ITS – Of Scanias and Rolls-Royces
Will Shiers catches up with British haulier Steve Nixon, who treats his 2-million-kilometre Scania 18-tonner like it’s a Rolls-Royce.
ARolls-Royce doesn’t break down; it fails to proceed. And according to Steve Nixon, owner of Nixon’s Transport in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, the same should apply to a Scania. After all, in his opinion, the Swedish manufacturer is the RollsRoyce of the trucking world. And he should know – he owns several examples of both marques.
Of all the cars and trucks in his fleet, his favourite is without a doubt a 1992 Scania P93M 18-tonner. Incredibly, despite having covered more than 2 million kilometres on the same driveline, it has only ever failed to proceed once. “The only time I can recall it needing any assistance was with a starter motor failure, and the driver had to get a bump-start to get home,” he recalls. “It turned out to be a broken wire and fixed within the hour.”
The truck was purchased new by Steve’s father,
Terence. Having run numerous marques over the years, he had settled on Scania after a positive experience with a Super 80. It was the second Scania Nixon’s had purchased from new, and much effort was made to ensure that the specification was exactly right for this general haulier’s needs.
“We went for the heavy-duty 7500kg front axle, as not only did it give us a better tolerance with axle weight distribution, but it also made it possible to increase the plated weight from 17,000kg to 18,000kg when legislation changed,” explains Steve, thumbing through the original sales literature.
Nixon’s Transport also specified the optional GS771 10-speed gearbox, instead of the standard 5-speed version. “It was over-the-top for a rigid really,” admits Steve, “but it paid for itself in the long-run.”
According to the original bill of sale, £420 ($800) was spent on an optional speed limiter and another £155 ($295) on a radio cassette player.
This took the grand total to £30,762 ($58,000). Next, the truck was treated to some mild customisation, including the fitting of a stainless-steel bumper, air horns, sun visor, a hand-painted livery and, of course, a ‘Haulin’ Ass’ chrome badge for the grille. Now it was ready to work for a living.
During the next 29 years, J964 BAU was used on general haulage duties throughout Britain, covering a distance equivalent of 2.5 return trips to the moon. (At this point, Steve announces that not only has it done it on the same driveline, but on the same clutch too!)
Have you ever seen an interview with someone celebrating a triple-digit birthday? You can guarantee that the reporter will ask,
“What’s the secret to a long and healthy life?” At this point, I desperately want to hear Reginald/Edna say, “A bacon roll for breakfast, 40 cigs a day, and several pints of strong beer every evening.” Unfortunately, that’s never the case. And when I ask Steve what the Scania’s secret is, the answer is equally as predictable. “We change the oil frequently, we do our own maintenance, and we always use genuine parts,” he says. Of course, it helps that the truck clearly rolled off the production line on a Friday afternoon.
“The oil is changed every 10,000km to 12,000km, and never more than 15,000km,” he explains. “And we never use cheap oil in any of our trucks. With oil, you get what you pay for, and expensive oil isn’t as expensive as metal. You can’t maintain something to a budget; you have to maintain it to a standard.”
This same philosophy is also applied to parts. “As a general rule, we use genuine parts on all our trucks,” explains Steve, admitting that one of the few exceptions are aftermarket bumpers. “But we would never fit aftermarket filters.”
But the same level of pampering hasn’t been applied to the paintwork which, judging by the numerous battle scars it has accumulated over the years, has been completely ignored. The only lick of paint it has ever received was last May, when the load bed received a tidyup for a very special occasion – but more about that later.
“People ask me why I don’t paint it,” says Steve. “My answer is that restoring is great, but a truck can only be original once. It was made to work, and that’s what it has been doing since. It could be a show truck, but then it wouldn’t be a work truck.”
Although it’s been taxed and tested continually since new, J964 BAU has been used more sparingly in the past couple of years. “It went out three days last week, but it might not be used for a fortnight now,” confirms Steve.
Nixon’s Transport doesn’t have any drivers of its own, relying solely on a select group of agency staff. Steve is well aware that a 29-year-old truck with no seatbelts isn’t everyone’s idea of a perfect work tool, and just two regular drivers are assigned to it.
“I wouldn’t send a complete stranger out in it as it wouldn’t be fair on the driver or the truck,” he says. “It’s not uncomfortable, and you don’t need three arms to drive it. It’s just not the same as a modern truck.”
It’s not quite as quick either and by Steve’s own admission, it loses some speed on the hills. “The old girl does slow down a bit, but you’d have to go a long distance before you lost any real time.”
Another difference between this and a modern truck is the manual gearbox, the operation of which is becoming alien to some younger drivers.
Steve recently had an agency driver arrive in the yard who announced that he couldn’t drive a manual. “He said he had only driven one manual and had almost had an accident. I said, ‘If that’s the case, it’s not fair for me, you or other road users to send you out in one’.”
So, the big question is, how much life is left in J964 BAU? Could it be good for another million kilometres?
Probably not, according to Steve, but that’s through no fault of either him or the truck. “Legislation [emissions regulations] will eventually take it off the road,” he says. “We live in a throwaway society, and good working trucks, with many years of life left in them, are being pensioned off because of legislation. It suits some companies to change trucks at five years old, but there is potentially still a lot of work left in them. They’re exported, the AdBlue systems are removed, and the pollution takes place in a different part of the world. It seems like such a waste of good working vehicles.”
At the start of this story, I said that Steve compares a Scania with a Rolls-Royce in terms of build quality. Well, last year, this particular Scania took the comparison one step further when it genuinely stepped into the role of a Roller.
Sadly Terence Nixon died last May. And in a fitting tribute to this well-respected haulier, he made his last-ever journey on the back of the Scania.