TeamsterGrrrl

Yup, a lot of VW's future product plans have me shaking my head... Like the American market SUV for a start. Lotsa volume in the SUV segment, but they'll be up against over a dozen competitors in a price competitive market. And unless VW has something in that SUV to make it a real standout, why should anyone buy it instead of those dozen plus competitors. Then there's VW plan to specialize in electric cars- Less than 1% of the market and everyone loses money on them. Hopefully VW isn't serious about electrics and this is just propaganda to pacify CARB and the EPA...

IIRC I bought Cummins before I ever got on BMT, and Cummins has been good to me. I'm completely out of Volvo, had a few shares that I hadn't dumped years ago, and the ADR agent decided to dump Volvo a few weeks back so I'm thankfully outa Volvo. Of more importance is whether I should stick with VW or go back to Ford when VW buys back my TDI. I'm looking for something between the size and capabilities of a Golf at the smallest and a diesel Ranger at the biggest. I like the Golf Sportswagon, but if I can't get one with a diesel I'll be looking elsewhere. Fords small cars don't seem to be competitive, and even Ford's little SUVs are gas hogs, and an F150 is way bigger than I need. But if Ford comes through with the diesel Ranger, that's gonna be hard to resist.

And should I dump my small holding in Cummins stock and buy VW?

Yes, but do we want to let Scania's magnificent V8s take up residence in lowly International trucks?

Take an honest look at the situation: America buys 15 million new cars a year, about 50,000 a day. Thus around the same number of old cars are scrapped, and most scrapyards don't have space to store them for long. And while we're looking for a part to keep our valuable Macks or classic cars running, most of the cars getting scrapped are plain old F-150s and Camrys with no enduring value... Thus little market for their parts. Unfortunately most scrapyards give classic Macks and restorable collector cars the same path to the crusher... All they care about is scrap metal prices!

Saw one with a Telelect power line service body at auction a few years ago. It looked to be a former REA (rural electric) truck, built a few miles away in Watertown, SD. The REA co-ops tend to go together and do volume buys of identical trucks from Telelect, and I suspect they did the same thing with Fords instead of the current Freightliner M2s 80+ years ago.

With all due respect, I wouldn't write off Cummins so quick. Cummins has succeeded because they specialize in engines and can supply EPA2010, Tier 4, Natural Gas, and other specialized engines while the companies that build trucks and engines on the side struggle to adapt. For example, while Volvo took a couple years to bring the American market Mack Titan to market, Cummins had EPA 2007 engines ready to go and Already engineered into the CL. Same with natural gas engines- Cummins is supplying the integrated manufacturers because Cummins specializes in engines and can come up with solutions while the integrated manufacturers struggle.

Smart move for VW Group, though why didn't they buy NAV when it bottomed? With MAN designed engines in Navistar trucks they're already partway in the U.S. market. And given the difficulty of "rationalizing" MAN and Scania post-merger, buying NAV gives MAN a role to play where they won't bump heads with Scania by letting MAN concentrate on the 3rd world and American markets that can't afford or won't appreciate Scania's premium products. NAV brings something to the party too- Their conventional cab trucks might fill a gap in VW's truck ranges in the countries where a short conventional like the Navistar 7600 might make sense to pull the shorter bulk and intermodal trailers.

Good point- I talk to a lot of people in politics that think smaller trucks are better for the environment and easier on the roads. Problem is, it takes too many of those "smaller trucks" to move the same load. The most environmentally friendly, easiest on the roads, and most efficient truck is usually the biggest truck that the roads can accommodate. For example, a B train with a cabover tractor and double 40 foot containers would use less fuel, be easier on the roads, and get in less accidents than a pair of conventional tractors hauling a single trailer. Give it 10 horsepower per ton and the four wheelers will never notice the difference, except how neatly it bends in twice as many places to get around the corners.

Sounds like there may be some euphoric recall goin' on here... Been decades since I've driven an R model. Yesterday I saw a Mack Western RL600LS conventional for sale, stopped to take a look. Open the door and... How the hell did we ever fit in that tiny cab? The R model was a great design for the 60s, but the newer designs are a big improvement!

I agree, trucking is a business where success goes to the most efficient. Trucking is not much of a lifestyle, as all too many "big riggers' learn from the repo man. To be efficient, you need to haul as much freight as possible to achieve the lowest per unit cost. For two thirds of the truckers the freight fills up the trailer before reaching the weight limits, so for two thirds of truckers fitting the largest freight carrying bodies possible is a high priority. In most of the world where the overall lengths of trucks are set by law but not so much the cargo carrying portion of the vehicle, for those two thirds of truckers a cabover is the most efficient truck. America is one of the few exceptions with our lack of federal overall length limits, and thusly we're stuck with oddball conventional cab trucks. And because we're not a big enough market to justify four manufacturers keeping their conventional cab products up to date, we're stuck driving antiques.

