Dear long-suffering bloggers and readers of this illustrious thread, if you will permit me ramble for a moment. I know we’ve discussed the subject of poor ERF back-up in Europe and beyond ad nauseam already, but with some excellent input from ‘ZbAnorak’, ‘Carryfast’, ‘Saviem’ and several others; however, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
An interesting question occurs to me: could British international operators have been ERF’s greatest ambassadors if ERF had made the NGC ‘European’ available from 1973 instead of 1975? And if so, would those two years have made any difference? Personally, I doubt it: UK operators could still buy the fixed-cab 5MW version of the ‘European’ but there was very little take-up — Beresford, S Jones, Richard Read/Vijore, Cadwallader, Partrick — only about 6 or so, then. When the NGC came along with its much-improved tilting cab only about twice that number sold in the UK. And only a similar number of LHD B-series units then sold in the UK after that.
These were really good lorries! It simply had to be about back-up down the road didn’t it? But WERE they such good lorries? We know that they were well-engineered, but were they well enough ‘put together’? We have a reliable witness in blogger ‘Harry’ that the two Swiss examples were not well-assembled. Poor assembly has dogged many a good lorry and I earlier made reference to my otherwise well-engineered Iveco ‘Eurostar’ that suffered from the same malaise.
The signature at the bottom of my posts, declares the NGC to be a ‘Kilmarnoch to Karachi’ machine because one of them actually made it to Karachi. But Coleman drove a 1922 Austin Seven to China: ANY lorry can do that distance but how many breakdowns would an ERF NGC suffer on a return journey to Karachi, compared to a Scania 140? This question is unanswerable because no two similar journeys are ever alike in terms of breakdowns.
I’ll bet you a pound to a pinch of camel sh*t that no one has ever produced lifetime breakdown distribution profiles on vehicles so that comparisons can be made (someone prove me wrong here!). We only have empirical evidence based on our memories. For example, I successively owned 4 Austin Maxis and 4 Volvo estate cars. The Maxis broke down as often as they could possibly contrive, and the Volvos just never broke down (my Volvo 960 GLE never broke down once in the six years I owned it, and it was already old when I acquired it).
Poor assembly is probably a much more important factor than I have been giving it credit for, in my eulogies of my ‘beloved’ NGC! I drove that Iveco ‘Eurostar’ of mine for four and half years and in that time the superb 14-litre engine, superb Eaton Twin-splitter gearbox, axles and chassis never failed once. But bits dropped off it regularly! At least two starter-motors packed up, the turbo came adrift, the climate-control matrix used to disintegrate, the curtain tracking used to drop into my lap every night, the driver’s door blew off when the wind caught it, air-driers didn’t last two minutes and countless other build-quality related things used to go wrong. It wasn’t about preventative maintenance either, because the unit was well cared for. Nonetheless, that ‘Eurostar’ was brilliant to drive; it saw me through three trips to the Arabian Gulf; it did eight years on the gruelling North Africa run and finished its tenth year with me on European work. Lorries are vulnerable creatures and none is immune to breakdown in arduous conditions.
In the end, I think blogger ‘Harry’ has got it right: a truck is either reliable enough to be economically viable, or it isn’t - discerning operators will always vote with their feet. This is why I am no longer an O/D, but just a romantic old fool who wants to drive ERF NGCs to Karachi or Shanghai!
This is where the human factor will always queer the pitch. Choosing a vehicle that is delightful (and fun) to drive and also ‘looks the part’, that is ALSO the best economical option is our constant quest for that mythical ultimate long-hauler.
Evolution has handed us a new generation of soul-less lorries, but they’re only ‘soul-less’ to those of us who drove B-series ERFs (or similar). I expect B-series ERFs were considered soul-less by ERF KV drivers in 1975 — it’s all relative!
Just draw up a list of all the lorries you’d love to drive from Barnsley to Brighton and compare it with your list of lorries you’d be prepared to drive from Sheffield to Shanghai. I’ll bet they’re not the same!
There are a lot of ‘dreamers’ on this forum (as opposed to hard-nosed businessmen like ‘Bewick’ who successfully operated transport), and I’m one of those dreamers; but at least I made many of my dreams come true, in that I ran my own wagon for a while and I did Middle-East /North Africa for several years besides — and, for pudding, I even kept my foot in the education door. If I could have my time all over again I would change nothing: I saw some of the best of transport and some of the best of teaching — and I hope that my nearly 1500 posts reflects that! Robert 
Robert
