Road Test
T
he traffic was bumper to bumper, and in the last few months before the NorthConnex tunnel took over from the infamous Pennant Hills Rd, in Sydney’s North. It was Friday afternoon at the end of a 1000 km round trip road test at the wheel of Mercedes-Benz, latest Actros and the last thing a B-Double driver wants to hit is an hour of crawling, ever stopping traffic, stuttering its way from traffic light to traffic light. In just about any other truck that scenario would have been a painful test of patience and temperament. However after a solid day at the wheel of the Actros we were able to remain fairly sanguine about the task. The comfort, quietness, user friendly controls and the revolutionary
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new technology MirrorCams made the hour long idle speed crawl, along this thoroughly clogged major artery a great deal easier to endure than it would have been in an older truck. The test of the newly updated Actros had started the day before and we had piloted the new Actros 2663 pulling a B-Double set, tipping the scales at 47 tonnes, north from Sydney up the Pacific Highway to Coffs Harbour. The Pacific is a natural environment for B-doubles these days with most Sydney Brisbane freight operators taking the ‘coast’ road in preference to the New England, given it is largely dual carriageway and will be totally motorway conditions by early in 2021. So it seemed logical to do a return trip in the new
Actros up the Pacific and back. This ‘new-gen’ (or is it a ‘re-gen’?) Actros is similar in many ways to the Actros launched here in 2016. The cab and driveline are largely the same as that all new Actros from four years ago, but there have been a number of new features added and some important updates to the spec with this latest update. The MirrorCam is clearly the headline new technology debuted with the new Actros, largely because it is so new and different to anything that came before it in terms of rear vision for drivers. However there are a whole lot of other features that make the latest Actros a very complete proposition on the road. Climb up into the Actros cabin and get behind the wheel and the first thing
