Sidney Crawford was a young bank employee aged around 23 who found himself as co-administrator of a regional Ford car dealership in Victoria which had hit hard times and had been taken over by the bank.
Under Sid’s guidance the business fortunes were turned around and it was then sold by the bank, but the motor industry had lit a fire in Sid who, with some others started Adelaide Motors in 1926.
After leaving there, Sid saw an opportunity to specialise in the sale and service of trucks and tractors and went on to establish Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMV) in 1934, with the franchises for British Leyland trucks and Case tractors to be later joined by the iconic Diamond T truck brand.
Ninety years on the CMV Group has almost 2,000 employees and is now firmly in the hands of the fourth generation of the Crawford family.
In addition to other roles within the CMV Group, Sid’s grandson Paul Crawford was the Joint Managing Director of the CMV Group, along with his brothers Michael and David, until he stepped back at the beginning of April this year, handing the reins to the next generation now represented by eight family members with cousins Miles and Daniel Crawford now appointed as Joint Managing Directors.
Paul’s father Jim Crawford (who had taken over from his father Sidney) encouraged him to explore beyond the family business and Paul earned his degree in mechanical engineering and worked for PACCAR at its Bayswater production facility during his university vacations at the end of his third and fourth years of study.
“On the strength of that they offered me a cadetship so after I graduated, I went to work at Bayswater which was a wonderful time working in the engineering department as a production liaison engineer and I did some design work as well,” recalls Paul.
Subsequently, he became involved in special projects including light weight trucks intended for fuel haul applications, and the first 3406 Cat-powered Kenworth.
Paul had ambitions to work for PACCAR in the US but a downturn in the US saw him head, instead, to Europe, first working for ZF in Germany and then to Volvo Bus and eventually the Volvo Truck Corporation in Sweden. Paul returned to Australia after a couple of years, and rejoined the family business.
CMV’s portfolio then included foundation franchises Toyota, Kenworth and Volvo and eventually encompassed associated brands such as Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Hino, DAF, UD Trucks, Mack and Volvo Bus. More recently the Chinese brand Foton Electric has joined the CMV stable and the Hino Hybrid is being strongly promoted.
“We’re conscious of our obligations in terms of decarbonisation but recognise it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Paul.
“We will try not to leave any customers behind because that’s very much the CMV approach and we are trying to arrange our representation plans, so we’ve got offerings for most applications. We support the continued development of internal combustion technology especially when it involves sustainable fuel sources such as green hydrogen or HVO. Obviously, we strongly support the ongoing development of other technologies such as pure BEV, Hybrid, PHEV and Fuel Cell to name a few.”
In Paul’s view, there’ll be some situations such as roadtrains and other really heavy applications where diesel, for the moment, is the absolute best solution.
“We believe that the carbon dioxide produced in these applications should be able to be offset in lighter transport tasks where existing and developing BEV and Hybrid technology will come to the fore,” says Paul.
“We are optimistic that our industry can navigate through these challenges without there being any massive step changes that negatively impact on our customers or the end users. Certainly, there needs to be change, but more evolutionary, particularly in the more demanding applications.”
The CMV journey hasn’t been without its challenges and the need for tough fiscal decisions such as during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 brought about a stark reality.
“The GFC for us was actually pretty scary,” says Paul. “Like a lot of other dealers at the time, stock grew quite quickly when customers were faced with financial difficulties or uncertainty. So, we had trucks parked along fences in many sites. We had to cut our costs including making employees redundant, which was not the ‘CMV way’, but we had to protect the jobs of the majority.”
Out of the ashes of that came a greater focus on fixed operations and the extent to which a dealership can operate at, say, breakeven levels on the back of parts and service without actually selling a vehicle.
The Crawford family’s pragmatic approach is a reflection of Sid’s philosophies all those years ago.
“My grandfather Sid actually wrote a book called Hauling for Profit which was published in 1939,” says Paul.
“Because he was from a finance background, in a way, his idea of helping operators was to encourage them to consider how they should be looking at their businesses, including efficiency, utilisation, cash flow, margins, vehicle depreciation and all that goes with running a transport business. That said, my brother Michael and I love seeing good looking and well maintained vehicles, but at the end of the day they have a job to do and it is actually all about cents per kilometre and the whole-of-life cost equation.”
Paul has witnessed and been a part of the paradigm shifts in the truck sales and transport industries over the past four decades.
The biggest change he has noted in the past 40 years is the level of professionalism and efficiency and with that the productivity gains that have been made by the operators.
“In some respects, the introduction of the B-double all those years ago has been a game changer,” says Paul.
“And to their credit, some state and federal regulatory bodies have facilitated this through greater flexibility, which has seen significant growth in higher productivity vehicles under the PBS system.
“This includes multi-trailer applications such as B-triples and pocket roadtrains. It’s been a change not actually seen all over the world. You only have to travel to the US where you will still see heavy duty trucks with relatively low payloads compared to Australia.
“We have achieved a high level of professionalism including safety and productivity through increases in better and bigger trucks and also a more flexible regulatory environment.”
By having such a broad suite of brands and models available, CMV is able to deliver the right truck for many applications.
“The dealership approach we’ve had, even in the early days, was to critically assess the customer’s application thereby ensuring that the truck that was to be sold to the operator would be fit-for-purpose and give the customer a good run,” Paul says.
“That might sound a bit glib but that’s exactly what we mean. In some cases, we’d rather not sell a truck when we know the customer is dead set not buying the correct vehicle for the application. There’s no joy in that.”
He adds, “It’s a long game, this business.”
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