This is exactly how I remember the classic, on-highway big rigs from Germany. One can say the country’s counterpart of the typical US semi-box trailer type. A Mercedes-Benz or MAN 4×2 cabover truck, towing a full trailer with three axles and single wheels, often built by Kässbohrer. Both the truck and the trailer came with a flatbed with dropsides and a tarpaulin cover.
Actually, this ol’ MAN has a tilting flatbed, which was a common set-up in Germany. On top of that -very much figuratively speaking- it’s powered by an underfloor (‘Unterflur’) turbodiesel.
Back in 1971, MAN took over truck and bus manufacturer Büssing. The underfloor truck diesel was a well-known Büssing concept, MAN would use it for many years to come after the takeover. And oh yes, that lion logo on the grille is also a Büssing idea.
From 1967 to 1986, this was the friendly face of heavy MAN cabover trucks and tractors. The tilt cab was a French Saviem design, Renault’s heavy vehicle division of yore. In exchange, Saviem got MAN diesel engines. A mutually beneficial business relationship, as the average truck driver would say.
There it is, hanging on the right side of the chassis, slightly hiding in the dark. An inline-six, MAN D2566 turbodiesel with a displacement of 11,450 cc, and good for 320 DIN-hp.
The truck’s transmission is a synchronized, manual ZF 16-speed with a double-H shifting pattern. Also known as the ZF Ecosplit 16S.
With an underfloor engine, there’s obviously no doghouse intruding into the cab. And the engine sound is only heard somewhere in the background. From a driver’s standpoint, anyway.
Splendid, the matching Kässbohrer full trailer. In its homeland, the whole combination was rated at a gross weight of 39 tonnes (85,980 lbs). That’s 17 tonnes for the truck and 22 tonnes for the trailer.
Found on YouTube, the very same combination on the move, seven years ago. Slowly, so we can have a really good look at it.
Ja, genau! The truck driver’s name is Brummi, no idea who the suited guy is, but they seem to get along just fine.
Thanks for the essay. I always enjoy your truck articles. I note that now that I saw the cartoon characters, I will be polite to truckers. A little sarcasm here. I admire these men and women who have to put up with fools who do not understand the dynamics of a truck.
Brummi is the German Michelin Man, sort of…
Well – in a certain way, it is. But it also is a colloquial term for a lorry / truck. A nickname, so to speak.
Right, thanks! Now I just have to ask: those widely used signs with ‘fern, schnell, gut’, why is there a red, diagonal line across the words?
Especially teachers in the pre-high school years did that when your (home)work was not quite correct. Then you got a similar red line across your words/numbers.
Those little things keep bothering me (quote Columbo).
As I heared, the signage FERN SCHNELL GUT had a certain significance when German road transportation demanded different official licensing in the past.
There used to be commercial local freight transport ( i. e. transportation within a radius of max. 50 km as the crow flies from the
assumed location ), which was selectable within a radius of max. 30 km from the company headquarters.
Transports beyond this limit that could not be assigned to long-distance plant or plant transport were assigned to long-distance freight transport.
long-distance freight transport. This required the corresponding concession.
This was divided into the so called BLUE CONCESSION (150 km radius from the assumed location), the so called RED CONCESSION (Europe-wide) or the so called yellow concession for FURNITURE TRANSPORTS.
The inscription FERN SCHNELL GUT contained a diagonal bar whose color ( blue, red or yellow ) indicated the corresponding concession.
Before, in the 50s and early 60s, the long-distance concession was identified by a longitudinal stripe in the form of checks, connected tip to tip on the corner) around the loading area.
Midsommar, thank you very much!
That cab looks quite luxurious inside! I wonder if that was just a brochure version, while everyday drivers of those rigs made do with something more spartan. At least that seems to be the way it works here in the States.
I also love the three windshield wipers. American big trucks seem to have adopted twin parallel-action wipers that leave a lot of un-wiped space on the glass.
Well, it’s a French cab after all…but I agree it must be the top trim level, pictured in a factory brochure.
That photo dates back to the seventies, BTW, as trucks in this top segment got air-suspended seats in the eighties (the article’s MAN has them).
The seventies and early eighties were the era in which heavy-duty Euro cabovers vastly improved in each and every aspect, especially from a driver’s point of view. Compare a Volvo F89 from the mid-seventies to a Volvo F12 Globetrotter from the early eighties, for example.
JP, now that you know how, dont drive any modern European trucks, you would get a rude shock, comfortably and quiet is how they drive, proper wipers and lights plus all the electronic wizardry that just comes stock,
Great profile, of a classic rig. Thank you Johannes. Clean, practical design, throughout.
The owner bought the rig from a hauling company and changed its color scheme and livery into the factory MAN ‘Fahr & Spar Training’ livery from the mid-eighties. That’s ‘Drive and Save’ (fuel), a factory training program.
