Royal Jones and the arithmetic of a gallon

Royal Jones wanted a wind tunnel. What he could afford was a hill. In the 1980s, with a young trucking company to keep afloat, he and his team coasted trucks downhill in New Mexico to see what changes to their shape would do. Gravity supplied the motion. The road supplied the verdict. It was an economical arrangement, although probably less impressive on a tour of the facilities.

The episode is a useful introduction to Jones, co-founder, president and CEO of Mesilla Valley Transportation. He has spent decades attending to the unglamorous details of moving freight: the air around a trailer, the way a driver uses a throttle, the diesel required to finish a trip. His other enthusiasm is racing. There, the No. 131 car gives him a different reason to pay attention to a machine.

Between those two interests sits a working life rooted in southern New Mexico. Jones’s story includes a lumber yard, a partnership with another truck driver, a costly discovery in the trip records, and a promise about a sticker. The fleet grew. So did the number of people whose decisions mattered to it.

When four miles to the gallon was too few

Before he owned trucks, Jones worked around equipment at his father’s lumber yard. He learned to operate it at twelve. By nineteen, he had bought a truck and become a driver. His daughter Jackie has described the purchase as the result of about a year’s saving, and a career choice his family greeted with considerably less enthusiasm than he did.

The lumber yard had already given him a practical introduction to business. Trucking gave him a business of his own, along with an education that arrived in fuel receipts. He met Jimmy Ray while driving for Jimmy’s father, Joe D. Ray. Eventually, Royal and Jimmy were working from the same office, each with trucks and each doing the billing and tax work that ownership requires.

Combining their operations offered a way to stop doing everything twice. Their partnership discussions came together in late 1981; MVT dates its founding to 1982. The name borrowed its identity from the valley around Las Cruces. The founders were also the company’s first drivers, which meant neither had to imagine what the job looked like from the cab.

Expansion introduced an awkward discovery. Jones had managed roughly five to five and a half miles per gallon when he drove his own truck. Drivers he hired were averaging around four. At that rate, the growing operation was losing money. Buying another truck had multiplied the fuel problem along with the opportunity.

He worked on equipment and driving habits, including a 68-mile-per-hour limit. The drivers’ mileage improved. The business began making money. That early experience helps explain why fuel economy remained such a persistent interest: Jones had watched an apparently modest difference threaten the thing he wanted to build.

A hill will do

Once fuel became a question worth pursuing, the questions multiplied. Could a different configuration use less? Was a promising improvement real? What happened when two trucks that appeared much alike delivered different results? Jones kept investigating, rather than accepting resemblance as proof.

The downhill experiments came from that appetite. A wind tunnel would have allowed the company to study aerodynamic changes. The hill offered a cheaper way to compare how trucks behaved while coasting. The procedure was plain enough to describe without a brochure: change something, send the truck down, pay attention.

As MVT developed, its equipment incorporated features intended to reduce the work of pushing through air and rolling down a road. Trailer skirts, tails and wheel covers became part of the conversation. Each device made a proposition about savings. Jones’s interest was in whether that proposition held up in use.

That distinction matters in a business with a great deal of equipment to buy. A small saving repeated across many vehicles can justify an investment. A small disappointment can repeat just as faithfully. Testing gives the purchasing decision something firmer than the seller’s confidence.

In 2016, MVT and InnoMetric MPG formed MVT Solutions, offering testing and consulting to the wider trucking industry. The partnership followed several years of working together. The company says its first year using InnoMetric’s methods identified $3 million in savings. Jones’s long-running question had acquired an organization devoted to asking it for other people.

The prize goes in the driveway

Better hardware left another variable: the person operating it. Even trucks equipped for efficiency could produce markedly different mileage in different hands. A company could buy the same machine for two drivers and receive two different fuel bills. The specification sheet ended before the trip did.

MVT built incentives around that fact. Its programs included monthly fuel rewards, a quarterly opportunity to win a car, and a $25,000 annual award tied to mileage performance and safety conditions. Better technique could have a consequence visible in a driver’s own driveway. Saving fuel became something more immediate than a management preference.

