Good Response from makers on Liaison
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THERE has been a good initial I response by vehicle and trailer manufacturers to three different letters sent out last week by the highways and vehicles committee of the Road Haulage Association which asked for their views on maker-user liaison, their proposals for uprating existing Vehicles to the new weights, and details of the .spares and service facilities offered.
The committee, in one letter, drew attention to the plea for closer liaison between manufacturers and operators of commercial vehicles which was expressed by its chairman, Mr. C. W. Oliver, at The Commercial Motor Fleet Management Conference, and asked whether the manufacturers favoured the idea of meeting representatives of goods vehicle users from time to time to discuss matters of mutual interest.
The replies received by the beginning of this week were generally favourable to the idea of co-operation with users, although the tone of some of the letters suggested that there was not the keenness for liaison which the committee had hoped to see; but, admittedly, at this time very few of the quantity producers had replied. And one manufacturer of both chassis and trailers had immediately suggested a date for a meeting.
The second letter from the highways and vehicles committee asked makers what they proposed to do in the way of offering modifications to existing vehicles registered after February 1, 1963, to adapt them for the higher gross weights permitted under the C. and U. amendments. It also asked that manufacturers should take great pains to keep down the price of such modification kits to avoid making the cost of conversion uneconomic; the committee also wanted to know when suitable kits might be available and what the manufacturers were doing to increase the efficiency of brakes on these vehicles.
Some of the early replies were not very specific, but Leyland, for example, confirmed that they were going ahead with modification kits for plating some existing models for higher weights.
The third letter from the committee recorded that operators had iecently expressed concern about the difficulty of getting spares and service replacement units throughout the country on a 24hour basis and especially at week-ends; the letter stressed the particular need to obtain road spring parts at short notice and asked what facilities the individual manufacturers offered.
The response suggested that most of the larger companies offered either 24hour facilities or had special arrangements for spares to be obtained at weekends.
There were some unexpected replies among those received by the R.H.A., including one from a trailer manufacturer who said that, while he did not wish to appear unco-operative, he considered that in approaching the makers in this way the R.H.A. was "exceeding its recognized function in these matters".