etruck.com.au

The task of demystifying the performance of high productivity trucks has been taken up by NatRoad. They set up a demonstration day at Dubbo and invited along all of the stakeholders, especially the decision-makers in local and state governments who are proving to be a roadblock stopping these new vehicle designs getting out onto the highway.

As you can see from the video these combinations perform particularly well. In many cases, they perform much better than some of the existing road trains we have on our roads. As they negotiate the 90° bends it is clear all of these combinations would have little problems in terms of genuine accessibility on many roads in the outback. Some of them would clearly be perfectly okay handling the major intercapital highways to be assembled and disassembled on the outskirts of the city. Let’s hope this demonstration day has allayed fears of some of the more intransigent regulators.

Yet again, the BAB Quad has demonstrated its effectiveness as a viable and preferable alternative to the triple road train, it is more manoeuvrable, more stable and safer. Because it can be broken up into two B-doubles, it is a much more efficient method of long-distance transport.Surprisingly, the demonstration day did not include an ABB Quad, a semi-using a dolly to pull a B-triple, this has been shown to be an even more stable and manoeuvrable combination. Perhaps this is because it is a more difficult combination to put together out on the highway from two B-doubles.

Well done to NatRoad for putting this together and let’s hope this series of demonstration days actually gets something done and the local authorities get together with the state regulators to approve a few more high productivity vehicle routes. They could also start to think about a rational approach to running some long combinations between the major capital cities and stop pandering to the fear tactics of the anti-truck lobby.