Connect: A vision of the urban truck of the future

For the time being, Renault Trucks manufacturer that proposes a wide and innovative range of urban vehicles, especially with his vehicles Clean Tech (electrical, hybrids and of natural gas), has imagined for the future, Connect, his vision of the urban truck ideal.

For this concept truck, Renault Trucks had a lot of reasons to choose the electrical propulsion. On the one hand, because in 2040 the access to the centres of the city will be reserved to the vehicles that do not contaminate and that they are silent and, on the other hand, because this technology opens new horizons in the architecture of the vehicle. Thanks to the presence of electrical engines in the leading wheels and to the integration of the batteries in the chassis, the floor of Connect is perfectly flat. This characteristic allows to obtain a threshold of access that is to the level of the sidewalk and does that the load and the download, so much by the rear door as by the sides, was safer and less tired for the repartidor.

To facilitate still more the movement, the seat of the driver has been displaced to the central position, so that it can go down and go up so much by the left as by the right. Even it can access from his cabin directly to the commodity, limiting like this the rises and descents of the truck. The central position provides to the driver a field of vision very wide, so much ahead like side, what reinforces the security of the driver and of the others users, especially the pedestrians. The rear vision concrete with a screen in the salpicadero, that broadcasts the image of the cameras situated in the rear part of the vehicle.

The denomination Connect has not been chosen at random. It does reference to the possibility to connect the truck for recargarlo and also to the telematic that instruments on board. Already present in the trucks Renault Trucks current, with the applications Renault Trucks for smartphones (like the special browser trucks NavTruck…) the telematic on board will have increasingly importance in the future. It will be indispensable and will allow to inform to the driver on the state of the traffic, for example, the level of autonomy of his vehicle or to indicate him the centre of recarga nearer.

“Although it was rather a vision of the trucks of the the day after tomorrow that of the ones of the morning, Connect is not, neither much less, an utopia. His conception frames in the global reflection of Renault Trucks on the urban transport of commodities and the solutions proposed base in foundations that, at the end, could be materialised to industrial level”, signal from the company.

The put in practice of these solutions on a maqueta is the first stage to test them and to study them of way more concrete. Other solutions, other concept trucks will go enriching this reflection and will be the base, in definite, of future models commercialised by Renault Trucks, always with the same lemma, as they conclude from the company: “put the good truck, with the good energy, in the good place and in the good moment”.