Where’s The Red One? (HINO will never lend me another truck)

In-depth

4 Dec

Everyone knows that Red-Goes-Faster! It’s just a simple fact of life that we all accept – just as we accept Father Christmas, The Tooth Fairy and The Easter Bunny.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I turn up at Prestige Hino in South Dandenong and their demo Hino 700 is WHITE! Their past demos have been red, and I’m sure I got to wherever I was going faster.

I really shouldn’t complain as Hino is the only truck company that will hand me the keys to their trucks, pass over a fuel card, and send me on my way for however long I wish to have the vehicle. This is a golden opportunity to test drive a truck without a company rep watching your every move – which tends to somewhat inhibit one’s driving alacrity.

Hino also kindly put me up the night before at a nearby Hotel so I didn’t have a pre-dawn drive all the way from MooTown, bless ‘em.

So, this is the third new release in the Hino range, following on from the 300 and 500 series. It is also the Big Boy of Hino trucks – at least in the guise seen in the above photo. This one is the Hino FS 2848 6x4 with their 13 litre, Euro 6, 480 HP, 2,157Nm powered version, driving through a 16 speed ZF auto ‘box with the ability to play in manual if so desired. The truck is also available with an 8 litre donk, but hey, given the choice….

I awoke at 5am on the morning of the pick-up to howling winds and driving rain, so donned my old Truckin’ Life weatherproof which proudly proclaims me to be A Driver of the Month in TL’s Million Click Club. I’m not. Just a bit of TL memorabilia that I snaffled when I worked there. Thankfully by 9am the weather had abated to showers and chill.

I hop up in the cab and am greeted on the 6.5” multimedia touch screen unit by Hino’s Daniel Petrovski who’s viewing me via a specially installed, rotating camera up on the nearside A pillar. Daniel takes me though the basic functions of the cabs equipment – there’s heaps - wishes me a good trip and signs off. Time to hit the road.

Fire the 700 up, ease out onto The Princes Highway and aim towards Hooterville, some 65 km away to pick up son, Nick, who’s spending a couple of days with me to shoot some video (which I’ll put up in the next week or three).

Having a total memory fade-out of which way to go – along a road I’ve travelled dozens of times – I plug the route into Google Maps. BIG MISTAKE! I forgot to tell Google that I was behind the wheel of a 4.3 Metre high, bloody long rigid. So instead of taking me along tollways and freeways and highways, she’s decided on the most direct route – over the Dandenong Ranges.

There are some very pretty towns in the Dandenong’s and many of them are reached by narrow, windy roads. Google decided that she would take me along the worst of them. There’s a stretch preceded with a sign proclaiming ‘Low Hanging Trees’. They got that right! They are so low that there are yellow lines painted on the tarmac so you can avoid them. This meant 15 or so kilometres up hill, down dale, around hairpin bends and mostly on the wrong side of the road. All I could think was, ‘I’m going to have to call Hino any minute and apologise for wiping out the top half of their latest and greatest.’ At least I proved that the Hino’s Lane Departure Warning is deadly accurate, and in this case plentiful – going off with metronome regularity.

By the time I arrived on a truck-friendly road that I knew, the stress levels were such that I pulled up and climbed down from the cab for a calming nicotine hit and to ring Nick, informing him that I was well behind schedule. Entry and egress from the 700 is as good as they get in a truck of this size with grab handles on A and B pillars and the steps splayed slightly outward and easy for this vertically challenged body to use. Between step 1 and 2 is a night light. Thoughtful that.

Climbing back in the 700 I turned the key to be greeted with – nothing.

S**t! I try half a dozen times to no avail. ‘Hino will never lend me another truck’, I think to myself. The dashboard keeps telling me to put the damn thing in Neutral. Where the hell is Neutral? Finally the brain snaps back into gear and I remember that the ‘gearshift’ is a simple dial on the dashboard as pictured below.

I finally arrive at Hooterville and pull up on the narrow-ish (for a truck of this size) dirt road outside Nick’s home. A coffee and its back to the truck.

“How are you going to get out of here?” says Nick.

“Around the block,” I reply. “Too risky backing her out onto the main drag with those blind corners. I’ll get under that phone line no worries.”

And I did. I just wasn’t going to make it under the next phone line around the corner. Do you know how many point turns needed to back around this ‘Y’ section? (I’m talking the top of the Y). Me neither. I lost count at around 15. With Nicko watching the drive tyres to make sure they didn’t end up over the washed away road edge (the standard rear view camera was a blessing) we finally got under way.

“Where we going?” says Nick.

“Anywhere the roads are sealed and wide.”

We decided on heading back up to Mootown. Good roads and comfortable beds were impossible to ignore. The 700 does have a ‘bed’ and now I’ve lost a heap of weight (again) I could sleep on it overnight if required, but the padding is not that thick and I had Nick to think of didn’t I.

The route takes us up a steep, winding 3 kilometre stretch of road, commonly referred to by locals as The Slide. Here was an opportunity to check out the 700’s torque and power curve.

