READERS’ RIDES IN FOCUS
THE LONG HAULER
NAME: MARC JEANNERET DIRECTOR, ROLE: MANAGING ARONSHORE PILOT SERVICES FLEET: 11 X ISUZU D-MAXS
Over 500,000km on the clock in three years? It’s all part of the job for Marc Jeanneret.
Your company escorts oversized loads across the country. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve transported? Ah! There was a giraffe named Sky that we moved from Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast to Dubbo Zoo. When I was first contacted by telephone they said, “Listen we need a height survey. We’re gonna move a giraffe.” As you can imagine there’s a few bridges between Australia Zoo and Dubbo that need to be measured because you definitely don’t want to decapitate your load. And power lines, too, because you don’t wanna barbecue it on the way down either. Wow. What else? My company doesn’t specialise in anything in particular—we work right across the board. We could be moving
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MAX*D GO YOUR OWN WAY
10m-wide houses around Brisbane or interstate in one piece. Or a nine-metrewide piece of mining equipment weighing 100-150 tonnes. Or a 100m-long wind farm blade. And, less regularly, we might take 150-200-tonne pieces of equipment, such as tunnel boring machines, on a 900km road trip. There’s a surprising amount of large stuff that needs shifting. One thing is the significant infrastructure works that people don’t think of. They drive over a bridge and they don’t realise that there are 100-tonne concrete beams that needed to be brought in to be lifted into place, for example. You put astonishingly large numbers on all of your D-MAXs. Can you give us a few examples?
Yes, as of last service one D-MAX has done 745,359km. We got it in 2018. It’s not to be confused with our sixth Isuzu, which has done about 523,000km in three years. And the second D-MAX we ever bought was sold for more than half the purchase price as a cab chassis in May 2022 after four years. It had more than 602,000km on the clock! Excellent resale value. Why did you choose the D-MAX? These are vehicles that we drive to make money. We don’t drive them to employ mechanics to improve their ability to make repairs. Succinctly put. They are work vehicles but they’re still comfortable to drive and they’re still enjoyable behind the wheel. When you’re
