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Trucking company failures reached the second-lowest level ever during 2011’s fourth quarter, reflecting the industry’s improving financial fortunes, according to a new report.

There was a day when the word “green” was used mostly to describe a paint color, money or grass. Today, it has new meanings relating to the quality of the environment, our fleets’ effect upon it and the challenges fleet managers face to meet local, state and federal regulations that target everything from pollution control to managing hazardous waste.

Class 8 truck sales and orders have continued to outpace the expectations of analysts and company executives, creating a round of hiring at truck plants and a healthy backlog of orders that should keep the plants busy for months to come.

This issue of Transport Topics includes our extremely popular Top 100 ranking of the largest for-hire motor carriers in the United States and Canada.

U.S. truck owners registered more heavy-duty vehicles in the year’s first quarter than a year earlier, but also purged older trucks at an even faster rate, causing the nation’s Class 8 fleet size to drop for the fifth time in the past six quarters.

The head of the National Private Truck Council said shippers are beginning to expand and upgrade their in-house fleets in response to improved business conditions and in anticipation of possible shortages of freight-hauling capacity and higher fuel costs in the year ahead.

President Barack Obama’s call last week for U.S. companies to add more alternative-fuel vehicles to their fleets did not provide more money for new trucks, but he is seeking funds to aid fleets’ purchases, Bloomberg reported Friday.

The U.S. Class 8 truck fleet appears to have halted a lengthy decline, according to new registration data for the last quarter of 2010, and fleet executives, truck dealers and analysts all said vehicle sales should continue to rise.

Carrier acquisition announcements this month by three fleets provide a clear signal that the pace of trucking mergers will pick up in 2011, industry officials said.

FleetPride Inc., an aftermarket distributor of heavy-duty truck and trailer parts, has acquired the assets of aftermarket distributor Heavy Vehicle Parts Inc. Terms were not disclosed.