it is, and it is costly.
Getting that truck back out is rarely a matter of technician skill alone. The right part must be in the building, the fault has to be read correctly the first time, and the person holding the wrench needs to know the machine in front of them.
Two Trucks, One Yard, Almost Nothing in Common
A front loader and an automated side loader can serve the same fleet, roll out of the same gate every morning, and arrive at the same transfer station in the afternoon. In the shop, they have traditionally been treated as completely separate species. Different body structures, hydraulic layouts, controls, diagnostic paths, and service procedures, because nothing ever required them to be alike.
The clearest place to see what that costs is the parts room. No shop can afford to wait three days every time an ordinary component gives out, so inventory gets stocked by experience. When two vehicle families share almost nothing, that stock must be built twice. The valve on the shelf for the side loaders does nothing for the front loaders parked 20 feet away.
Some of that is unavoidable. Front load and side load collection are different jobs requiring genuinely different tools. But there is a difference between a truck that is specialized where the work demands it and a truck that is different simply because that is how it has always been.
That distinction matters more now that fleets have gotten sophisticated about total cost of collection. Purchase price is the easy number. The harder ones are how long a repair takes, how many unique part numbers the organization carries, and how fast a technician or driver can move between units when somebody calls out.
What Commonality Looks Like Once Somebody Counts It
Let’s answer that question with a number rather than a philosophy. How much of a front loader and a side loader actually needs to be different? The answer is far less than anyone assumed—a body design with more than 40 percent common components across the two trucks, and more than 230 individual parts shared between platforms.
The useful part of that second figure is what it replaced. Across the body, tailgate, hydraulics, rails, and electrical systems, the number of parts common to both trucks used to be zero. Hydraulics went from no shared components at all to shared routing and shared hardware.
The hoppers stayed separate, which is the right answer. Loading is the one place a front loader and a side loader are doing genuinely different work, so that is the one place the engineering should stay specialized. Everywhere else, commonality cost the trucks nothing. Capacity was maintained or increased across the range, and the front loader now reaches 33 yards. Standardization here meant removing duplication, not capability.
Complexity Hides in the Wiring
Parts counts are the visible half of the problem. The other half is hidden in the harness. Wiring is where refuse trucks have quietly gotten more complicated over the past 20 years, and it is where a lot of shop time disappears. Every added camera, sensor, and controller brings connectors, splices, and routing with it. A technician chasing an intermittent fault is often not diagnosing a component at all. They are tracing a circuit.
Standard build harnesses reduce wiring complexity by nearly 60 percent, and more than half of the remaining harnesses are common to both the side loader and the front loader. For a shop, that means fewer harnesses to stock, faster diagnosis with less tracing, simpler training, and less downtime per repair. It also means one technician can work on both platforms without learning two electrical systems.
The Cab Can Become a Diagnostic Workspace
The operator environment is worth examining honestly, because the refuse cab has not always been designed so much as built up one control at a time. A recent side loader cab might carry a camera monitor, a separate three-inch body display, hard-wired switch banks, and a joystick. A front loader might carry a seven-inch display, a joystick and as many as two dozen CAN control units. Each of those was a reasonable addition on its own. Together they produced a cab with three screens competing for attention, alert banners that could cover a camera view at the worst possible moment, a doghouse thick with wiring, and enough identical switches that an operator could reach for one and hit another.
Two shortcomings mattered more than the clutter. If a button failed, there was often no second way to perform the function. And there was no dynamic troubleshooting from the cab, so a fault that could have been identified in the seat became a trip to the shop.
The next generation consolidates that into a single 12-inch touchscreen with a split-screen view of cameras and machine operations, and cuts in-cab buttons by 66 percent. Cab functions now carry redundancy, so a single failed switch does not park the truck. Diagnostics, body data, and live feeds in one place instead of three.
The driver benefit is obvious. Any fleet that has put a front-load driver in a side loader on short notice knows what a familiar layout is worth. The maintenance benefit is quieter and probably larger, because diagnostic information that used to be buried across three screens is now in one place.
Designing for the Person Doing the Work
Common parts only solve half the problem. Those parts still have to be reachable, and access is not something that can be added after a design is finished. Several of the platform’s changes exist for no reason other than the technician. Tailgate locks that move from underneath the body to the tailgate rear bolsters takes the locking mechanism out of the debris path, allowing the tag axle to retract fully, and makes the locking area far easier to reach and clean. There should be additional covers over exposed areas.
Side skirts are now fully sealed, with harnesses raised up off the bottom rather than sitting where water and debris collect. Controller access cutouts were enlarged, and the pin access that used to require working around the controller housing moved to the front face.
None of this turns heads when the truck rolls down a residential street. In the shop, those little improvements are huge. A few minutes saved on one repair is not that big of a deal. The same few minutes across every PM, every fault chase, and every repair on a hundred trucks over a 10-year service life is a real number, and it is usually where good refuse equipment design proves itself.
Images courtesy of Environmental Solutions.
Built In, Not Bolted On
Fleets have added a remarkable amount of technology to collection vehicles in a short period of time, and most of it arrived as an installation rather than a design. Cameras are the clearest example. For years, they have been bolted to exterior brackets, hanging in an environment full of vibration, hydraulic heat, road salt, and airborne debris. Those installations fail in predictable places, and the failure is usually the mount or the connection rather than the camera itself.
Cameras should be built into the body itself in protected locations chosen so integration does not cost field of view. The reverse camera is incorporated with the brake light rather than bracketed nearby. Built in, not bolted on, is a meaningful distinction once a truck has been on route for three years.
As collection equipment gets more connected, this stops being a feature question and becomes an architecture question. Cameras, controls, diagnostics and data are part of the vehicle now. The more of these systems that get designed together, the fewer seams there are for complexity to collect in.
Common Where it Counts
Very few fleets are transformed by a single engineering decision. Uptime gets built from dozens of small ones. Having the part on the shelf. Recognizing a component because it is also on the truck in the next bay. Reaching it without pulling three other things off first. Finding the fault code where you expected it. Handing a driver a set of keys and watching them work out the controls in about 90 seconds.
Individually, each looks minor. Stacked together, they change how a fleet supports its equipment. Front loaders and automated side loaders will never do the same job, and they should not. Their loading systems and duty cycles differ because the work differs. The components behind those functions are another matter, and for a long time they were unique mostly because nobody had gone looking for the alternative.
That may be the most useful way to think about standardization in this industry. It is not the elimination of specialization, but rather being honest about where specialization is actually doing something and taking the difference out everywhere else.
Every one of those advances arrived with the option of adding complexity, and most took it. The harder problem, and the more valuable one for the people maintaining the result, is moving equipment forward while taking complexity out. Refuse work is going to stay complicated. Maintaining the equipment does not. | WA
The Heil® Co. is a leading manufacturer of refuse collection bodies and automated collection systems. Heil has been designing equipment for the solid waste industry for more than a century, with a focus on helping fleets improve performance, safety, and efficiency across a wide range of operational conditions. They have seen waste collection go from manual labor and open bodies to vehicles that collect, compact, record, and transmit information all day long.
Heil is part of the Environmental Solutions segment of Terex®, Inc. Through the Connected Collections® ecosystem, Heil refuse bodies, 3rd Eye® smart camera systems, Soft-Pak® waste hauler software, and Marathon® Equipment compactors and recycling equipment work together seamlessly to help fleet owners make better decisions, faster and achieve the lowest total cost of collection. For more information, visit .