It’s all about the numbers

With the release of a new 16 L engine Volvo Trucks can now claim to produce the most powerful production truck in the world. The new improved to FH16 pumps out a massive 700 hp and has been unveiled for the European market. How long the engine will take to arrive here for sale in the Australian market is a matter for conjecture.

Although the company is describing this as a major development for their engine and for their range, it is difficult to believe the extra power will make much difference to the driver or to the load on the road.

It could be that the most important thing is the fact there is a 700 painted in big numbers on the door and the driver or the truck’s owner can boast they have the most powerful truck in the world on the road. Quite often it is simply a status thing with little discernible productivity improvement from a higher power figure.

The figure we should be looking at instead is the torque rating. Torque is what gives an engine it’s oomph and, as such, is actually a more important figure when gauging how well a truck goes. Horse power always gets the spotlight, but it it is in fact a torque which is doing all the work. When we look at the torque on this new 16 L engine from Volvo we see there has been an increase of just 50 Newton metres in the torque rating. In normal highway running with a single trailer or B-double it would be difficult to discern the difference from the driver’s seat or from trip times.

What we will see this year from Volvo is the new look for the FH and FM ranges, a modernising of the style coupled with some specification improvements underneath. We can expect to see these changes later this year, most probably at the Brisbane Truck Show. At first glance these changes don’t look to be that different but I have been lucky enough to get a sneak preview of the new trucks in the metal and can say that the difference is striking and it makes the trucks look, stylistically, much more modern.

Getting back to the new 16 L engine, another number will be of great interest to Australian truck buyers. In the information released so far in Europe about the truck the SCR system is described as being larger than the current model fitted here in Australia. This may, or may not, impinge upon the chassis space available for fuel tanks on this next-generation FH model.

So the number we will be looking for is how many litres of fuel it is possible to fit into the chassis of a standard semi or B-double prime mover for major linehaul highway work. You can be sure the Volvo engineers will be working hard right now on the chassis layout of the new trucks, for release in a couple of years time, to ensure they can shoehorn enough diesel into the truck to satisfy the Australian operators’ needs.