The rewards have continued. In September 2026, MVT announced Reynaldo Ramirez as a quarterly car winner. He had averaged 11.96 MPG across 32,456 miles, with 1.10 percent idle time and a perfect CSA score. He had been with the company since 2007. Those figures describe his recorded performance, rather than a promise about what every driver or every route can achieve.

Jones’s concern with drivers also reached beyond fuel. In the mid-2000s, he wanted turnover brought below 50 percent, even when the company’s existing rate was already below the large-carrier industry average. A retention effort involving pay and morale brought it down to 35 percent in the period described. The people doing the work were an operating concern in their own right.

Driver competitions offered another way to recognize skill. When a safety fair and truck-driving championship was being organized at MVT’s El Paso facilities, Jones backed it and took part in a contest for company presidents. An owner could join the test, too. More recently, the company’s Ask & Accelerate videos have put him and other executives in front of questions submitted by drivers.

“But I’m most proud of our people.”

Royal Jones · Run on Less, 2025

Number 131, after hours

Racing supplies a livelier setting for Jones’s mechanical curiosity. He has raced modifieds and sprint cars, and Vado Speedway Park identifies him as both its owner and a competitor in winged sprint cars. The number 131 belongs to this side of his life. A freight schedule and a racing schedule make very different requests of a driver.

One 2003 result captures the distinction neatly. At El Paso Speedway Park, Jones won his heat but was disqualified for approaching the scales in the wrong direction. He started the feature nineteenth. With twelve laps remaining, he had reached the lead; he went on to win. The evening supplied both a reminder to read the procedural details and a chance to make up ground.

Owning tracks has also put him in a position to give somebody else a start. Racing announcer Ruben Mireles remembers Jones hiring him in 2012 to announce at El Paso and Southern New Mexico speedways. Mireles was still a child. When online comments were unkind about his early efforts, Jones defended the beginner, pointing out his age and the fact that he was trying.

Mireles went on to work larger events. That small act of backing a novice belongs in Jones’s story as much as a finish position does. A racetrack depends on people learning their jobs, often in public and within earshot of everybody. Encouragement can be quite practical when the microphone is already on.

The sticker that stayed

Another relationship left a mark on MVT’s trailers. Billy Elkins, an early driver and a veteran, brought Jones POW/MIA stickers and asked him to put them on the equipment. The company had six trailers then. Jones agreed. In a later conversation about Elkins, he said MVT had never stopped applying the stickers.

By the time of that conversation, he put the trailer fleet at 6,500. He remembered calls from people who had seen the marking on the road and connected it with a missing family member. A request between a driver and an owner had become a repeated, public gesture. The detail is small enough to overlook until somebody explains why it is there.

Jones’s community involvement has taken other forms. MVT began an annual charity golf tournament in 2015. By the account accompanying his 2026 college recognition, it had raised more than $500,000 for community needs, including support for veterans, children and educators. His giving has also included support for New Mexico State University, local students and youth activities.

At a Las Cruces business panel in 2023, his advice included being honest, working hard and finding work one loves. He also urged business owners to give back. None of those instructions required specialized equipment. Like the hill, they were available before the company became large.

Still asking about horsepower

In 2026, Doña Ana Community College named Royal W. Jones Jr. its honorary Associate in Prebusiness recipient, recognizing entrepreneurship, philanthropy and mentorship. The title has a pleasing chronology: prebusiness, after decades of business. It acknowledged the work and relationships a conventional résumé can struggle to fit into a line.

He was still discussing the machinery that September. In a NACFE podcast interview, Jones talked about aerodynamics, maintenance, fuel prices and MVT Solutions. He also addressed horsepower and the choice to leave some available power unused. The questions remained specific, even after more than four decades in trucking.

That is where the different pieces of his life meet: learning equipment young, driving for a living, testing trucks, entering races, backing drivers and encouraging a beginner with a microphone. Each involves somebody making a decision in real conditions. A gallon, a lap, a promise. Jones has given the small things a long time to add up.