Opinion: Global designs, local challenges

As Bruce Honeywill knows only too well, for today's global truck manufacturers the ultra-competitive and testing Australian market is a tough nut to crack…

Is the Australian truck market a 'field of dreams' for global truck manufacturers, or a mine field?

Australia has one of the most diverse truck markets in the world. Just about every manufacturer from every continent has had a dabble. However, attempting to taste the dusty flavour of Australia has never meant unconditional success for truck builders. Many brands lie rusting in the weeds beside our highways.

Traditionally Australia has never had one or two manufacturers that dominate the market. Yes, up to the '50s the market was dominated by Empire, the British manufacturers. After WWII the Yanks blistered the Poms with the availability of large numbers of ex-army heavy trucks and then the B Model Mack. The latter rewrote heavy transport in Australia, hauling big weights at previously unheard of speeds.

Then came the Kenworth glider kits and, all of a sudden, by the '70s we had trucks coming from everywhere: Scandinavia, the US, even Vatican Macks (or Fiat 684s for those fortunate enough to have never driven one). Japan quickly took over the small/medium market from the British. One valiant Australian manufacturer with an agricultural heritage plugged on building trucks designed for Australia: International Harvester.

The big Americans started calling Australia home. Mack Trucks and Kenworth Paccar built big plants and supplied genuine custom-built trucks to the Australian market. Yet those of us who drove the highways back in the '70s probably remember seeing, at least every six months, some new, strange shape of another new breed of truck having a crack at Australia. Those were the days when the shape and style of trucks were not forced into boring homogeneity courtesy of the rigours of the wind tunnel and emission standards.

For the northern Europeans, the Australian market was most certainly a field of dreams. We watched them come. The Volvos and Scanias pulling three trailers.

For a week, two weeks, a month, all went well in the world of road trains. Then they were billowing black smoke or were beside the road as we laboured past jammed in an R Model cab with a sturdy 320 Cool Power doing the work. Field of dreams or a Euro Dream Time? Back then there seemed little point in throwing these trucks into the deep end other than to get the murals onto the walls of boardrooms in Gothenburg and Södertalje.

The attitude and trucks of northern Europe have of course changed and today all growl with an Aussie accent. Yet in the '80s I recall a researcher in an R&D plant in Sweden proudly proclaiming that the engines were tested to road temperatures of "up to 35 degrees Celsius".

I mentioned to him that road temperatures in northern Australia often exceeded 50 degrees. The researcher just looked at me, open mouthed.

The point of this is to suggest that all the manufacturers supplying trucks to the heavy end of the Australian market had to make expensive engineering decisions to meet Australian requirements. And every manufacturer that has done this will tell you they ended up with better trucks.

With the 21st Century came the world truck. Euro companies buying out American manufacturers, Americans buying European truck builders. These multinationals taking over Japanese companies. Korea entering the market. Today the competitive nature of mass truck building works against a customised approach. And there is the elephant in the room: China.

Today we live in a different world of truck manufacturing. New truck models and manufacturers still approach the Australian market and many will find it can be a minefield. It is a shame to think Australia's extreme conditions may no longer be part of the world truck engineer's design palette. And if our road conditions are not part of the design process, it will be Australian customers who are the most hurt.

Opinion: Global designs, local challenges

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