Multidrive investment
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by Bryan Jarvis • David Brown has invested over £2m in a 1.5-acre design and development centre for Multidrive vehicles at Boltby near Thirsk, North Yorkshire.
The move follows last year's sale of the Artix dump truck factory and Brown Engineering Centre to Caterpillar.
Half of the initial investment is in 10 Pro-Engineer 3D CAD stations and about 50 jobs will be created at first. The site will also house the parts and service unit for existing Multidrive users such as the MoD and South West Water.
Multidrive will concentrate on design and building of prototype vehicles, essentially for off-highway work. According to product development manager Anthony Lister: "The new vehicles will offer higher durability, reliability and mobility than conventional machines". Multidrives are particularly suited, he says, for transporting heavy equipment or for hauling commodities like timber, minerals, overburden or liquids over long distances.
"We can still produce TM55-type Multidrives but the new range will be customer-driven," says Lister, "based on proprietary motive units with standard drivelines but built to our specification".
The new models will be four to 16-wheel drive and are intended for military or civilian use in home or export markets. One of the first will be a 4x4 prototypes which should appear later this year.
Previously, a large batch of all-wheel drive/steer chassis was sold to the MoD for use in Bosnia, and South West Water bought six AWD TL33-27-based Multidrive tankers for land waste injection duties. These were later converted to Renault G340 prime movers (CM 21-27 July 1994) and were transferred to general waste treatment work.
Other versions for contractors Peter Bennie (Volvo-based) and Fenstone Transport (ERF) have since sold them to second life users.