Duo Trailer
While Kögel, Krone and Schmitz Cargobull deal with the Euro Trailer, Mega Liner (pictured above) and EuroCombi, Seat and the Spanish Sesé Group are already ahead. They have a fundamental disadvantage of the
extended trailer fixed, namely that it does not fit on the normal railroad cars.
At the same time they wants to do a radical, but also easy to realize step, namely to hang a second semitrailer of the same standard length of 13.6 meters with a dolly behind a normal tractor-trailer. 70 instead of 40
tons of payload to bring and allegedly halve the number of trucks.
The entire vehicle is 31.7 m long so that it can brake fully on dry, non-skid lanes within its length from 80 to 0 km/h (video 2). It aims to save 20 percent per route and 25 percent CO2 for logistics and
transport.
One thing is for sure, the Duo Trailer will not more burden the road surface, because the second trailer plus dolly corresponds to a truck with rather less empty and total weight. However, for the surrounding traffic it
becomes more difficult to orientate, for example to leave or to enter the motorway.
The problem is that even a 10% reduction in road freight transport would mean a difficult transition (+25 percent) for the railways, and that would hardly be noticed in normal road traffic. In addition, a modern truck may
be at least
equal to rail CO2 emissions. If it then also gets power through overhead line ...
Of course, the semitrailer looses a significant part of its maneuverability. If not enough auxiliary vehicles are available (video 3), much more maneuvering is required to bring the second semi-trailer to the ramp. Just the
space required to qualify the Duo Trailer only for very specific charging and discharging stations, not to mention suitable road connections.
The biggest hurdle seems to be enforceability with and through politics. It's brave what the engineers are up to. After all, the first test runs have already taken place in Spain, but unladen. The Scania
(pictures above), still relatively new in the VW Group, seems to have enough power for two semitrailers. Incidentally, much competition in Europe is necessary, because only the three largest German trailer producers
together manage to outperform the largest Chinese. 08/18
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