Essex, UK: Valley Grown Salads say they are achieving better fuel consumption since replacing the company’s three five-year old Volvo FH 440s with FH-500 6×2 tractors. Family-owned Valley Grown Salads, which supplies fresh salad produce to supermarket regional distribution centres, operates the three-axle tractors with tri-axle refrigerated trailers.
Operations director Ian Parrott, says: “The new 500 horsepower FH’s are proving to be a real eye-opener. We’re getting better fuel consumption that we did from our Euro-3 440s and the drivers love them.” The old trucks achieved around 8.4mpg while the new 500s are already turning in 9.5mpg after only six weeks on the road. The vehicles have been taken on a Flexilease contract hire package from Volvo Truck and Bus Centre London’s Enfield Dealerpoint. Along with moving from Euro-3 to Euro-5, this is Valley Foods’ first experience of SCR and AdBlue.
Valley Grown Salads is replacing its heavy truck fleet with Volvo FH 500 6x2 tractors
“The trucks achieve around a 4% consumption rate against diesel, which I am very pleased with,” says Parrott. “The Volvo Dynafleet telematics and the I-Shift automated gearbox has topped it all off. In conjunction with driver training from our Volvo dealer, it’s enabled us to get the best possible driving economy,” adds Parrott.
