Wednesday
I can't make up my mind about Torino. On the one hand, it's nothing like Birmingham, to which someone had likened it (the motor industry being the key similarity, whereas as any self-respecting Brummie will tell you, Birmingham is actually "the Venice of the Midlands" thanks to its canals) and the majority of the centre is quite pretty, but on the other it just doesn't seem to be bothered about clearing up the graffiti and the general scruffiness.
Sure, the main shopping street, Via Roma, is chi-chi enough and there's enough designer boutiques to make you wallet scream, but like all Italian cities it seems to take its heritage for granted.
Every otherwise ordinary little street has a beautiful 16C courtyard jutting off it, turn a corner and there's a lovely renaissance church - you can't help but run into it - but, whereas in the UK we'd have roped it off and covered it in English Heritage signs, here there's a shrug of indifference.I don't know, maybe you just get immune to these things.
Needless to say as well, the city centre is much, much nicer than the industrial hinterland on the other side of the River Dora Riparia where Iveco has its head office, engine plant, axle assembly works, customer service department and so on and so forth.
We didn't actually get to see inside the sprawling plant - I'd give you a comparison in football pitches, but frankly I have no idea, let's just say it's very big - not least because large chunks of it are empty since actual truck assembly got sent elsewhere in the Iveco empire (I'm not sure what it says that one of the nearby roads is Via Giulio Cesare).
However, what was interesting was a meeting with Guiliano Giovannini, the company's sales and marketing director of product, where he outlined what Iveco is doing with alternative fuels and how it will achieve Euro-6.
While I could bore you to death with the detail of what he said, the condensed version is thus:
- Euro 6 won't attract a fuel consumption penalty, but E6 trucks will be 5% more expensive
- It will be achieved via SCR, so AdBlue is here to stay
- Hybrid trials are ongoing - but thus far positive on both Daily and Eurocargo
- Iveco really, really likes CNG/CBM as a fuel
- It's adding more powerful gas engines to the Stralis
- It'll happily make electric vehicles but feels the market is pretty limited.
That probably covers it - at least in the detail I'm going to go into here. Following that interview we had a brief look round its breakdown assistance centre, which was again suitably impressive.
It was revealed to us though that the UK is the most demanding market - whereas other countries teach their drivers self-reliance or at least grant them a degree of autonomy, here (well, there) in the UK we make sure that assistance is called out even if all that's wrong is a blown headlamp bulb. Possibly food for thought.
Anyway, tomorrow it's off to Budapest - which, from memory, makes Italy look sane and well-ordered.
Oh, and there's project Diciotto - that may be of more interest to UK hauliers.