Talkin’ Bout New Truck Generation

A recent visitor to our shores as an international attendee at the Brisbane Truck Show, Thomas Hemmerich along with Craig Lee, Penske Australia On-highway Executive General Manager, spoke to Prime Mover about MAN’s new truck generation range as it settles into the market following its launch in Australia in August 2022.

Prime Mover: You’ve been with MAN for 20 years. Are you a truck, sales or administration guy?
Thomas Hemmerich: Truck and sales. My background is engineering and I love diving into talking with the customers trying to understand what they need. I wouldn’t call myself a finance guy.

PM: The MAN new truck generation range was launched in Europe in 2020 and has been very successful there. Do you think that will translate to success here in Australia?
TH: We won the International Truck of the Year award for new truck generation in 2021, but it’s not about awards. It’s about the feedback we get from our customers. We need to confirm that we deliver on the promises and our promises are uptime, efficiency and, most importantly, driver fit in these times when it is getting more and more difficult to attract truck drivers. The response we are getting is overwhelming.

PM: That must be edifying.
TH: That makes us super proud that we are able to deliver on our promises. I’m really looking forward to delivering those trucks into the Australian market and to be able to see lots of those trucks on Australian roads and also getting the feedback from the operators as well as the drivers. For the last two years of our development, we have had great support here from the Penske team and I’m very happy to have the Penske commercial team here to sell, support and service our partners.

PM: The MAN new truck generation has some impressive specifications. How well does all that translate into fuel efficiency?
TH: Actually we have recently tested with the current Euro VI technology in Europe and it gives another seven per cent fuel saving. Obviously, we can’t compare a European 4×2 with a 6×4 Australian truck. However, it’s the same driveline, just with a different axle configuration. We’ve gone another major step in the right direction with the European spec being more fuel efficient and the Australian one will also be significantly better than the previous, as well.

PM: What’s the local response been to the new range, particularly from your customers who have trialled it?
Craig Lee: The ‘vibe’ on the previous generation was it was a good reliable truck, and it was adequate to do the jobs asked of it. The feedback from the customers who have tried the new truck is that it is a significantly improved ride and that’s very much around cab sway, and the road noise is noticeably lower. Those are probably the two biggest pieces of consistent feedback — the comfort of the cab and the quietness in the cab.

PM: Have you received much comment about the drivelines?
CL: The feedback on the 640hp is just how well it holds on from a torque perspective and the engine braking gets a massive rap especially on the Euro VI 510hp and the Euro VI 640hp.

PM: Any feedback on fuel economy?
CL: I think you could confidently say most of the Europeans running around the 13-litre and 500hp mark are all going to be pretty good on fuel, but it’s the drivers that are going to make a big difference. We’ve compared one of our latest generation trucks here and we’ve been playing with axle ratios. We’ve got a dedicated test route with the same driver running the same load and we’ve already seen some really nice fuel numbers from the Euro VI d technology.

PM: A contemporary question: what’s stock availability like?
CL: MAN production have done a very nice job getting on top of sales and have been very kind to prioritise a lot of our volume for Australia. I’m going to use the number of 80 per month landing, month on month, starting this month. That’s a reasonable number as we have 300-odd already sold. We are absolutely aware that the challenge for us is to execute delivery and we’ve now got a good dealer group which we have extensively trained on the aftersales side of the business, and we’ve also invested in the sales teams. For example, we’ve got another six sales professionals starting in the next four weeks. And we have also invested heavily in parts in the right locations.

PM: Sounds like a major undertaking.
CL: One thing that we have been very focused on is ensuring we can support the new truck generation before we put it out there, rather than trying to play catch up. We’ve put a lot of effort in getting our people trained. We expect the new truck generation to not have a lot of unscheduled downtime and, with our parts inventory and our technical training, we are confident we have done everything right. We’ve recruited another dedicated MAN Technical Trainer who is one of our very best technicians. We sent him overseas to do his training and we’ve now got two dedicated MAN technical trainers training other technicians purely on the new truck generation MAN product.

PM: Is driver training part of the package?
CL: It absolutely is. In ‘MAN speak’ we have what is known as a “ProfiDrive” driver trainer, who is a certified driver trainer based in Brisbane and he is available to work with our larger fleets. We have other driver trainers as well for smaller operators and we also schedule them for when we do our fuel economy testing involving exercises such as changing differential and transmission ratios.

TH: The secret is how to operate the truck. When I’m driving with our professional driver trainers in Munich the things you can do in order to optimise fuel consumption are amazing. We need to be able to convey this message to the truck drivers and that’s why it is so important to have driver trainers. Eventually it’s about cost of ownership. We are selling a fancy story to the operator and if we are not able to train the truckers so they really pull out the maximum out of the truck, it’s pointless.