The VNL hotel: Volvo's largest sleeper big on comfort and functionality

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;17;19

Jason Cannon

Hey everybody. CCJ Chief Editor Jason Cannon here with a different type of test drive review for you. I'm going to be test driving this mattress. We're inside the new Volvo Vnl sleeper. I'm going to be spending the night in here. I've done plenty of time in sleepers before. I've done some time in the Volvo sleeper before, but this is a brand new vnl.

00;00;17;19 - 00;00;31;21

Jason Cannon

This truck's been on the market for less than a year. I'm pretty excited to spend the night in this truck, which I'm going to do here in just a little bit. It's 1030 local time here. It's past my bedtime. But before we get into that, I want to throw this over to Dewayne Teague, who's Volvo's product marketing manager.

00;00;31;25 - 00;00;51;23

Jason Cannon

And he and I are going to go over some of the amenities in this truck and how it's changed slightly from the old generation value to the new generation being out. And for all the latest news on Volvo's trucks and basically everything else trucking related. Subscribe to the newsletter by clicking the link in the description below. Duane, I want you to give us a little bit of an overview of what we're looking at here in this sleeper.

00;00;51;25 - 00;01;04;00

Jason Cannon

A lot of the amenities that we see here pretty standard the closet, the refrigerator, television, some of the storage components. But you know, this is a really nice, really flush sleeper here. So you know what makes the Vnl sleeper special.

00;01;04;03 - 00;01;22;06

Duane Tegels

You know, I think where we're sitting here right now, we're sitting here at this nice, comfortable dinette. What you don't typically find in most sleeper configurations. And this is going to fold down into a bed. Very comfortable bed for you which is pretty quick. Easily turn around. It'll take us 30s to throw this thing down. So that's kind of the first part about it.

00;01;22;09 - 00;01;38;27

Duane Tegels

As you can see, it's very roomy. You know, I'm six foot three and I have a hard time hitting the ceiling in this thing, so there's quite a bit of room. We do have a bunk that's above us. You got a full hanging closet here? Pretty good sized closet. That's seems to be some of the concern about some of the customers.

00;01;38;27 - 00;01;57;01

Duane Tegels

Like how big is a closet? You got plenty of room in there. Yeah. You got your inductive charging here. Simply, you're going to put your cell phone right here on the pad. Here you will see a little amber light light up if you want to charge it through a seaport. You have that here as well, along with the 12 volt source and 110 bolt.

00;01;57;03 - 00;02;32;09

Duane Tegels

Your inverter is right here. Simply just by pushing this button to make 110 volt work. And then, you know, as we go into the control panel, this control panel is going to manage our, parking cooler here and also our radio functions and, our inverter as well. So we're just going to go ahead and hit our power on here and we can look at our battery, how much battery life we have left over you also looking at the temperature that we have set here for the sleeper area and also in the cockpit area, so we can manage both of those separately and we can set an alarm for you if you like.

00;02;32;15 - 00;02;54;07

Duane Tegels

So the lights will turn on. We also get an audible as well through the radio if you'd like. We have an under foot will light down here and then above us here there's your main light and you have that crescent light as well. And those can be linked to the alarm. We're going to go ahead and turn on our inverter and we can hit set auto here for our climate control.

00;02;54;07 - 00;03;13;29

Duane Tegels

You can hear the fan come on right now. And that'll keep the cab running here. About 7.5 hours on the integrated parking cooler. It's an electric parking cooler. It runs off of the battery system, 24 volt system. It'll run for approximately 7.5 hours, and then the truck will start up, and it's going to run for about an hour and a half.

00;03;14;02 - 00;03;16;15

Jason Cannon

An electric parking cooler is not an AA for you, right?

00;03;16;16 - 00;03;38;23

Duane Tegels

It is not an Apu. So how that functions is is the alternator on the engine is going to charge the batteries. Some of the challenges you have with starting an engine off of the battery systems, it drains the batteries and puts a big load on it real quick. We have a capacitor on that. So all the engine starting and stopping is done automatically.

00;03;38;23 - 00;04;02;04

Duane Tegels

The starting is done through a capacitor setup. Charging is monitored, so we're always monitoring the temperature of the batteries to make sure we're not overcharging them. And then the battery system also turns off as we no longer need loads to keep parasitic loss of the life there. The design there is to keep the life of the batteries extended as long as we possibly can, because we are pulling load off there for the integrated parking cooler.

00;04;02;04 - 00;04;04;22

Duane Tegels

And again, that's just run by the battery system.

00;04;04;24 - 00;04;15;29

Jason Cannon

All right. Well, I'm the one spending the night in here tonight. You promised us that this could be converted from a table and a dinette area into a bed in 30s, or less. So do you feel like you could really hit that 32nd mark?

00;04;15;29 - 00;04;17;26

Duane Tegels

Well, let's see if we can do it. All right.

00;04;17;28 - 00;04;30;07

Jason Cannon

We get out of your way.

00;04;30;09 - 00;04;36;25

Duane Tegels

And is. There you go, Jason.

00;04;36;27 - 00;05;00;07

Jason Cannon

It's, 1135 way past my bedtime. The battery indicator back here in the bunk is showing about three quarters charge for the parking cooler. It's a blistering 62 degrees back here right now, and I'm going to sleep. So I'll see you guys in the morning. Good morning. We're back outside the truck after spending the night inside the truck.

00;05;00;10 - 00;05;18;18

Jason Cannon

That was a very comfortable experience. Good night. Sleep last night. Very comfortable mattress. Lots of room, very quiet. The parking cooler. We did run out of juice there about 2:00 in the morning. The truck did cut on. That did wake me up. And interesting enough, I wasn't awoken by the noise of the industry so much as I was the shaking of the truck.

00;05;18;18 - 00;05;40;14

Jason Cannon

I thought that was fairly interesting because you couldn't really tell the engine was running, other than the vibration from the cab. My truck was surrounded by other trucks, and if they idled last night, I never heard it. So that truck is very well insulated. There is a curtain between the driver's cab and the bunk, and it's an insulated carton, and it's a fantastic carton because I crank that air conditioning last night to 62 all night.

00;05;40;16 - 00;05;57;13

Jason Cannon

And it was freezing back there. And I did that for a specific reason. That's about as cold as it would go. I really wanted to stress the battery system here to see how long it would last and when the truck would idle. So we hammered the AC pretty much nonstop for about six hours. I thought that was pretty impressive.

00;05;57;19 - 00;06;13;14

Jason Cannon

There will be a lot of variables in play with ambient temperatures. You may not get the same mileage if you're in Arizona in August as I did in South Carolina in September, but overall, I was fairly impressed with the sleeping experience. I'm very well rested, and I'm ready to take this truck and the trailer to Charlotte, North Carolina.