Get up close with Volvo's VHD

Hi, I'm Duane Tegels here at Con Expo 2026. Today we're going to do a quick walk around the Volvo VHD here behind me. Starting out here with our center toe pin. For those applications, we'll maybe in a little bit aggressive, need a little bit of a help. We have a cast iron cross member here tied into both rails for direct pulling from both rails. And as we move forward to the top here, we have a stationary grill. This gives you a little bit of a benefit here. So if our customer has a need for maybe a hose reel and a vac situation or maybe putting some snowplow accessories on here, this keeps that grill from coming in and gives us a little bit more space. Moving down to the front here, we have our high visibility LED headlines. You'll see that we've got heating elements in here to keep any sort of ice or the snow from building up on that, but great visibility.

This truck's available in a axle forward and an axle back situation. This one is an axle back. The axle setup, we have these available anywhere from a 125 to a 228 configuration. So pretty meaty tires on this particular one. Underneath the bonnet here, underneath the hood, we have our D13.

This one here is a 500 horse 1850. This is available also in 11 liter from 325 to a 405. This D13 is available from a 405 up to a 500 horse 1900. Then as you can see that everything's here easily accessible. Our oil, our power steering fluid, all the components there as far as fluids, nice, easily accessible. As we move down here to the steering gear, this truck is available with dual steering gears, but we have a nice feature on here. Volvo dynamic steering. This puts additional torque into the steering gear, making it a much more relaxed experience for the driver, giving road feedback, but minimizing that jerky feeling in the steering wheel. Really a nice feature giving the driver a little bit more relaxed feeling during the day. And we'll transition back over here to the lift axles. We've got this particular truck has 13K steerable lift axles, but your dealer can set this up however you like.

The chassis you look at or the frame setup is available anywhere from a five-sixteenths to a seven-sixteenths with full liners. That gives you a RVM of 4.2 million. And then as we transition back to the axle setup, we offer both Dana and Meritor axles here. This particular setup is a 58K Meritor. We can go from 40, 46, 52, and 58. This is our T-ride setup. It's a parabolic leaf spring. It's a walking beam system. This gives us approximately 17 inches of articulation from side to side, keeping those tires planted at all times. And now you can see we're inside of the cab, one of the biggest cabs in the industry. As we look out over the hood, great visibility. This truck has a bumper to back a cab of 113 inches. With that axle back situation allows great maneuverability around tight work areas. As we transition into the cockpit here, we have the availability to move this steering wheel, whichever way we'd like, making it comfortable for the driver.

Everything's an arms reach. We've got our lockers over here. We have our auxiliary axles, our PTO switches. This also has Hillstart assist in it. Great feature as we go up a hill and stop. It holds the brakes. So when the driver goes ahead and hits the brake, moving over the throttle, prevents the vehicle from rolling back. Again, great feature. This is our iShift transmission. As you can see here is the pad, the shifting pad. We've got reverse, neutral, drive. And if the driver wants to go into a manual mode, we can push the M button there and move it up or down, selecting whichever gear we'd like to go manually. It does come with a driver mode function, giving us what we call extra economy or economy, or if you'd like that extra performance, just push it additional time. That'll increase your engine RPMs, giving you greater performance.

As we move over to the steering wheel, all your radio controls are here, cell phone controls, whichever you'd like there. Then we move into our exhaust brake functionality here. We've got it all the way to off to automatic, so we can set that to our road speed or over speed. And then we have one, two, three here. It gives us different levels of brake mode. And then full B, which is full braking, does a full brake in the exhaust brake, but then also does automatic downshifting. So make sure your seat belt's buckled because it's going to hit hard. From a safety perspective, standard airbag in every Volvo. The cab is high strength steel. We do crash testing on every vehicle model. So fantastic from a safety perspective. This truck's also available with Volvo active driver assist. So collision mitigation, side protection radar, all the safety features that Volvo was well known for.