Volvo Trucks Australia boss Mitch Peden says new transmission option answers Australian critics
Volvo says the new I-Shift AMT transmission with crawler gears will enable the company to mix it in the super heavy haulage market in Australia.
Volvo Trucks Australia vice president Mitch Peden was speaking at a media conference on the eve of the recent Melbourne Truck Show.
The latest in Volvo’s series of international “stunt” videos shows an FH16 with I-Shift crawler gears pulling 750 tons worth of containers 100 metres along a dock.
Peden says it’s now “thrilling” and a “game changer” to be able to offer a truck out of the Volvo Group’s Brisbane factory capable of pulling 300 tonnes on outback bitumen.
Volvo says the one or two extra gears on top of the 12 in the I-Shift automated manual transmission also enable improved manoeuvrability for precision situations, with speeds as slow as half a kilometre an hour.
“We were told very firmly that if we weren’t going to be in that 225 tonne-plus space we are out of the game here,” Peden said frankly at the annual Volvo Group Australia media conference.
“We’ve been criticised for quite a while now that our truck goes just a bit too fast in reverse for the heavy haulage segment, so now we have an application that also solves that problem.”
Of course, you can’t have everything and the I-Shift with crawler ratios comes at a cost of nearly 50 kilograms in extra weight and 12 centimetres in extra length.
The new transmission can be matched with both the 13 litre and 15 litre Volvo engines.
VGA stablemate Mack says crawler gears have recently been introduced to models in the US, and will eventually be available in Australia too.