Scania’s low-entry L-series cab has achieved a five-star safety rating – the highest possible – in the European consumer testing organisation Euro NCAP’s Safer Trucks programme. Assessed against safety performance parameters yet devised, the L-series cab has been proven to provide drivers and vulnerable road users protection and is positioned for a variety of waste industry applications.
The cab’s structure meets Scania’s highest standards for occupant safety and secured great results in the four stages of Euro NCAP accident testing: safe driving, crash avoidance, crash protection, and post-crash safety.
All-around safety is now a core competency, no longer a nice-to-have, yet there are many ways to increase the safety of a waste vehicles’ fleet, which stretch beyond crash test assessments.
Fleet managers can do more than tick off a box with a slew of active and passive safety systems, such as advanced emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, as well as road user or pedestrian anti-collision warning systems. While these play a key role in preventing accidents and are state-of-the-art technology, now becoming widely available in the market, Scania offers advanced intelligent systems that will spare waste fleet managers’ headaches.
Scania Zone is a concept that ring-fences geographical areas and prevents drivers from over-speeding, informing them in the cab that the speed limit is being enforced by the vehicle, via settings made by fleet management, based on the vehicle’s position and time of day.
For vehicles working in school zones during drop-off or pick-up, Scania Zone could be especially helpful. Scania’s connected vehicle network comprises almost one million vehicles around the world constantly reporting hundreds of performance parameters to the Fleet Management tool. This provides not only visibility to the operator of how their assets are being used, but gives Scania analysts the ability to monitor real-world wear and tear, actual use in service by payload, the driving environment, and driver skills.
The aim of this technology is to provide greater in-service uptime, by using data drawn from numbers of vehicles to plan preventative maintenance programmes, which avoid unplanned breakdowns. These stoppages are more costly in terms of time, money and meeting operators contracted KPIs compared with pin-point preventative maintenance measures.
“Running a fleet of waste vehicles for municipalities, councils or private recycling enterprise requires more than vehicles that are purchased on price alone,” says Benjamin Nye, director of truck sales for Scania Australia. “Environmental performance is under the microscope, and many waste-related activities are a focus of the public’s attention. In addition to providing safe and fatigue-reducing vehicles, Scania has a suite of active and passive safety systems available as standard, which make working in the congested streets of our inner cities or trawling the suburbs, dodging runners, cyclists and impatient car drivers, that little bit easier.”
Reducing the potential for impacts with street furniture or other vehicles means less VOR for repairs, less cost and happier drivers and management.
Nye also said that using Scania Zone ensures compliance when driving liveried council or company branded bulk haulage vehicles as it has a societal benefit.
These vehicles are being seen to do the right thing by the people who pay council rates or contract a company’s services.
“For almost two decades Scania has fitted driver airbags to steering wheels on its trucks, has delivered all steel cabs that are crash tested, and exceeded the most stringent requirements,” said Nye. “Since 2018, we have fitted standard side curtain airbags on all our New Truck Generation range, to reduce the potential for death or serious injury if a high-sided vehicle with a high centre of gravity, topples over.”
The L-series cab combines good visibility with easy entry and exit, contributing to a safer working environment for drivers and crews. In addition to its ergonomic advantages, the cab offers active safety systems, such as advanced emergency braking, lane departure warning with active steering, and a side-turn emergency brake that detects and reacts to cyclists turning across the vehicle’s path.
“From our perspective this is a global endorsement of the safety performance that has been engineered into all Scania vehicles in the current generation, drawing on decades of safety engineering evolution,” said Nye. “When you draw together all the Scania safety innovations, standard safety features and the results of independent crash testing, you just won’t find a safer truck for your application. And as a way to lure or retain drivers, offering them a safer workplace is undeniably a strong drawcard.”
For all waste operators interested in driving down emissions, most of Scania’s diesel
combustion powertrains can be run using renewable diesel, up to B100 biodiesel or HVO, which can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 85 per cent. These renewable diesel options require no additional infrastructure investment by the operator, invoke no range anxiety, and the fuels are readily available. This solution can be implemented instantly and is suitable for enterprise or municipal bodies that may be required to report on their emissions reductions performance, or which have new targets with which to comply.