The truck has a front spoiler (under the steel bumper) and a roof spoiler, that never happened in the seventies, let alone earlier.
no idea who the suited guy is
Otto Normalverbraucher (Otto regular gas user). It was a common term in the media in Germany to represent the typical/average car owner/driver, who drove a basic car that used regular (Normal) gasoline, in counterpart to an enthusiast or such. The poster is of course intended to encourage cooperation between cars and trucks, which was very much not the case, given how fast many Germans drove and how slow the trucks tended to be back then.
Aha! ‘Otto Normalverbraucher’, that does ring a bell!
“Otto Normalverbraucher (Otto regular gas user). It was a common term in the media in Germany to represent the typical/average car owner/driver, …”
“Otto Normalverbraucher” not only refers to car owners. The term has a more general meaning. It is Mr. Everybody. The English would call him “Joe Average”, I think.
Come to think of it, Otto Dieselverbraucher does not exist, I suppose. Otto and Diesel don’t go well together, they never did.
I think that’d be Herr D. Normalverbraucher, his rather coarse brother.
We also have TC MITS – The Colloquial Man in the Street.
IIRC, the .321 was MAN’s first successful turbodiesel introduced in the late 1970s; in MAN form, the cab had to be raised slightly to clear the plumbing on the slant-six and had a sporty valance added between the cab & bumper. Not needed on this Büssing version.
It replaced the .320 with its V10 which shared its block with Mercedes-Benz. No Unterflur version of that, of course!
Apparently, the military wanted a standardised range of V6, V8 & V10 diesels, but MAN & M-B insisted on using their proprietary combustion chambers, so that meant unique heads and pistons and less standardisation.
‘Jan Modaal’ is the man’s name here. John Modal, easy translation.
Aha! I’m only familiar with the term from reading it in Auto, Motor und Sport in the US. I never heard in Austria in the 50s.
Nice ol truck, I see other commenters wondering about the luxury interior, honestly its quite sparse in there compared with later models of almost anything out of Europe, we have appalling roads in some areas with yet to be repaired cyclone damage, Euro trucks have a nice ride on any surface, air suspended cabs and seats see to that.
You are not legally able to tow a 6 wheel trailer with a class 2 truck here, they are light trailer trucks only lacking full air brakes required for towing and a second drive axle,
that ZF slap box isnt a good thing, have you driven one? I have in a MAN like that one and a Chinese spec Isuzu, cheap isnt always good,
We had a little MAN curtainsider like that for round town work, every now and then I got sent to pick up the odd lift missing from my linehaul load in it, Good truck for those jobs, the same cab and likely powertrain was available in 6 or 8 wheeler form for highway work
In a next episode, another big MAN born in the eighties, yet with a Fuller RTO9513.
For a long time, both ZF and Fuller were offered by the truck makers that didn’t build their own transmissions, like DAF and MAN. Nowadays, those brands only offer ZF in Europe.
The underfloor turbodiesel appears ingenious to me from a mechanical accessibility standpoint. Any idea why this interesting design faded out in favor of the now common euro cab over engine preference?
See Nick’s comment below.
Apart from the accessibility standpoint, also factor in the difference between a heavy rompin’ stompin’ lump of a diesel engine above the steering axle, all the way up front, or the same thing hanging deep down below, between the steering axle and the rear axle(s).
I think it was noise – I seem to remember they tried encapsulating the engine, taking away its advantages. Also, the newer cabs got better sound insulation and more space, rendering it less advantageous. Also, despite Büssing’s most ridiculous earlier experiments, it’s difficult to do on an articulated chassis.
So the market shrank and became unprofitable to engineer & build.
‘I think it was noise’. That’s indeed what it says on MAN’s own website. If I’m not mistaken, noise regulations became rather strict in Germany, certainly in built up areas/cities.
But there must be an efficiency aspect too. More standardization if you just plump down the same engine, say MAN’s 11.5 liter 6-cylinder, in all truck and tractor chassis -conventionals included- that roll down the production line (in a given power segment). What all others did.
Well, that’s what did for Büssing in the end – they only made a couple of thousand trucks per year, their own engines and in effect, two model ranges; the ‘S’ (Stehend – standing) and the ‘U’ (Unterflur). The latter makes some sense if there is also a bus chassis version (a big market for them once) but in the end, it was uneconomic.
They just could not compete with MAN & M-B.
Büssing in a nutshell: excellent ideas, superb engineering, premium quality, but they forgot to make profits.
The (pre-Fiat) Lancia of trucks, in other words.
Nothing ever went to waste in Germany though – The Braunschweig plant is still very much part of MAN and the Osterholz-Scharmbeck one makes Faun roadsweepers/bin wagons.
All of our 1-2,000 per annum producers are now housing estates.
One could argue the same with Hanomag-Henschel; M-B took them over to close them down & use the facilities itself.
Rationalizierung ist brutal…