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RHAPSODY
As part of our Milestones series, Pat Kennett takes a nostalgic trip through the history of Scania.
• For a world-class truck manufacturer boasting major production facilities in five countries, Scania came from pretty humble beginnings.
The story starts in Sweden, of course, but had nothing to do with trucks, or any other form of motorised transport. The bicycle was the name of the game for Scania in the early years of the century — British bicycles, to be precise, because the company was the Swedish agent for Coventry-made Humber cycles.
In 1911 it merged with Vabis of Sodertalje, to the south-west of Stockholm (where Scania is based to this day) but its new partner was not involved with trucks either, being in the railway wagon business. Scania Vabis (the Vabis' part of the name was dropped in 1969) finally saw the light by branching out into cars, buses and trucks. Car production ceased in the twenties, and by the late forties Scania was busy filling the post-war demand for bus and truck chassis.
To expand their product range the Swedes entered some technical liaisons, notably with Mack (for bus design and truck transmissions) and Leyland (for engine and chassis technology). Even now the bore and stroke of Scania's 11-litre engines are the same as those of the Leyland 680, even though little else is recognisable after 40 years of evolution.
REPUTATION
Scania's reputation grew steadily, but even in the 1960s it was building only about 7,000 vehicles a year, which was hardly big league, even in that era.
The mid-sixties was a period of change for Europe's truck builders and operators alike. Hauliers were switching from the immediate post-war do-it-the-best-you-can era, to more sophisticated and scientifically planned operations. They began to look further afield when seeking to expand their fleets, and at the same time manufacturers were looking for sales outside their cosy domestic markets.
So it was that a handful of UK hauliers began to look at European trucks in the mid 1960s, particularly at vehicles from Scandinavia, where hard conditions bred tough and reliable trucks. Among them was Ken Beresford of the well-known green-liveried, Potteries-based fleet; John Smillie from Glasgow; Fred Robinson of Stockton; David McVeigh, and other stalwarts of the industry. They were shopping for tough, hard working trucks which might not only do a better job for them, but were available when needed — not at the far end of a year-long delivery queue, which most UK manufacturers were enjoying at the time. Initially a small number of Scania Vabis trucks were imported privately, before a new UK company began bringing in the chassis. The flagship model in Scandinavia was the LB (for last bil or load car) 76, a fine looking fixed-cab four-wheeler or tractive unit, with an 11-litre 164kW (220hp) engine. Its transmission included both main and auxiliary boxes, with separate levers to operate them. This was straight out of Mack's design manual.
Those hauliers liked what they saw, and by early 1966 the first LB76 trucks began to trickle on to British highways. What is believed to be the first one, LGK 3D, is splendidly preserved today in the hands of Ray Hingley.
Commercial Motor lost no time in getting its hands on this new Swedish truck with a strange sounding name. Ron Cater handled the test in mid-1966, and be admits that even now he's not sure how to pronounce Scania Vabis.
Ron Cater commented in that first UK road-test on the high performance of the LB76 at 32 tons gross. Well he might have: the DS11 engine's output of 177kW (237hp) (DIN) had been uprated that spring and that, together with 901Nm (6651bft) of torque was exceptional by the standards of the day. Not surprisingly, the performance was also excellent by 1966 standards, but the LB76 had much softer suspension than the average British-built truck, and was inclined to roll spectacularly on corners. CM's test included a picture of the truck taking a roundabout with a very marked list to port.
There were a lot of unusual features about the newcomer which earned comment in that first report. The cab was fixed, of course. Volvo was the only European truck with a tilt cab (dubbed the "tip-top") so to get at the Scania's engine you went in through a hinged in-cab bonnet. Nothing unusual about that in 1966, but in addition you could remove the grille panel and swing the radiator away, to get at the belts, water pump and timing case. That particular feature reappeared on the Scammell Crusader some years later.
TRANSMISSION
The Mack-derived transmission had a fivespeed synchromesh main box and a twospeed synchromesh auxiliary acting as a splitter. Our roadtester observed that the splitter's synchro was weak, and good shifts would be easier if both boxes' synchromesh loads were equal.
Later, of course, Scania did away with the lever control on the auxiliary box, and achieved the same result with an integral splitter built into the main gearbox, with a pneumatic switch control. Meanwhile, the two-lever manual boxes were quite a trick to manage and GM's tester kept skinning his knuckles on the engine cover because the main lever was too close (he wasn't the only one — I still bear the scars!).
The CM test found the brakes disappointing — they would not have satisfied the minimum braking standard set by the Transport Act a couple of years later. Fuel consumption was disappointing too, at only 50.271it/100km (5.62mpg) on mixed road running.
Soon the snub-nosed Swede was a common sight on British roads, and a number of improvements were made to RHD models for 1967. Power went up again to 191kW (256hp) and torque to 963Nm (7101bft). A quarter of a century ago, that was very good output indeed from 11 litres. An oil cooler was added and an alternator replaced the dynamo, to cope with increased lighting levels on big trucks. More important still, spring-brake actuators appeared for the first time, and with bigger drums, the 1967 LB76 became a good stopper as well as a good goer. Fuel consumption on CM's autumn 1967 test was more encouraging too, at 36.22 lit/1001cm (7.8mpg) on normal roads, and 42.48 lit/100km (6.65mpg) on the motorway. However, the LB76 tractive unit. . . was considered expensive . . . at £4,500.
