The few years since Overdrive met Rob Hallahan, then a one-truck owner-op, have been unqualified good ones as business goes.
Hallahan Transport ballooned in a few short years to a 12-driver, 9-truck fleet hauling mostly van freight and some refrigerated, which it pivoted to with a leased fleet owner when COVID hit last year. Hallahan was a semi-finalist in Overdrive's 2021 Small Fleet Champ award program last year, too, and can now add another trophy to the case.
His personal 2022 custom Peterbilt 389, "Joke's on You," is the first-place finisher in the Overdrive's Pride & Polish awards' Limited Mileage category: The rig gives him a new, appropriately stunning flagship for a business that friends have started calling a veritable Easter-egg basket for the pastels Hallahan's favored in past builds and other equipment acquisitions.
"I built the truck to show," he said, but also to serve the short-haul needs of a customer in his La Crosse, Wisconsin, home base. Otherwise, Hallahan in 2020 ceded his prior personal truck, a 2019 Kenworth W900L, to a driver and now works full-time in the back office to serve his own and drivers' needs, given the growth the company's experienced.
The long process of putting "Joke's on You" together delivered much-needed head-clearing opportunities amidst the very long days dispatching, invoicing, negotiating with brokers for his drivers and leased-on operators, and so much more. It started in September 2020 with an order from the Peterbilt factory, purposefully delayed to January to gain the 2022 model year designation, one of the truck maker's first for the year.
It was delivered early this year to Sioux Falls Peterbilt in South Dakota with a "grass burner" exhaust. The rig's Cummins X15's exhaust system features modified placement of the diesel particulate filter. The DPF sits behind the fuel tank on the passenger side now. Hallahan wanted to make sure steps / battery box on either side retained traditional symmetry to enhance the rig's old-school look, despite new-school emissions controls.