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MIAMI BEACH — Volvo Trucks said it intends to introduce a liquefied natural gas engine for its heavy-duty over-the-road vehicles in 2014, which company officials hailed as the next step in the industry’s quickly evolving move toward natural gas as a primary fuel.

Bigger trucks and a field study of the hours-of-service restart provision are among items American Trucking Associations said it wants included in any highway bill that emerges from the House-Senate conference committee weighing the legislation.

Trailer orders staged a comeback last month after three straight monthly declines, climbing 12% above both the year-earlier month and March, as fleets stepped up the pace of replacing older equipment, ACT Research reported.

Trucking managers in information technology and finance will meet jointly in Tampa, Fla., next month to explore opportunities for efficiency improvement through IT and strategies for handling significant tax changes expected at the end of 2012.

PRINCETON, N.J. — Transportation companies are using automation and data management technology to streamline procedures that used to be complex or labor intensive, trucking and logistics leaders said.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Low participation by Mexican carriers in the cross-border trucking program could lead to the resumption of Mexican tariffs on U.S. goods, an official with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said.

Not long ago, getting rid of used oil was a problem for fleets. These days, for some fleets used oil is now a profit center.

The nation’s heavy-duty truck fleet grew in the first quarter for only the second time over the past 30 months, climbing 0.37% to 3.53 million vehicles registered on March 31.

Truck tonnage rose 3.5% in April over year-ago levels, American Trucking Associations reported, continuing a pattern of modest increases that mirror the overall U.S. economy.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Trucking’s leading advocacy group signaled growing unhappiness with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s handling of its new safety regime, and told the agency it needed to be more responsive to the industry.