Introduction
Are tipper drivers getting soft? Yours truly passes too many tipper yards on the way home to express a personal view, but consider the evidence. First they had cloth seats, then it was air-con. And now, for goodness sakes, these hard men of haulage are getting automatic transmissions.
The test is something of a landmark in Commercial Motor’s 100-year history, being the first full roadtest of a tipper with automated transmission. The tipper in question is Volvo’s FM9 and the transmission, the I-Shift, is widely acclaimed as the best of its type so far. It surprised us to learn that 15% of Volvo’s UK tipper orders have the I-Shift box ticked – but it shouldn’t have.
Product Profile
While it’s the long-distance tractor unit that generally gets the sexy new labour saving devices first, is that really how it should be? Who’ll get most benefit from not worrying about gear changes, the artic driver running up the M1 on cruise control, or the harassed distribution or construction driver who probably has a hundred times as many changes to make during the day, while being continuously surrounded by the mixed bag of hazards that make up urban driving?
Thought so.
However, there’s more to our roadtest than a gearbox, even a very good gearbox. The 380 8x4 is the top dog of the small D9A-engined FM9 family, trading 150Nm of torque for a weight saving of 170kg compared with the FM12.380. In any case the current line-up is about to be consigned to history, with a revised D9B unit and the all-new D13A taking over in readiness for Euro-4 and beyond (CM 15 September).
Suspension is the B-Ride system, with a single inverted steel spring on each side of the rear bogie, running on rubber pads and located by V-bars. Nothing controversial there, and the actual test truck might look familiar too, as it was featured in our recent tipper group test. Its spec includes a PPG asphalt/aggregate body lifted by the ubiquitous Edbro CX15 front-end ram with a tidy Transcover sheeting system.
Productivity
Look at the Volvo’s headline fuel figures and you won’t be overly impressed – 7.74mpg is a bit behind the class best – but the A-road part of the run was in far from ideal conditions. The monsoon on the A5 was bad enough, but then we came across a closure of the A422 at Farthinghoe that set us on a back-road diversion that was faro from suited to an eight-legger. The resulting figure inevitably dragged the overall numbers down. Journey times were reasonable, however.
At 9,273kg, the Volvo won’t win any outright victories for payload, either, but it’s just about in the middle of a scale that only differs by a quarter of a tonne from best to worst. If you needed every last kilo you’d start by loosing the sleeper cab and its 32kg penalty. While fuel economy and payload can be measured, the Volvo’s biggest advantage can’t be so easily quantified. But you don’t need a stressometer to realise that removing such a large part of the driver’s workload must be a good thing. All you need is to try it for yourself. What makes it even more irresistible is the fact that at £1,466 it will set you back little more than the cost of five tanks of diesel.
If the driver can be educated in when to use the M button and when to leave it alone he should still have enough energy left to have a life after work, and the operator can be sure that the last run of the day will be as good as the first.
