Isuzu……probably the best city dray truck ever!!

15 Isuzu NQR 7.5tonne trucks, each specified with the popular EasyShift transmission and fitted with a purpose designed 3.7m Lawrence David dray body, have recently gone into service with Carlsberg UK. These are now delivering stock items such as beer kegs and cases, wines and spirits to outlets based mainly in busy inner city locations. According to Keith Child, Marketing Director at Isuzu Truck (UK) Ltd, "Last year, Carlsberg UK came to us with an exacting operating requirement and, working with bodybuilder Lawrence David, we helped to identify the correct specification for the type of city dray truck that they felt would be ideal for this intensive but demanding urban delivery operation. Nine months later, the first Isuzus joined their fleet, as part of a batch of 15 city dray vehicles working out of the company's UK depot and RDC network." Each Carlsberg UK RDC now has two of these Isuzu urban dray vehicles, with the company's smaller depots each having one vehicle. Two of the Isuzu's based at the Croydon depot in South London have been fitted specifically with tail lifts as Carlsberg UK trials the versatility of the Isuzu's for roll cage applications. The background to this new design of urban delivery vehicle for Carlsberg originated when, during 2007, the brewery took a closer look at its existing operations, appointing a working party to develop a "City Dray". As Andrew Davis, National Fleet Engineer at Carlsberg said, "Prior to the arrival of these vehicles, we operated a fleet of vans out of each depot, which wasn't entirely suitable. The vans gave us the driving versatility but not the payload. The urban vehicle project was geared towards establishing the practicality of running much larger vehicles in inner cities: in other words, to operate small robust higher payload dray trucks but without losing the versatility and turning circle that we had with the vans. Isuzu met the brief in its entirety." The Isuzu 7.5t NQR dray vehicles for Carlsberg UK provide a payload capacity of 3.3 tonnes, are no wider or taller than the previous vans, and have a matching turning circle. "With these Isuzu's dray trucks, we combine versatility and driveability with impressive payload, which is ever so important as we need to access outlets that traditional 7.5 t trucks can not reach. Within inner cities, we have constant problems with both height and width restrictions. The final specification of the Isuzus' has enabled us to overcome all these potential difficulties yet provides us with significant operational benefits and savings through its increased payload capacity," added Andrew Davis. Each of the Isuzu urban dray vehicles has inner safety curtains fitted within the dray body, reversing cameras, underslung gas carriers as well as having the alignment of the driving mirrors changed on both sides of the vehicle to reduce the overall width of the vehicle to just 2.15metres. Working on a 5/6 day a week delivery operation, the Isuzus have a planned working life of up to five years with Carlsberg UK. As part of the urban dray vehicle programme, Carlsberg UK arranged for all of its urban delivery drivers to undergo a full driver training programme that was organised by Isuzu Truck UK. After a few months in service, Carlsberg are certainly impressed by the performance of the Isuzu's. "We can't really fault them. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. The vehicles all went into service literally just one week ahead of what is traditionally our single busiest trading week. And they survived, without any hiccups whatsoever. They are doing a magnificent job for us," concluded Andrew Davis.