Road Tests: Renault Midlum

We’ve done the sums. If you need an urban distribution truck in a convenient-sized package, the obvious first choice is a 7.5-tonner. But unless you really need its benefits of being able to do 70mph on the motorway driven by someone who hasn’t been tested in anything bigger than a Nissan Micra, the intelligent solution lies at 12 or 18 tonnes. Granted there are slightly higher costs involved, such as a bit more road tax, dearer tyres and extra fuel. But against that an 18-tonner gives you the possibility of carrying up to four times the payload of a 7.5-tonner. You might be hauling big boxes of breakfast cereal, in which case you only need the volume. But even if you don’t use every last bit of payload potential, you gain flexibility and valuable insurance against the bane of diminishing multi-drop loads: axle overload. As manufacturers begin to pick up on the potential of these middleweights a growing number are offering an overlap of model rages at 12 and especially at 18 tonnes. You can effectively have either a top-end example of the lightweight range or you can have a solution from the lower end of the “real truck” range.

The French company can offer you either a Premium or a Midlum at 18 tonnes, both with similar drivelines. Compared with a similarly specced Premium, the Midlum has a 700kg weight advantage thanks to its narrow cab (effectively the one sold to Paccar for the Daf LF) mounted on a lighter-duty chassis. With the Midlum order form in front of you the first box to tick is engines: either the 220, as tested here, or the 270. The standard gearbox is a six-speed Eaton with the option of a nine-speeder, both available with a selection of PTOs. The chassis is available with a choice of 11 wheelbases, ranging from 3,650mm right up to 6,780mm. Naturally, the full range of Midlum cabs is available, with a multitude of custom layouts based on the standard day cab or the longer Global sleeper. Our test example was specced by Renault to offer the lightest configuration available. Items such as cab trim and fuel tank are the lightest available, but Renault kept things realistic by eschewing luxuries like alloy wheels. There was no silly compromise on dimensions, either: its wheelbase of 5,450mm is well into the top half of the available lengths, and it carries a simple Cartwright 23ft 6in alloy-framed GRP box body with translucent roof and a single pole rail per side. Our truck has spent quite a few months accumulating running-in miles, and in the process it has been superseded by a revised cab specification. The interior pictures you see are of the latest version.

The Midlum 220 18-tonner is nothing if not consistent in its fuel consumption. Its overall figure of 12.6mpg is improved by 0.1mpg on motorways, and was down by 0.1mpg on the A-road and urban sections of our Welsh distribution route. While this is not insignificant compared with the cannily prepared Daf’s 14mpg, it’s at the higher end of the rest of the market. As previously mentioned, the Midlum was specced for optimum carrying capacity; the end was an impressive body/payload allowance of 12,930kg.