Agreed, but by definition it's a fleet truck. And most american fleets are too dumb to figure out that a better truck and better pay would go a long way to ending the "driver shortage" they created!

I haven't read through all of the bulky USPS procurement manuals, but my understanding is that there is no "buy american" requirement. NAFTA and other trade bad deals made "buy american" policies in government purchasing illegal. From a practical point of view, some of the supposedly "american" vehicles USPS has bought like big 3 pickups are in fact built in Mexico, and it's impossible to find a 100% american made vehicle.

it's not that USPS likes the Fiat Ram, FCA was the low bid...

Unless you're going to work the truck hard, I'd be tempted to go with a single frame so it doesn't rust out and split between the outer and inner rails again in a couple decades.

They're promising too much... Like stopping in half the distance of a conventional truck. Sure, they can turn the regenerative braking up to the max and put on big air disc brakes... But all they're going to do is start locking the wheels on the same tires that conventional rigs use. Then the ABS cuts back on the braking, and their "electric" truck stops in the same distance as a conventional one... Hopefully they've tied the regenerative braking into the ABS?

For all practical purposes, building gliders with pre-2001 engines will be pretty much over by 2021 anyways... There simply won't be many good cores left to rebuild. Parts supplies for the by then 20 year old engines will be scarce, and most of the trucks in production will have been designed to accommodate EPA 2010 and later engines.

Thanks for the photo! Looks like they only set the front axle back a foot or so, maybe because their would have been too much weight on the front tires otherwise? I'll have to dig through my old copies of "Truck" and see if I can find the article on Mack with the picture.

As long as the thread has drifted off to include the MH, I seem to remember a picture in Truck magazine of an MH prototype with a setback front axle, story said it was intended for Australia. Did the set back front axle MH ever make it into production?

That's the combination I did at least 80% of my driving career in! When I worked for Continental Baking (Hostess), even with a 45' trailer stacked to the roof with Hostess pies (heaviest product we hauled), we only scaled a hair over 17,000 pounds on the single rear axle with the trailer tandems welded 10 1/2' forward of the rear of the trailer. At that time 90% of the fleet was single rear axles, only thing we needed a few tandems for were a few routes with seasonal 7 ton axle weight restrictions and hauling the occasional loads of bagged flour and sugar. With the wider and longer 48' and 53' trailers they could get 20% and even 30% more on a trailer, and with a few clowns that wanted the "big rig" look sliding the trailer axles back, we started having occasional overloading problems even with the heavier 20,000 axle weight the STAA allowed. So from the late 80s on, almost every tractor Continental bought was tandem drive, except for some northeast locations where the old 22,400 pound axle weight was allowed or tractors specced to pull short doubles on the west coast. Same with UPS and the Postal Service- Very few loads required tandems. Our UPS hub needed a couple tandems because they had a paper company that would fill whole trailers with heavy copy paper. And the new UPS CNG tractors all seem to be tandems, probably to handle the extra weight of the fuel tanks. The Main Post Office I worked out of weighted their trailer loads and found that only 5% required a tandem tractor, so our manager ordered the last bunch of new tractors with 95% of them single rear axles. Oops... Problem was most of those heavy loads all came in about the same time every evening, and they had to order up a few more tandems! This is pretty typical of american trucking- I ran across a study a while back that showed that the average tractor trailer rig on the highways is only loaded to about 40,000 pounds total weight! That means that most loads could be hauled with only 3 or 4 axles down, and a lift axle could be dropped down to stay legal with the occasional maximum legal weight load. This is why tandem drives for on highway use are mostly obsolete.

Built from about 1959-62? IIRC with fiberglass cab, which is why you still see a few of them around despite the fact it was a poor seller.

It's all in the geometry- A typical Euro trailer has the kingpin set back 63" from the front of the trailer, a typical American van trailer has the kingpin set back 36", and only 18" or so on many flatbed and tank trailers. Draw it out if you need to visualize it- the longer front overhang on the Euro trailer means it needs less clearance space between tractor and trailer. This is one of the reasons why Scania has already gotten 10 MPG at 40 metric tons weight (10% heavier than our 80,000 pound limit) with a standard production truck.

The trailer king pin is set back 1.6 meters in the typical Euro setting, allowing for a narrower tractor to trailer gap.

Good luck fighting FEMA on that... They've got a lot of science and data behind them, unless you've been put in flood plain by a matter of inches, no point in fighting them.

That's the current Superliner they're talking about. The original Superliner preceded the internet so the search engines know little or nothing about it.