Iveco has announced that its new Stralis - due to be launched in the UK at next month's CV Show - is to be sold with a Euro 5 engine as standard (or at least as a delete option).
Now this may be a bold move, but is it really a surprise? In all honesty I can't believe that it has taken this long for a truck manufacturer to go down this route. The SCR camp has long been waxing lyrical about the benefits of the early adoption of Euro 5, and in my opinion it was only a matter of time before one of them made the technology standard. Market-leader Daf has been heavily promoting the benefits of skipping Euro 4 for over a year now and is currently achieving a rate of around 50% Euro 5 sales on its tractors. Now Iveco is taking an even stronger lead.
There seems to be a clear agenda here, and I wonder how long it will be before the other manufacturers follow Iveco's lead?
But with Euro 5 using roughly 50% more AdBlue than Euro 4 - how do they make the cleaner trucks enticing to customers? One obvious answer is to give away AdBlue for free - and over the last few weeks Daf and Mercedes-Benz have both told me that their dealers are prepared to do just this - throwing-in the urea solution as a sweetener with some orders. And now Iveco says it is considering a similar incentive "if AdBlue is seen as an obstacle".
Then there's the increased purchase price to consider - the new technology adds about £1,000 to the price of a truck. But who knows, maybe they'll be prepared to swallow this cost themselves. It depends how important it is for them to kill-off Euro 4.
A significant move from Euro 4 to Euro 5 would certainly prove unpopular with MAN, which currently does not bring its SCR-equipped Euro 5 offering into the UK.