The issue facing the engineers at PACCAR Australia designing the DAF XG+ for the Australian truck market was just how to bring together both European and North American technology, while at the same time getting the cocktail mix just right.
The latest new truck on the Australian truck market harks back to a previous generation of trucks, in some ways, but in another way demonstrates a set of interesting and exciting future possibilities for trucks not only in Australia but also elsewhere in the world.
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The truck we’re talking about is the DAF XG+ which has been designed by Paccar and is now being built at the Bayswater plant in Melbourne, Australia.
The most exciting element of this variant is the fact it is powered with a Paccar PX15 engine. This engine is, in essence, the Cummins X15D, which is part of the agnostic engine platform which Cummins unveiled back in 2022. It is a common engine block with different cylinder heads to enable it to be fuelled by diesel, hydrogen or gas combustion. The new Cummins engine is also lighter than the current X15 by over 200kg.
What this model represents is something which could well be the Australian truck drivers’ dream solution, a comfortable, spacious and well-designed European cabover prime mover, but with a North American designed engine with all of the caché of big North American iron.
The question on my mind, when climbing up into the cabin of the XG+ for a test drive out of Melbourne, heading west to Nhill, before returning to the Victorian capital, was not whether this new truck would be any good.
The DAF brand does not design bad trucks, Cummins do not make bad engines and the Paccar organisation in Australia has a long history of integrating various elements of a truck from different sources, over decades.
This is just the latest challenge for the engineers at Bayswater, and yet again they have come up trumps with something which does have all of that European comfort drivers like, plus it has that famous Cummins’ torque rise available under the driver’s right foot.
It even sounds right –– there is not the distant murmur of a diesel engine in the cabin that one would expect from a top of the range European prime mover. The engine tone is not obtrusive, but it does make enough noise for you to hear that familiar engine note which we expect from a Cummins engine.
What Paccar have done with this truck is to bring a disparate collection of elements available to them, as a company, and turn it into something which the Australian truck market has been seeking for some time — that is, the ideal combination of both European and North American technology in one vehicle as a complete whole.
There have been attempts at this in the past which have had mixed results, the Iveco Powerstar being one of the most obvious examples, where the truck was designed to create a European cabin with a conventional bonnet and a choice of European or North American drive line. It didn’t last long.
With the DAF XG+, designers have done a much better job of combining elements from the different trucking philosophies and come up with a design which not only does the job, but actually adds a little extra to the mix.
The aspect of the design which surprised me the most was the fact that Paccar chose an engine out of the North American tradition and coupled it with a transmission straight out of the heart of the European trucking tradition, the ZF Traxon. Also in the mix is the Meritor back end.
The solution which Paccar has come up with is to customise the interface between the engine and the transmission. Instead of using the Cummins engine’s own ECU, the team developed their own ECU to directly control the engine from the truck’s CANbus.
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