Heritage Commercials Magazine - capturing the spirit of vintage days

Comment - March 2012

But did you know that this award has been going since 1976? And did you also know that the first winner was a British lorry in the form of the Seddon Atkinson 200?
The award was actually the idea of the late Pat Kennett, who was the first editor of the sadly defunct magazine Truck. Apparently he came up with it while testing a 200 as he thought it was so good it needed to be recognised.

The following year the award was further developed and a jury was set up to decide the winner. It also went international, and soon the jury consisted of one representative from each country in Western Europe. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, other countries have joined in and the jury now stands at 24 members.

The second British winner was in 1981 when the award went to Leyland for the T45 Roadtrain. I suppose there was no surprise in that as nobody had seen anything like it before and I remember it being hailed as a tremendous step forward in lorry design.

The following year Ford’s Cargo took the prize but after that the winners have all carried a foreign badge. That doesn’t mean of course that some weren’t built here – for example in 2002 the Leyland-built DAF LF won the award.

Anyway, manufacturers are always pleased to win this annual award, but I can’t help thinking what it really means in the long term for the winning designs. For example, we recently ran a poll on our website to find out which foreign lorry you thought was the best. The winner then was Scania, followed by Volvo, DAF, Mercedes-Benz and then MAN. Now this result doesn’t tally up with the Truck of the Year Awards. For example, Mercedes-Benz (which came fourth in our poll) has won Truck of the Year eight times, more than any other maker. Therefore you’d think that as its designs were good enough to win so many times, that would also make it the most popular with drivers and operators. The other relevant results were MAN seven wins and Volvo five, while Scania and DAF both trail in at four each!

So it really just goes to show that although a manufacturer has to produce a fantastic design to win the Truck of the Year, the popularity of any vehicle can probably really only come after it’s been tested to the limit in the real world of work for a few years.