I think they end up having less living space for the truck drivers. I don't know if that's a design limitation, or just a separate aspect of the European market (where the flat-front trucks are ubiquitous), but it would be bad for the quality of life of a lot of truck drivers in the US if the result would be a less comfortable living space.
Surely there's a huge amount of in-city trucking that doesn't need a lot of "living space" for drivers? Such as trips from a regional distribution centre on the outskirts of a city to supermarkets within it? Obviously the distribution centre would be stocked from further out by larger trucks (or in an ideal world, by rail freight).
With the limiting factor of lorries ("trucks") in most jurisdictions being length, one would think the cab-over design lets you put a bigger sleeping cabin behind the driving space than the long-nose one.
Those big sleepers can do a lot for the quality of life for the long haul drivers. Part of the reason the trucks with big sleepers are in town is because it's not often cost or time effective to drop the trailer at the edge and let a day cab bring it to the final destination. I imagine this could potentially change, though.
Yes. Not everywhere, not all the time, but a lot of logistic companies have their platform on the outskirt of major metropolis where the trucks are parked and emptied. Then delivery within the city is handle via van.
I drove a euro-spec Mercedes cab over truck (complete with the glass that turns to dust if something like a rock, a pipe or pieces of an IED goes through it) when I was a civilian contractor overseas and they are pretty tiny compared to the full sleepers we have over here.
> I drove a euro-spec Mercedes cab over truck (complete with the glass that turns to dust if something like a rock, a pipe or pieces of an IED goes through it) when I was a civilian contractor overseas and they are pretty tiny compared to the full sleepers we have over here.
Oh, so a 1960s vehicle? I'm fairly sure lorries in Europe have had laminated windscreens since about the 1970s.
The lamination keeps the whole thing from coming apart but the actual glass just breaks up into a bajillion little pieces making wearing eye protection a necessity.
It doesn’t all turn into powder though, think it has to do with the velocity of the penetrating object. A piece of shrapnel moving fast enough to put a nice mark in a Kevlar helmet leaves a little hole while a rock thrown into it makes it a big floppy mess. The pipe was kind of in the middle but I think that’s because it bounced off one of the ballistic plates I had on the dashboard instead of going straight through.
Before they put metal mesh screens over the windshield we were going through a lot of them so I’m pretty familiar with how euro-glass reacts to traumatic impacts.
> but it would be bad for the quality of life of a lot of truck drivers
> For the US, Norden plans to follow a similar strategy, starting with a Class 7 variant (equivalent to the 16-ton EU model), with smaller Classes 5 and 6 variants following.
