“It is a new year and the market has slowed down,” Nyberg said. “The super-hot market of 300,000 trucks last year will now lead to a softer year ahead. So now it is all about finding fuel efficiency, driver productivity and [vehicle] uptime for customers.”
Wade Long, Volvo’s director of product marketing, noted during the Hagerstown event – which marks the start of a rolling two-week product introduction process for the OEM’s dealers – that all of those enhancements should widen the appeal of Volvo’s powertrain options among fleets seeking fuel efficiency and lighter weights without compromising on performance.
In terms of the price tag associated with those new product offerings, Nyberg would only say that “any new feature comes with a value proposition, so price will be based on the benefit offered to our customers.”
Yet John Moore, Volvo’s product marketing manager for powertrain, noted that the return on investment (ROI) specific engine enhancements, such as the D13 engine equipped with turbo compounding should be fairly quick. “We expect it to offer an ROI of one and half years,” he said.
And such savings are no longer limited to just over-the-road customers, either, he stressed, especially when it comes to the crawler gear option for the I-Shift.
“Dump truck and [concrete] mixer fleets want to get into fuel savings,” Moore said. “With the I-Shift they can now go down the highway with lower engine RPMs.”
That’s because the crawler gear-equipped I-Shift can reduce rear axle ratios down to 3.14 or even 3.08 compared to typical ratios in the vocational segment of 4.10. “That means you can experience an up to 4% fuel savings when driving [vocational trucks] on the highway.”
