It must be as a result of global warming, but the legislation around trucks is beginning to see a situation where the glaciers are starting to move.
The glaciers I’m talking about are major policy issues which have we have been discussing for as long as I’ve been involved in reporting on the road transport industry, namely dimensions, vehicle mass and access.
The process to make any small change seems to take forever. However, the good news is one of the glaciers is starting to move. We now have an extended width limit to 2.55m for trucks, which means that new technology and new truck designs are all going to become available on the Australian market.
As a result of the 2.5m dimension width limit, some major changes in truck design, improvements in aerodynamics and overall design and comfort have not been able to be introduced into this country because the whole system was based on a design 2.55m wide and it could not be adapted to meet the stricter Australian regulations.
In essence what this has meant is, not that those trucks never appeared here, but the development program to adapt them from their European or North American roots took much longer because redesigns would have to be made on wheel arches, cabins, etc.
With the arrival of the electric truck the whole problem has gotten a lot bigger. The move away from carbon intensive diesel engines to any of the alternatives, whether they be electric, hydrogen or some other form of internal combustion engine are all massive research and development programs.
These projects are so big that even the global giants are unable to afford the kind of funding required and are entering into joint ventures like the one between Daimler and Volvo to design a fuel cell which can work in trucks.
Mercedes Benz will no longer make all of their own diesel engines, but instead, Cummins have taken over their German plant to make an engine specifically for their medium duty trucks.
The sums involved in developing these trucks is astronomical, and it is crazy to expect the truck makers to add to these astronomical funds by making a special adaptation for the few thousand trucks which do come into Australia from elsewhere, to make them inside keep them inside the 2.5 meter limit.
Once this was explained to the politicians and a lot of pressure was brought to bear, especially by the truck manufacturers, who actually assemble their vehicles in this country, then the government finally got on board and we do have a 2.55m width allowance on new trucks.
The next major issue is going to be front axle mass. We saw the long drawn out process which finally gave us 6.5 tonnes on the front axle as opposed to the previous six tonnes. It took a long time to resolve some issues and enable lower emission engines to be fitted into trucks on the Australian market.
The scale of the issue when electric motors and batteries are brought into the picture, or hydrogen storage tanks, is on a much larger scale. A small jump up to seven tonnes is probably not going to get us anywhere. 7.5 tonnes is the absolute minimum with which the truck industry could cope, as it goes forward in trying to provide trucks powered by electric or hydrogen or HVO.
This much heavier mass may also play into another discussion which has come and gone over the years in truck manufacturing and that is the move towards twin steer trucks and an increase in the allowance from the very low 11 tonnes to, potentially, 13 tonnes and a more rational approach towards axle mass as a whole.
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