It’s an odd thing, but long experience drawn from many moments of corporate claptrap and executive evasion have caused me to quietly believe that in the trucking business, there are two types of Swede. The Volvo Swede and the Scania Swede, the Volvo variety almost always more conservative, guarded, reticent and dare I say, cynical than their competitive countrymen.
Why that is, well, perhaps it’s a mystery mired in mindsets dating back to each brand’s founding fathers. Whatever, from a perspective gathered over the past 40 years and more, it has never ceased to amaze and at times confound how two great and hugely successful companies from the same Scandinavian country of just 10 million steely souls can produce highly advanced, top-shelf trucks yet give the marked impression of being so distinctly different in corporate character, complexity and candour.
There have, however, also been rare times when that belief has been effectively flushed down the delusionary S-bend, and now is one of those times. Gone is the shallow rhetoric and dismissive denial, replaced by bold action and lavish language as Volvo embarks on a massive and clear-cut campaign to lead the western world in the promotion and provision of battery-electric trucks for medium and heavy-duty applications. And have no doubt, the Australian market and the assembly of battery-electric models at Volvo Group Australia’s (VGA) Wacol factory in Brisbane are high, very high, on the agenda.
“The decision to display no diesel models whatsoever was a gutsy and blatantly aggressive move by Volvo.”
Sure, Volvo isn’t alone in its ambition. Global supremo Daimler Truck is similarly lifting the lid on its technological achievements, furthering a mammoth push to deliver alternative energy sources, in the process also revealing an upcoming Australian test program for battery-electric Mercedes-Benz models to expand the inroads already made with its light-duty Fuso eCanter stablemate.
Yet, despite their intense rivalry with each other and everyone else, in every market in the world, Daimler Truck and Volvo Group – the two most dominant forces in global truck production – have joined forces to create a company called Cellcentric to develop and produce highly advanced fuel cells for the hydrogen-fuelled electric models each now has under development.
For its part, Volvo admits it already has prototypes running’s October issue), with insiders quietly conceding that on current indications, production is likely to start in either 2027 or 2028.
