I got a rare treat mid-last month when Overdrive 2023 Trucker of the Year Jay Hosty happened to check in to note he'd be rolling through Nashville bringing home his 2022 Western Star 4900EX daycab as a daycab no more. That's right -- plans in this case come to full fruition, with the addition of the 100-inch custom Alliance Truck Group (ATG) rear-door sleeper. It's a looker, as these wide shots make clear as he rolled into the Love's on Trinity Lane where we were able to meet up on a rainy Wednesday a week before Christmas.
The 2022 4900EX rolling into the lot.
As with his prior Western Stars, including the one memorialized by Eston Hoffman of Pennsylvania on the occasion of Hosty's big Trucker of the Year win this time last year, the 2022 is Detroit-powered, yet there's a big difference. Rather than the Series 60 in those prior rigs, the DD15 here features some new wrinkles for Hosty with the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) emissions-control system (not to mention an automated 13-speed transmission).
[Related: Nominations open! Compete for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year honor]
He's been sitting on full use of the unit now for a couple of years since purchase, waiting for the right price for the sleeper build, which got under way and finally finished in 2024. (Even with the truck sitting through multiple seasons in his Diamondhead, Mississippi, home base, worries over diesel exhaust fluid evaporation, he's found, may be a little more than they've been cracked up.)
The sleeper's set up with a rear door to the catwalk on the frame, likewise a sizable, close-to-standup boot opening to the cab.
Down the driver side from the front, a small closet then gives way to a "gaucho" bed, he said, that folds up to a table with two seats.
Owner-operator Jay Hosty is pictured here along the driver-side at the table, with the bed folded up.
On the passenger side, the shower sits just behind the cab, then giving way to the kitchenette.
The kitchen features a refrigerator, sink and countertops, storage, microwave and more.
The layout mimicks what he'd had in his first Western Star and its Star Class custom sleeper, a shorter 80-inch bunk overall but configured more or less the same way. A couple of details he'd hoped for didn't make it into the final design -- he wanted a slightly shorter-than-standard bed to maximize the width of the closet that sits between it and the cab, for instance.
With the truck itself, too, though he'd spec'd it with 2.64 rears to allow for a 60-mph cruise in 11th gear for the 13 speed to maximize fuel savings, the truck was delivered with 3.08 rears -- "they said they wouldn't gear it that low because it'd be a 100-mph truck," said Hosty, his "life in the slow lane" motto notwithstanding. Regular readers will recall that motto was there for all the four-wheelers passing him on the driver-side hood of his '06 Western Star -- still is there, in fact. (Hosty plans to turn that unit over the next years into a rig reserved exclusively for show, he said.)
And with time, yes, he'll get the lettering he needs for the same on this unit. For now, the side of the hood remains bare, though four-wheelers will still be passing it often enough. Hosty hasn't changed his ultimately frugal ways, moving slowly to save on fuel -- he was getting around 10 mpg bobtail in the truck so far, he said.
View of the instrument cluster from the driver's seat.
An impressive unit, all around, turning the heads of a variety of fleet drivers in the Love's parking lot when I saw it last month. You can get a look at it yourself come March, Hosty noted -- he'll have it parked up out front of the Louisville Convention Center with the ATG display at the Mid-America Trucking Show. (Get registered for the big show at this link.)
Kuenn McClinton of Elegance on 18 Wheels, too, got his own look at it after the build at ATG headquarters in Indiana. Find some video footage by McClinton in the vid below, following the beautiful featured 359:
[Related: They said he'd fail, but he proved them wrong: Overdrive's Trucker of the Year, Jay Hosty]
