PERSONALITY
Martin Merrick.
EXECUTIVE
ORDER
Volvo Group Australia President Martin Merrick has been tasked with steering the company through one of the most challenging periods ever faced by local markets as industry comes to grips with the fallout from COVID-19. A roadmap, however, is at the ready and includes launching four new models, future announcements in electro-mobility and big plans for investing additional development resources into the Mack brand. PM: Euro 6 emissions are not currently mandated in Australia, yet VGA has made some significant sales to major fleets. Is it time the Australian government took more interest in what the industry is doing? MM: I think there is a clear support for Euro 6 to be mandated and I know the Truck Industry Council and a number of industry associations are working closely with the government. We’ve been importing Euro 6 trucks since 2017 based on customer demand. We now see the demand is increasing and we have now invested circa $25 million to build Volvo Euro 6 vehicles here locally, rather than import them. That sort of investment and technology is not just 58
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about Euro 6 emissions but leads to safer and more productive and easier to drive trucks. We are also investing $100 million over the next four years in our Mack product strategy which will also include Euro 6. PM: When will we start to see the new Volvo models which were revealed in Sweden in March? MM: We’re launching four new models for Volvo Trucks which has been a significant investment of 10 billion Swedish Kroner (approx. $1.56 billion AUD) and of course the Brisbane Truck Show would have been the perfect stage to showcase those new models. We couldn’t just hope about how many of
our dealers and customers will be able to travel across borders so we had to make a tough decision early not to participate and a lot of people perhaps felt we were premature in what we decided and I understand that. We just felt that hoping for the best was not a good strategy. PM: Your predecessor Peter Voorhoeve put a lot of effort into aligning the model line-up across the three brands. Is that going to continue under your watch? MM: Absolutely. Thanks to the work that has been done under Peter’s leadership and the fantastic team here, we’ve got three fantastic brands that compete in different segments. We have the Volvo Group CAST system
