We review the Mercedes Actros from price to economy and all its features
NOW this is what I call a motor.
I’m the first person in the UK to drive the Actros, the new superstar of the truck world.
Truck superstar ... the Mercedes Actros
It costs £90,000 and the trailer is nearly £60,000 on top of that. At £160,000, that’s similar to a Mercedes SLR.
The Actros is a high-tech lorry equivalent of a Mercedes Benz F1 racing car and, in the eyes of its drivers, every bit as glamorous.
But trucks are about more than getting from A to B.
Drivers spend all their working day or night behind the wheel and at the end of it, the vehicle becomes their mobile home from home.
As the proud son of a trucker, driving the Actros was very much the stuff of my dreams — although the sheer size of it was intimidating.
The cab is so high it was like climbing a mountain just to get behind the wheel.
The Actros is a world away from my dad’s Albion, Atkinson and Dodge lorries. Sitting in it was like being on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise and there is enough technology to make you believe the Actros could take you to the moon and back.
As I don’t have an HGV licence, I had to settle for piloting the Actros around the Millbrook Test Centre, a 120-acre site that has every kind of road condition from hill routes to an oval high-speed endurance track.
The first shock was I couldn’t find the big gear lever I remembered from my dad’s truck.
There was a small lever on the dashboard but my instructor quickly told me that was the truck’s handbrake, only to be used when we came to a stop.
The actual gear lever is a small stalk on the side of the steering wheel that you simply flick from neutral to automatic drive.
This means all you have to do is concentrate on steering more than 50ft of truck between the white lines — and trust me that is more than enough.
When you see a 50ft trailer in your XXL door mirrors, it’s like pulling a bungalow behind you.
But driving the Actros is, dare I say it, easy once you’ve got used to its size.
You bounce up and down on your beautifully sprung customised seat, soaking up the worst of British roads as if floating on your own magic carpet.
And the cab is so well sound-proofed that even under hard acceleration the noise levels never increase above a subdued hum.
Few cars can match it.
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The automatic gearbox is super-smooth, better than most cars I’ve driven.
It needs to be, too, because it’s linking up with 11 litres of 450bhp engine that has to pull 44 tonnes day in, day out.
Modern trucks undergo even more thorough testing than a new car.
The Actros has been through a staggering 50million kilometres of engine testing on test rigs and 20million kilometres on the road in extreme weather.
The cab has been designed to be the most aerodynamic in the business to improve fuel efficiency.
It has spent 2,600 hours of fine-tuning in the wind tunnel — that’s more than an F1 car.
And the result is a truck that has boosted economy by more than seven per cent to about 10mpg.
That might not seem great but in the world of trucks it’s a remarkable figure and increasingly vital with the ridiculous price of diesel.
The attention to detail is summed up by the fact that Merc engineers have even optimised the angle of the sprayguards behind the wheels to reduce wind resistance.
Inside, the Actros is like the Mercedes S Class of trucks and with all the luxury you’d expect in an executive limo.
You get a beautifully laid out, state-of-the-art instrument panel that wraps around the driver.
There’s everything from a large fridge to a small kitchen’s worth of storage cupboards, plus a dining/work top that pulls out from the dash in front of the passenger seat.
Then at the end of the day you climb into a full-length orthopaedic bed, designed for maximum comfort for a good night’s sleep in an air-conditioned cab, watching the telly or listening to music on the expensive sound system.
Mercedes have sold more than 700,000 of the previous models over the past 15 years, making it every bit as important as any of the firm’s car range.
With the new Actros they have raised the bar to new levels of sophistication and given hard-working truck drivers the vehicle they deserve.
I want one.