Times are changing at Renault: the Renault T is replacing the old flagship Renault Magnum as the French company’s long-distance lorry and brings with it plenty of Swedish touches from Volvo. But the Swedish-French co-production is not as new as it seems: Renault Trucks has been a brand of the Volvo corporation for over ten years and uses the technology that the corporation’s building blocks provide. This includes the chassis, engines, axles and also the I-shift gearbox, which Renault calls the Optidriver.
Volvo originally developed this as the Eco-Roll. The engine is always decoupled from the drive train (the split transmission goes into an intermediate position) when no braking or engine torque is required.
Longer rolling with Renault Magnum
Renault would not be Renault and the French would not be the French, if they had not tackled the issue of “rolling in neutral” in the Renault Magnum in a fundamentally different way to their Swedish colleagues. Volvo’s solution is complex, the driver only discovers it gradually, but it appears extremely carefully thought-out – very Swedish. In general, the French have no time for such complexity. Renault therefore developed its own, much simpler version that generally switches on when the engine starts but only becomes active in cruise control mode and which – hard though it may be to believe – leads to longer rolling distances than in the Volvo.
So: even if the Renault T looks like a break with the past, the old Magnum as a used lorry offers very solid technology, “made in Sweden” and is sometimes even better than the original.
