Designing a new truck model is a large, long and complicated task, over a period of years. After the Kenworth K220 was presented with the Truck of the Year Australasia earlier this year, Tim Giles sat down with two of the Paccar design and engineering team, Brad May, Paccar Australia Chief Engineer and Ross Cureton, Director of Product Planning – PACCAR Australia to talk about the whole team behind the the creation of the final truck.
“The customers who buy the trucks are the main stakeholder, but we certainly have plenty of opportunity to bring in the rest of the stakeholders as we develop products,” says Brad. “It was tricky because the factory was working throughout COVID. Then the design team were working from home, but they still needed to come in and look at the factory.”
More than 100 people are working in engineering, but the core project development teams are much smaller than that. Engineers with highly specialised knowledge from our local team, and increasingly, from the broader PACCAR engineering team are brought in just when the team needs to access that expertise. Those specialists can be anywhere in the world, sometimes writing specific code for a truck they will probably never see.
“It certainly has changed a lot about the way we design new products now,” says Brad. “We’ve got many engineers here now who spend their working days outside the normal daylight hours of Australia, because they’re connecting with people in all parts of the world.”
The engineering team at Bayswater has demonstrated its skills and is so capable and respected that they are now the first people outside of Holland to be designing and changing DAF trucks.
“DAF in Holland are very capable engineers that understandably closely monitor the changes we need to make for Australia,” says Ross. “Now we have this local team that is doing exactly that, enhancing the product. That’s something to be proud of, a group that’s so recognised and respected globally they can participate in global projects.”
The Paccar operation in Bayswater typically hires somewhere between 10 and 30 new engineers as graduates every year. They will then spend a lot of time working in the business and around the different departments, in manufacturing, in service, sales, engineering, many different roles to build a bedrock of understanding of the market and the products. Only then will they be let loose on designing the product.
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