Truck & Bus News

IVECO to fully import heavy duty range plus others

As part of a global transformation process, IVECO announced the development of the Customisation & Innovation Centre (CIC) and related changes that will impact its Australian manufacturing arm.

The CIC is a business unit that will leverage IVECO’s local engineering and manufacturing expertise, transforming the company’s focus towards the customisation and innovation of its vehicles for local markets. The CIC is being developed to better assist IVECO customers and body-builders – particularly those with complex body types – to achieve a more streamlined design and body fitment process for their vehicles. Promoting innovation will be another key aspect of the CIC, with IVECO placed to work more closely with Europe and local partners to explore areas such as alternative propulsion solutions, digitisation, connectivity and autonomous driving. Australia and New Zealand Managing Director, Michael May, said that by focusing on the CIC, IVECO would strengthen one of its key selling points in the Australian and NZ market. In announcing the development of the CIC, the company also advised it would move to fully import its Heavy Duty range from IVECO’s advanced manufacturing facility in Madrid, Spain. This transition is anticipated to take place from the end of June 2022. IVECO currently fully imports its Light Duty, Medium Duty, selected Heavy Duty, Minibus and Off-Road models. The decision to fully import its Heavy Duty range will allow IVECO Trucks Australia to more closely align model year introduction timings with that of its parent company in Europe. As an example, IVECO will be launching the new S-WAY model in Australia according to the global launch plan. The new S-WAY model for the Australian and New Zealand market will have undergone thousands of hours and kilometres of validation testing on local roads and highways and had input and development from IVECO’s local engineers and specifically selected customer partners, ensuring it is designed and then tested to meet the needs of our local ANZ market. This will include a further iteration of the highly regarded dual control ACCO model for the local waste market. Mr May said the decision to move to local customisation of fully imported vehicles was a natural progression of IVECO’s ANZ transformation. Over the coming months IVECO will continue to engage with its employees who may be impacted by today’s announcement and will provide appropriate support to the involved workforce. According to a report in Australasian Bus & Coach a company spokesperson said that the company was not building Iveco’s full bus chassis in Australia at the moment and that the change would not affect the Heavy Bus range.

Volgren to add 50 more jobs

Australia’s largest bus body builder, Volgren, will create 50 new jobs following the Victorian Department of Transport’s decision to award Melbourne’s franchise bus fleet to operator Kinetic.

Kinetic will introduce five Volgren battery electric buses (BEBs) into the city’s network by June next year and by mid-2025 will have introduced 36 BEBs, plus more than 100 Volgren-bodied hybrid buses. “Every manufacturer strives to plan and structure their business based on long-term demand. The Metropolitan Bus Franchise helps us to do exactly that. Our expectation is that our direct labour resources will increase by 45 to 50 percent, or by around 50 direct new jobs,” Thiago Deiro, CEO of Volgren, said. “Over the past four decades, Volgren has become part of an extensive and thriving south-east Melbourne manufacturing ecosystem. And we plan on building on it by investing in programs to enhance apprentice and traineeships at our Dandenong facility during the life of the contract.” “All our factories are geared-up to start building BEBs at the scale required to meet the needs Australia’s shift to zero-emission technology.”

Volta wins Dezeen design award & production starts

Volta Trucks and its strategic design partner, Astheimer Design of Warwick, UK, have won the Dezeen Product Design award 2021.

The Volta Zero is a purpose-built full-electric commercial vehicle designed specifically for urban logistics and was created by Astheimer Design. The modern and innovative vehicle design and packaging features a revolutionary glasshouse-style cab with a low, central seating position to improve driver visibility and the safety of vulnerable road users around the vehicle. “It is a rare occurrence for a designer to be given the opportunity to rethink and reinvent a category of vehicle,” Carsten Astheimer, Founder and Managing Director of Astheimer Design, said. “This was the responsibility given to us by Carl-Magnus Norden and Kjell Waloen, the founders of Volta Trucks.” The first road-going Volta Zero prototype vehicles have started production and will commence a rigorous testing regime in early 2022, ahead of customer evaluation in mid2022, and the start of manufacturing of the first production-specification vehicles by the end of next year. The DV prototypes are the first full-electric Volta Zero vehicles to be built, a total of 25 vehicles will be manufactured and once completed in January, the fleet will embark on a rigorous testing regime. This will involve Volta Trucks’ engineers replicating a wide range of customer usage and delivery cycles, as well as taking the Volta Zero to the extremes of cold weather environments in the Arctic, hot weathers in equatorial conditions, and crash testing, all to validate the safety, durability, and reliability of the vehicle. The results of the comprehensive DV testing program will be fed into the final prototype stage – ‘Production Verification’ (PV). The PV prototype vehicles will be built at the company’s new manufacturing plant in Steyr, Austria, in mid-2022. Many of these production-specification prototypes will be lent to selected customers for extended periods to be tested in their real-world logistics conditions, undertaking millions of delivery kilometres, alongside Volta Trucks’ own engineers.

Historic trucks back on the road

Due to the split of Daimler into two independent companies on 1 December, Daimler Truck transferred the first batch of historical Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicles and parts of its truck and bus archive to the location in Wörth at the end of November.

For this purpose a convoy of low-loaders and historical trucks and buses travelled from the Stuttgart area to the Application Information Centre (BIC) of the MercedesBenz truck plant in Wörth am Rhein. The historical trucks included a Mercedes-Benz LP 333 from 1960 (known as a “millipede” due to its two steerable front axles) and a Mercedes-Benz LP 608 which was the first truck produced at the recently opened Wörth plant in 1965. In future, Daimler Truck will mainly house its collection of historical exhibits near its truck and bus locations. Additional archival material and exhibits will be relocated in the weeks ahead.

Daimler Truck’s collection encompasses around 130 vehicles, of which about 30 were previously located in Stuttgart and the surrounding area. This collection also includes powertrains, parts and accessories from the company’s 125-year truck history. The archives of Daimler Truck were previously distributed on more than 160 square metres of storage space. The documents filled more than 2,000 metres of shelves on several levels. The archival material includes 2,600 rolls of film and 600 magnetic tapes that contain over 1,000 hours of historical moving images. Mercedes-Benz Museum to remain the venue for the company’s shared history.