TIME TRAVELS

FORTY YEARS AGO, a seismic shift occurred in the global trucking landscape. A shift so vast it would eventually lay the commercial and technological foundations for Europe’s ultimate ascension over Fortress America as the dominant force in world truck manufacturing.

That was the year, 1981, when the company formerly known as Daimler-Benz bought the struggling US truck maker Freightliner, and whether by confluence or coincidence, it was also the year Swedish brand Volvo acquired the financially strapped White Trucks.

As historical milestones, these acquisitions by two titans of global truck manufacturing were the starting point, the beachhead of Europe’s assault and largely unchallenged annexation of the world’s biggest heavy-duty truck market. There would, of course, be much more to come, with no shortage of corporate convulsions along the way but even now it remains easy to wonder if brash corporate bravado blinded American interests to Europe’s ultimate ambitions until it was too late. Way too late.

Yet while Daimler-Benz’s acquisition of Freightliner would develop exponentially into North American market leadership, Volvo hasn’t reached the same heights of market strength in the US despite an ’80s campaign which was unquestionably the most dynamic and boldly aggressive of the two continental invaders.

Five years after buying White, for instance, the Volvo White company bought the heavy truck business of the massive General Motors organisation. Ironically, and perhaps most profoundly typifying the economic trauma then afflicting most of America’s truck makers, Volvo’s expansion came around the same time a US investor group formed a company called Navistar International to rejuvenate the truck interests of the quickly corroding International Harvester Corporation.

Strangely though, a couple of White offshoots rejected by Volvo in its ’81 takeover would many years later become high profile parts of Daimler’s bold new world, namely Western Star and a dormant brand in the White stable called Sterling. Down the track, Daimler in 1997 would buy Ford’s heavy truck business and recast Sterling in an entirely new light, only to eventually dump the brand altogether in 2008. Go figure!