Unimog confident of municipal sales
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by Oliver Dixon • Unimog is predicting that its smaller models will become increasingly important as the company concentrates on thy municipal market rather than specialist off-road applications.
Senior vice-president Hans-Jurgen Wischhof has told CM that the firm sees municipal and local-authority markets as offering an excellent chance for growth, particularly for the recently launched UX100. "The UX100 is best seen as a platform from which any number of applications can be carried out with a minimum of fuss and a maximum degree of productivity," he says.
At first glance the UX100 is a departure from the traditional Unimog design but, according to UK sales director Seppo Hakkinen, this is not the case: "The Unimog range might appear to have grown in terms of the size of the vehicle," he says. "The UX100 is, however, almost exactly the same size as the first machine we produced in the late 1940s. Fifty years ago Europe was not urbanized; now it is, and we need specialised urban maintenance vehicles, like the UX100."
Currently available with 4x2 mechanical or 4x4 hydrostatic drive, the UX100 com petes against rivals such as the MuRican Early next year it will be joined by a version with mechanical all-wheel drive.