This week’s truck is a Freightliner Argosy that I caught up with on a recent road-trip from Darwin to Alice Springs and return.
Freightliner is a truck manufacturer based in the US that is said to be the most popular semi-truck in the US, with more than 35 per cent of the heavy truck market in the US in 2023.
Freightliner started life as a part of Consolidated Freightways in 1929 and launched as a singular brand in 1942.
The mammoth German automobile manufacturer Daimler AG acquired Freightliner in 1981 and the brand is now part of Daimler Truck North America based in Portland, Oregon but with a manufacturing base in North Carolina.
Freightliner pioneered construction using aluminium and sold its first cabover sleeper tractor-trailer – as opposed to the “long-nosed” design more familiar on Australian roads – in the 1950s.
The lovely specimen in these pictures – a Freightliner Argosy that I caught up with at the Dunmarra Roadhouse 630 kilometres (400 miles) south of the Northern Territory capital of Darwin last week – was introduced to the Australian trucking industry in the late 1990s.
As the Australasian Transport News noted in 2017, the Argosy has had a somewhat chequered history in Australia:
It’s hard to think of a premium truck endowed with more potential or challenged by a more chequered career than Freightliner Argosy.
From the moment it arrived on Australian soil in the late ‘90s, Argosy had the potential to blow Kenworth’s K-series out of the water as the leading US cab-over. Obviously enough, it didn’t and all indicators suggest it never will.
That, however, does not change the fact Argosy was a huge burst of fresh thinking in American cab-over design, sporting so much more than a K-series which back then had become outdated in both form and function. In effect, old and awkward!
With Argosy came advances in driver comfort, convenience and style which almost overnight made Kenworth’s long-serving cab-over archaic in comparison.
From the outset, Argosy was modern, exciting, even inspiring, and certainly the biggest thing to hit the heavy-duty cab-over class in decades. Suddenly Freightliner had ample cause to boast its heritage as the creator of America’s first cab-over model way back in the 1940s.
Freightliner discontinued US sales of the Argosy in 2006, shifting production solely to export, mostly to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The Argosy was produced for export until 2020.
For the whole of its 30-plus year production, Freightliner assembled the Argosy at its manufacturing plant at Cleveland, North Carolina for both domestic US and export markets.
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