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Innovation has been a bit thin on the ground in
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this particular area of the market. Manufacturers nave, instead, been turning their hands to improving their core products. Dave Young assesses what's on offer...
Despite the vagaries of the truck manufacturing and road transport industries, which are many,varied and well documented, people still want to, and, more importantly, need to buy goods from the shops.
So far, if anyone has come up with a viable alternative to the ubiquitous distribution truck for getting the daily bread onto the shelf or, for that matter, taking away the leftover crust from the buyers' doorstep, they've certainly kept it to themselves.
So, for the second year on the trot, the middleweight truck manufacturers have been putting their efforts into refining their core products, which means there has been few new innovations unleashed on the marketplace. The choice of Euro-5 variants is beginning to increase,which helps to give operators more opportunity to green their profiles well ahead of the legal deadline, with Daf and MAN leading the way to Euro-6 and beyond thanks to their ultra-clean EEV (Enhanced Environmental Vehicle) engines.
Daf continues to dominate the sector, but can expect some aggressive competition from the most significant newcomer of the year, the lveco Eurocargo, as the Italians chase severe self-imposed market targets.
Avia, Hino and Isuzu look set to secure themselves small slices of the 2009 pie, but BMC has taken the decision to relax its distribution ambitions in order to concentrate on the specialist municipal market. It is here, in this particular niche that, the Mercedes-Benz Econic and Dennis Elite 2 continue their head-to-head tussle with only minor revisions, while the Renault Puncher seems to have thrown in the towel and is content to let them get on with it.
Perhaps the most interesting trend is that artic operators suffering from poor returns on depressed rates are looking to downsize and return to running traditional 18-tonne rig,ids at a better rate than an artic.
If feedback from used truck dealers is anything to go by, an 18-tonner,with a bogstandard box body or curtainsider is still a popular second-hand truck to buy, especially if it comes with a sleeper cab and a tail-lift. Colin Barnett