Mack Trucks North America President Jonathan Randall walks us through some big changes at the renovated Mack Experience Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and talks about Mack’s approach to zero emissions.
Set on 60 acres, the Mack Experience Center allows dealers and customers to immerse themselves in all things Mack, which includes a visit to the showroom where they can now see their truck on a lift and learn more about features, options and uptime resources.
On- and -off-road courses nearby provide hands on experience and additional Q&A time with subject matter experts. Cap it off with a visit to the Mack Truck Museum down the hall from the showroom where a variety of historic Macks are kept in working order.
In this video
00:00 Mack Experience Center
00:54 Showroom pilot trucks
01:31 Mack test track
01:56 Mack Lehigh Valley operations
02:25 Mack and sustainability
03:00 Zero emission powertrains
We are standing actually today in the showroom of the Mack Experience Center and of course today is the grand reopening of the center.
Mack invested $3.2 million in this facility which allows dealers and our customers to visit, and really what we've tried to do in development of the Mack Experience Center is give our customers a view of really what it's like to work with Mack holistically.
The updated facility to include a renovated lobby, new meeting rooms, a new brand room, and a new product showroom with a lift that can raise trucks up high enough for our customers and dealers to walk under and really see what makes a Mack a Mack.
We come here a lot for customers to do pilot trucks. What that is, is we build the first of a run. They'll come in, climb all over the truck, make sure everything's built the way they need it to build. What this does is you're able to lift the truck all the way up. You're able to climb under it. You're able to get to all the access points you need to get to, to really make sure that that pilot truck is built the way we anticipated it to be built, the way the customer expects it to be built. And then we can sign off on it and then go build the rest of the run.
The Experience Center is also the gateway to the Mack Trucks Historical Museum, the perfect way to celebrate our 123 years of building trucks worthy of the Mack name.
We've got a new test track out there. We've got a couple new places within the track, like a mud pit and a rock pit to be able to try all the different technologies that we're developing. And it really gives our customers the ability to test everything that we offer all in one place and have the subject matter experts available to them to provide any answers to questions they may have. Same time, right down the street is our Lehigh Valley operations where we build all the trucks so we can then go over there and actually see the trucks being built and customers can talk to the folks at the factory floor, understand how we build things, why we build them the way we do.
We have people from all over the world coming here to visit our site, to visit this area and then see what we've got. Because everything that we build, for the most part around the globe comes out of Lehigh Valley.
Mack is all in as part of the Volvo Group on sustainability. And we've made the commitment, or at least set out the goal that says by 2030, 35% of our production will be zero emissions at tailpipe. And so we're going to do that through various different technologies, certainly battery electric, and we've got the battery electric garbage truck, the LR we've just launched and actually started Monday taking orders for our medium duty electric.
But really to get to that 35% by 2030, all of our products are gonna have to have some sort of zero emissions powertrain, whatever that might look like. It could be fuel cells. And we've got the joint venture with Daimler in Europe called Cellcentric, where we're doing hydrogen fuel cells. There could be hydrogen ice engines. There's other things that we're testing, including renewable natural gas that will get us there. There's probably not one technology that's gonna get us there given the different applications where we play, but we need to make sure that there's a payback to the fleet because again, this is business to business. This isn't in B two C, 'cause folks aren't just gonna run it to say they run it.
There needs to be payback there as well. And and you make trade-offs as you have this new technology, whether it be range, whether it be weight, whether it be payload. And so we have to balance all of that in working with our customers to make sure ultimately we're achieving the production of something that they can use and that they can make money at as they're satisfying their customers. So again, nothing's off the table and not only are we developing in-house, but I would say we're also looking at partnerships around the globe to help us get there.
