SEDDON ATKI1VSON
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1. The road transport market must certainly expand in the EEC as industrial output grows. The rate of expansion may be spasmodic in certain sectors of road haulage due to increasing pressures aimed at diverting more traffic on to the member countries' railways, but as a whole should equal the growth rate within the EEC over the past 10 years. There, industrial output has doubled but road transport activity has trebled.
2. It is the lighter range of commercial vehicles — generally "compartmented" as distribution types -which I see as the spearhead of Seddon Atkinson operations when we enter the Common Market. Customers in this sector are not very well catered for at the moment. There will also be some valuable business done with a maximum-capacity vehicle for high-mileage work which incorporates the present Continental flair for cab styling and interior fitments with top-quality British engineering.
3. There will certainly be co-operative operations in the EEC among vehicle manufacturers, particularly in the lighter weight sector, but they will not necessarily be of a type which brings "further drastic rationalization".
4. Looked at in isolation, there is no doubt that the 13-ton axle and the four-axle articulated outfit for 44/45 tons gross is the ideal maximum. It may now be a lost cause, but these limits fit within the accepted ratio of 3+ to 1 of gross weight to axle weight and result in a stable vehicle which can carry a full 40ft container with minimum tyre scrub. Such a vehicle is relatively simple in design and so keeps both manufacturing and running cost down — with subsequent lower transport costs to the community. Use of the 13-ton axle in general would have resulted in more compact trucks and less of them) to carry a specific tonnage. But it looks as if the 35/36-ton four-axle artic with 10/11-ton axles will win the day.
5. The lobbying of a growing environmental movement — together with drastic changes in legislation governing town centre traffic — could result in the widespread use of smaller containers in 20 years' time. Problems of transhipment of present-sized containers at out-of-town depots and the breaking down of their loads could make the use of small containers an attractive economic alternative.
Again, their use could drastically affect the basic designs of the vehicles which move them over long distances as well as the ones that deliver them to individual premises. By that time also, we might have the long-awaite'd low-compression diesel engine.