Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/319866
32 COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | JUNE 2014 I f you went into a lab and boiled down everything Mack Trucks has learned over the past 114 years from every jobsite, battlefield, dam and highway that have seen its trucks, you'd probably come away with a truck like the 2014 Titan By Mack. This is Mack's heavy-haul/se- vere-service big dog: A beast of a truck with a 265-inch wheelbase, a 44,000-pound Mack S440 rear axle and a 605-horsepower Mack MP10 diesel engine. In an age where Mack is known as an aerodynamic and fuel economy leader, the Titan is a throwback to a time when trucks got their work done through brute force. Titan isn't really new. Mack debut- ed the model in 2006, just in time to watch the economy crash and take the construction sector with it. Since then, the company hasn't done much to pro- mote the truck, preferring to wait until the business environment improved. Today, housing starts are up, and oilfield work is going like gangbusters, so when I called Mack about getting behind the wheel of a Titan at the company's home base in Allentown, Pa., they were happy to oblige. For a good indicator of Titan's toughness, you need only look to the Australian Outback, where the truck is a popular pick for pulling roadtrains across barren desert. So it was a good bet that my test truck was more than up to hauling a flatbed of concrete barricades that brought us to 80,000 pounds. Stu Russoli, Mack's prod- uct manager for vocational market segments, said my test Titan was spec'd for Texas oilfield work with a longer wheelbase, high horsepower, 52-inch axle spacing, the company's 18-speed manual transmission and Rawhide interior package. Despite the truck's size, visibility from the driver's seat was extremely good. The cab height, combined with some artful engineering, provided extended visibility to the front of the The gold Mack Bulldog sitting on the nose signified an all-Mack powertrain and drivetrain. Easy-to-read gauges and a dash-mounted driver information center provided critical information at a quick glance. Continued on page 34 Mack's big dog Titan By Mack primed to meet toughest challenges of construction rebound BY JACK ROBERTS C C J T E S T D R I V E : 2 0 1 4 T I T A N B Y M A C K Photo by Jack Roberts Photo by Jack Roberts