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Kings of the Road

Monster Trucks Come to Germany

By Christian Wüst

Will 60-ton tractor-trailers soon be roaring down the German autobahn? These extra-long "gigaliners" could reduce truck congestion and save gas, but are controversial -- especially with advocates of rail transport.

Thomas Sommer is a lucky man. He's one of the few Germans licensed to drive the new generation of freight vehicles, 25-meter-long monster trucks known as "gigaliners." The 44-year-old truck driver works for Cotrans, a shipping company based in the northern German city of Wolfsburg, and is currently testing one of the first few gigaliners on German roads. Sommer insists that he hasn't inflicted a single scratch on the truck since the trial began in July 2006, adding that he is "a little proud" of that.

Three of these giant gigaliners, which at 25.25 meters (83 feet) are 6.5 meters (21 feet) longer than a conventional tractor-trailer, are currently involved in a one-year trial throughout Lower Saxony, the first German state to politically support the new generation of trucks. Three other German states, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Bremen, have followed suit and are now also conducting similar trial runs.

There is a sense of political urgency behind such programs. Germany's roads are choking in truck traffic, and its famed autobahns sometimes resemble little more than vast truck parking lots. According to government estimates, truck traffic on the country's roads will have increased by almost 70 percent by 2015, compared to 1997. No one knows where all these new trucks are supposed to go.

The gigaliner could prove a godsend for Germany's clogged highways. With a cargo volume of 150 cubic meters (5,357 cubic feet), it can carry about 50 percent more goods than the largest conventional tractor-trailer. For Cotrans CEO Herbert Hausherr, the math is easy: "I'll be able to replace three tractor-trailers with two," he says. Fewer tractor-trailers would also mean that the surface area of roads would be used more efficiently.

And these behemoths hardly cost more than a standard tractor-trailer, neither to operate nor buy. Gigaliners consist of the same components as a conventional tractor-trailer, except that an additional trailer has been added.

The gigaliner will be unbeatable in terms of operating costs, because it hardly uses more diesel fuel than the current, shorter models. Only during acceleration does the additional load make the truck's engine less fuel-efficient. But in long-distance transport, where trucks generally maintain a constant speed, this hardly makes a difference. According to Cotrans, the test truck consumes 28 to 33 liters (8.7 gallons) of diesel every 100 kilometers, which is not that different from conventional trucks' fuel consumption.

During the trial year, the extra-long tractor-trailer, loaded with Volkswagen parts, makes the daily round trip between the automaker's plants in the cities of Wolfsburg and Emden. According to Hausherr, the gigaliner's higher cargo volume will save 71,000 truck kilometers and, as a result, at least 20,000 liters of diesel.

With these kinds of numbers, Europe's logistics sector could easily follow the example of the Australian system, where giant trucks with multiple trailers routinely roar through the outback. Tractor-trailers like giga-liners have already been used in Sweden and Finland for years.

But can these kinds of countries serve as models for Central Europe? As far back as October 2004, the Free Democratic Party's (FDP) parliamentary group in the German Bundestag submitted draft legislation that would ban the use of larger and heavier tractor-trailers in a nationwide trial. But the legislation became bogged down in the Transportation Committee.