Interesting Equipment at the New Atlanta Show
Dorsey showed a van and a container chassis, as well as flatbeds and lowboys. So the NACV show was about more than freight hauling. Photos: Tom Berg
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Dorsey showed a van and a container chassis, as well as flatbeds and lowboys. So the NACV show was about more than freight hauling. Photos: Tom Berg
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By now you’ve probably heard about the inaugural North American Commercial Vehicle Show in Atlanta, and that attendance was good and exhibitors were plentiful. I headed down there with the belief that we don’t need another truck show, but came away thinking that this was a quality production that has a future.
The NACV show will be held every two years, alternating with the huge IAA show in Hannover, Germany. That’s important to certain truck builders, and might or might not mean something to truck users and buyers in Canada, Mexico, and the USA. This show’s focus was on fleet executives and managers rather than the drivers and owner-operators who attend the Mid-America Trucking Show – MATS – in Louisville.
The apparent success of the first NACV show could mean that the truck original equipment manufacturers that pulled out of MATS will stay out. Did it deserve to be jilted by the OEMs? Who knows? Do drivers and O-Os deserve to be forsaken? No. But I will note that Daimler, which instigated this big change in preferred shows, let Freightliner set up a large MATS booth dedicated to drivers, so didn’t forget them. If another of the absent OEMs did that, I didn’t see it.
Of course, Kenworth and Peterbilt exhibited at MATS this year and were not at NACV. There are many business considerations and industry politics involved in the pullout from MATS and starting of NACV, but let’s put them aside. Because there was a lot of equipment to be seen in Atlanta, and of course I tried to focus on trailers.
I was surprised to see large displays of lowboys and flatbeds when I thought that …Read the rest of this story
