GITI Tyres Big Test; Curtain Call

Major change is underway in Japanese truck manufacturing, and the early signs are just becoming apparent here in New Zealand.

Until recently Japan had four truck manufacturers. And it still has four brands, but at the deeper levels of future product development and manufacturing it’s become a two-horse race.

Isuzu and UD are joined in one camp while Fuso and Hino now exist under the new Archion Corporation banner in an alliance that brings together the might of Daimler Truck and Toyota Motor ...

New Zealand’s first new Kenworth T420 seems to have a numerically appropriate job description. It’s busy shuttling 40s and 20s around the Napier and Hastings road network.

Everfresh Transport from Twyford put the new T420 8x4 Day Cab to work in April as the third container swinglift unit in its fleet of more than 40 trucks.

With a steadily increasing container workload at Everfresh, the T420 Day Cab joins a 2022 T410 in a similar spec and the original Freightliner Century 6x4 which got the company into swinglift work. The Freightline...

GITI Tyres Big Test; Quiet Revolution

A quiet revolution has just started in the forests near Rotorua and on the highways of the Bay of Plenty and central plateau.

The Rotorua Forest Haulage (RFH) fleet has a new Scania which is very different to the others working in the familiar green and white colours.

It’s a 45 R model, an R Series 6x4 tractor unit which is working as a 9-axle B-Train logger. That alone is different because anything other than 8- and 9-axle truck and trailer combos are a rarity in modern Kiwi log transpor...