In boxing, the follow through is just as important as the opening, and for CNH Industrial in the Middle East, where the OEM celebrated its most successful year to date in 2015 with its Astra heavy-duty truck range, it is time to press the advantage.
At Bauma the manufacturer unveiled its latest Astra, an extra-heavy-duty 8×6 HD9 dumper with a 24m3 body and 55t gross vehicle weight, aimed at the mining and quarrying sector. The design incorporates heavy-duty front and rear Kessler axles with reinforced parabolic suspension and a HD9 chassis strengthened with additional reinforcement.
Michele Bianchi, senior product and marketing manager for Astra worldwide, explains: “The HD9 in general is a truck that is very strong due to the chassis frame and other components, but this truck here is even more so, because we have added further components, like extra-reinforced axles that enable it to carry the 55t of GVW.”
The chassis design is what differentiates the Astra range in robustness from, for example, the Iveco Trakker. The Astra’s C-section is 320mm-high, 90mm-wide and 10mm-thick, “so it’s a very high section and the inertial momentum is very high,” notes Bianchi.
The material also has a tensile strength of 530 megapascals, which, when combined with the design and the thickness of the material produces an extremely high bending moment — a critical parameter for measuring the stiffness of longitudinal members and the torsional stiffness of a chassis frame.
Bianchi adds: “The bending moment of the HD9 chassis, as a structure, is 200,000Nm, which is best-in-class, even without additional reinforcement, and this enables the vehicle to load very heavy equipment.”
The standard HD9 chassis can carry a GVW of 45t across its four axles, and Bianchi notes: “Normally, our competitors will not provide this as standard without reinforcement. The HD9 does, and with reinforcement can reach up to 55t with the rear tandem structure carrying up to 40t across two Kesslar axles.”
At a glance, the utility of having a 55t extra-heavy-duty HD9 appears questionable, given Astra, at the 30th edition of Bauma in 2013, already launched the HHD9, which can carry 63t — but there is method in the madness.
The HD9, at 2.5m width, is road-worthy; the HHD9, at 2.9m width, is not. The extra-heavy-duty HD9 essentially provides all the robustness necessary for the most extreme off-road situations and a GVW not matching but approaching that of the HHD9, while retaining its road worthiness.
Bianchi highlights: “You have markets where you are working in very hard, off-road conditions, but you also move from one site to another, and you have to drive on the road.”
Such scenarios are frequently the case in the Middle East, and particularly in the UAE and Oman, where aggregates are often picked up from the quarry by the contractors and delivered by road straight to site.
The mining hood on the HD9 at Bauma was also an Astra-customised and Astra-branded body, designed with an Italian body builder.
Across its different country markets, CNH Industrial provides both bare chassis and fully fitted and equipped bodies, to its customers.
In an example present at the stand of the Italian Concrete equipment producer Cifa at Bauma, the extra-heavy-duty 8×4 HD9 had been equipped with a 15m3 CIFA mixer body — an application that typically required a sub-frame to be installed onto the truck chassis in most trucks, but which is enabled without a sub-frame on the extra-heavy-duty HD9 thanks to the extreme strength and stiffness of its chassis. This reduces both the cost of the installation, as well as the overall weight of the vehicle and its installations with the model in an additonal benefit for Astra HD9 customers.
Looking to the future of Astra’s business in the Middle East, Luca Sra, brand business director for Astra, adds: “Last year was an exceptional year for all of the Middle East, and particularly for Oman, due to the important partnership that we have developed with our importer, Al Fairuz Trading & Contracting.”
In short, over just five years, Al Fairuz has sold around 1,000 Astra trucks into Oman, and in 2015, nearly one in three Astra models produced worldwide was sold into the Sultanate’s market, much of it to the dealer’s key accounts, like the famed Omani contractor Galfar Engineering and Contracting.
Sra continues: “Now Al Fairuz has more than 20% of the share in all the heavy segments, including the heavy-duty on-road segment — even though our business is focused on off-road — and the construction business is still very active in Oman, so we expect to consolidate our presence and our volumes at these levels.”
There are regional differences, with the Oman market traditionally purchasing 90% three-axle trucks, so it will be interesting to see if the benefits of the extra-heavy-duty 8×4 HD9 will suffice to captivate the market.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is a four-axle market where Astra can readily concentrate its sales around the extra-heavy-duty 8×4 HD9’s advantages in terms of GVW for both mixers and tippers.
Sra notes: “We sold at the end of last year 70 units in Saudi Arabia to Schlumberger. It was a mixture of 4×4 and 6×6 units, and we delivered them in March.”
In the Kingdom, Iveco and Astra also have an existing partnership with Cifa, whose mixer body was installed without a sub-frame at Bauma, and thus who already has the design prepared for such applications.
The extra-heavy-duty HD9 will enter Middle East markets with a Euro stage 3 engine, but in Saudi Arabia in particular, the market and regulations could be ready by Euro 4 vehicles as early as 2018.