These engineering changes signalled to the small band of UK users that Scania Vabis was a progressive company when it came to product development. Even so, nobody was prepared for what came next. At the 1968 Amsterdam Show an all-new Scania appeared. It was called the LB110 and it established Scania as a maker of truly exceptional trucks, an image that it has retained ever since.
It had a strong steel tilt cab with a luxurious interior, an uprated 205kW (275hp) version of the famous 11-litre engine, an integrated main-gear-plus-splitter 10-speed gearbox, advanced suspension and brakes and heavy-duty singlereduction axles as its major feature.
Scania was keen for Europe's truck press to try their new baby. That winter saw a steady stream of testers heading for Sweden, where Scania demonstrated a touching confidence in their ability to handle heavy trucks on ice and snow.
Matters were invariably given an extra touch of spice by the regular Scania test driver, Palle Bjorkman, a chap with an uncommon sense of humour, who now runs the company museum. One of his favourite tricks for the benefit of visiting testers was to set off down a nice straight road out of town, and exclaim. "Here's a nice place to test t' Broms, No?" Broms are brakes, of course, and Palle would have the whole thing tabogganing off down the road to Jonkoping at high speed, all wheels locked, laughing hysterically at the terrified expression on the face of his guest in the cab.
CM's 110 test appeared in February 1969. "A most acceptable chassis" was our verdict, and the poor fuel consumption of 49.56 lit/100km (5.70mpg) could be blamed on the snow and ice. We liked the performance, the handling, the comfort and the safety features.
However, those early tests revealed a weakness that was to stay with Scania for a number of years. Such was the power of the engines that they were prone to breaking various transmission bits, particularly halfshafts. CM's tester discovered this shortcoming when going for a swift downshift in the rain on a sharp hill near the factory in Siidertalje. There was a bit of wheelspin, then it found some grip, and "g-doing". . all forward motion ceased. A halfshaft had gone. In the space of a few weeks, CM snapped a second shaft, and several other British testers followed suit with halfshafts, propshafts or broken pinions. For years that hill was known among Scania engineers as "English Hill", for the number of casualties.
TENDERNESS
This transmission tenderness was not helped by the massive torque of the 14litre vee-eight which was introduced a couple of years later. It wasn't until the 2-Series came along in the early 1980s that Swedish metallurgy overcame the difficulties and the drivefine components came up to the reliability standards of the rest of the chassis.
A feature of the tilt-cab Scanias in all versions — Type 80, 110 and 140 — was the strength of the cab. Scania made considerable capital from films showing their cabs being thumped by huge weights in a test lab, and then showing that the doors still opened. CM confirmed this strength in a test of an LB80 artic in 1970.
It had been a long, hot summer and the test trailer decking had shrunk to the extent that the concrete test weights were sitting on the chassis rails, not on the timber. During brake tests at MIRA, the webbing and chain load retention gave up under the strain. A cascade of concrete blocks sheared the trailer headboard off, knocked the cab off its mountings and slammed it on to the road in front of the LB80's chassis.
At that time there were very few cabs in which you could hope to survive an accident of that sort. The Scania was one of those few, and our tester, Trevor Longcroft, lived to tell the tale, as did Scania's man Sven Nylin, who was also on board. CM's photographer got a dozen shots of the flying test weights with his trusty hand-wind Leica and Scania subsequently used the CM's pictures in its safety advertising. Scania worked hard on durability, reliability, environmental acceptability and safety. It also bucked the trend in Europe by limiting production to heavy trucks with models from 16 tons upwards. It was a bold move, but it paid off.
A new rationalised cab system, with three heights of forward-control structure, a bonneted version, and several length and trim choices, was a pioneering effort in production rationalisation in 1982.
In 1986 Scania introduced a new 8.5litre engine called the 9-Series, to join the 14 and 11 types; and the old 7.8-litre DS8 engine was dropped. High efficiencies in combustion technology achieved specific fuel consumptions well under the critical value of 200g/kWhr, and Scania pioneered the lugging characteristic of modern lowspeed/high-torque engines.
Scania's philosophy of high rationalisa tion levels and strictly defined model groups, enabled it to stay well in the black, even when everyone else was losing money in the mid-1980s. That effort culminated in the highly developed 3Series that won the Truck of the Year award in 1989. Those 3-Series are super machines but, maybe we're all getting older and stuffier, they don't seem to generate the excitement of the days when we first sampled the Swedish way of doing things with the 76s and the dramatic launch of the 110.
Scania enters the 1990s in a unique position among truck builders. Not only is it still very strongly profitable while most of its competitors are faltering on but the company is actually increasing production capacity. Most others are seeking to reduce capacity, or are at least looking for something to fill capacity. Early this year Scania took over an empty exInternational Harvester plant at Angers, in France's Loire valley, and by mid-1991 will have added it to its active plants in Sodertalje, Zwolle, Sao Paulo and Tucuman.
By then Scania will have the capability to build upwards of 45,000 trucks a year, all heavies. In addition, it has many component factories, as well as external suppliers, but it is all highly rationalised. For example, engines and gearboxes built in the South American plants can and are used in European-sourced vehicles. The word is that they grind the words "Made in Argentina" from the gearboxes before selling them in Britain!