The GCM of this version is 63,000kg and we’re loaded to 80%, so if my (lousy) maths are correct we’re hauling a bit over 50 tons up the incline. Flick into Power mode and let those 16 gears do the work. I approach The Slide at 70kmh. Three kilometres later I crest the top at 68kph. Big Tick!

More impressive was that the ‘box talked to the torque and happily picked the right gears all the way up. Memory tells me that we didn’t change down more than a couple of gears. Bear in mind also that some of the corners on the way up were signposted at 50kph.

Finally I can take in the interior of the 700. I’ve said it before about Hino’s latest range of trucks but it’s worth repeating: the cab is a nice place to be. The mix of colours and textures works a treat, imparting a feeling of luxury. Everything falls neatly to hand (including the Auto-trans dial now that I’ve remembered where it is). There’s good storage in the overhead lockers AND there are cup holders in the doors! Yeah! Although the door pockets could still be wider.

Surfaces are hard, as in most trucks – understandable given what trucks are designed to do – but look great. One area for improvement would be rubber lining on the trays, but that’s a very small quibble. At the de-brief, Dan Petrovski took note of my complaint so maybe it will be addressed, but really, two bucks at Woolies will buy you a roll of non-slip. It says a lot about the interior design if that was all I could find to whinge about.

Conversation in the cab at 100kph was at normal levels indicating Hino has done a good job with sound deadening. Similarly, wind noise around the screen and pillars was non-existent. Even with windows down the wind passed by, rather than in, so plenty of thought has gone into the aerodynamics of the truck. The Isri driver’s seat is an upgrade on the already great one installed in the previous model and long periods behind the wheel should present no problem to your derriere.

All the safety equipment you could want is included, with the aforementioned Lane Departure Warning and Reversing Camera, as well as ABS brakes, Stability Control, Daytime Running Lights, Heated mirrors, Driver Monitor, Safety Eye and an Autonomous Pre-Collision System – which I’ll come back to shortly.

The cruise control is adaptive and keeps you safely behind a slower vehicle until you put down the accelerator to pass. Wish I had this in the old Territory. The multi-media touchscreen does all the stuff you’d expect with good graphics and a soothing voice to remind you that you’ve entered a speed restricted area – although on a couple of occasions she told me I was in a 50kph zone when I was sure I wasn’t…I think. She also said, “Entrepreneur,” on a number of occasions. Entrepreneur?? Nick, whose ears are much younger than mine decided it was actually, “Town Entry Point” so we’ll go with that.

The 700 is equipped with both a Jake Brake (brake pedal activated) and a 4-stage Intarder, which I reckon is the best in the business. The levels between each stage are succinct, and honestly I rarely needed to use the foot brake over my three days with the truck, apart from pulling up the last few metres to a standstill. It’s a ripper!

On the way back to town we had to traverse The Slide once again…downhill this time. Not once did I need to touch the Whoa-pedal.

While at Mootown, we took some video and I’ll get that up in the near future, if it worked out. I suggested to Nick we should try out the Auto Emergency Stop function (PCS). Like my Rita and good mate Don before him, he refused to stand in front of the truck and play Crash-Test-Dummy. Bloody spoilsports, the lot of ‘em!

“Got any cardboard boxes?” he suggested.

Indeed I did, so we taped a couple together to create a man-height structure, put it at the end of a no-through road and I drove at it. CRUNCH! Tried it again and the boxes got scared, laid down and played dead before I got to them. One last time to no avail.

**‘Time to duck!’ said the cardboard boxes**

Of course I brought this up with Daniel at the debrief. “That’s because the Pre Collision System knew it wasn’t a human, an animal or a vehicle,” he replied. “If you’d wrapped it in foil it would have stopped.”

The bloody truck’s smarter than I am! It did make for a great Blooper video though.

At last we come to the Safety Eye. Now some of you may look at this camera placed in the A pillar as a Big Brother. To me it’s a Guardian Angel. Simply put, if you take your eyes off the road for too long, or it detects your eyes are drooping, etc, it lets you know in no uncertain terms. After a couple of very long days and a sleepless night before, I’m driving the 700 back to Prestige Hino, and Safety Eye tells me that I’m not paying attention.

**That black rectangle on the A pillar is Safety Eye – and it’s not happy!**

I looked that camera right in the eye and told it, “Bulls**t!” She didn’t reply but just stared back with a malevolent gleam in her ‘eye’.

You know what? I dropped the 700 off, got in my car and drove home to Mootown. “How are you love?” asked Rita. “I’m great,” I replied. I flopped down on the lounge and within 5 minutes I’m snoring. This at 1pm. That wasn’t malevolence I saw in the Safety Eye – it was a look of concern.

Now, I could move on to Hino Connect, but that’s a whole other chapter, and as I’m driving the FS 700 again in a couple of weeks – this time in Prime Mover and Trailer form, I’ll save it until then.

Meantime, if you’re in the market for a really, really good truck in this heavy rigid format, put the Hino FS 700 on your ‘must check it out’ list. You won’t be disappointed.