With Western Star Australia enjoying unprecedented sales success over the last few years, the decision to locally fit Cummins ISX engines in fully imported glider kits appears to be paying off big time. As PAUL MATTHEI reports, it was a project borne of necessity rather than desire and driven by a joint resolution to keep the customer satisfied. Customers such as NSW outfit Hogan’s Heavy Haulage.

Question: What if a fully imported heavy-duty truck no longer offers a certain engine brand which just happens to be favoured by a good slab of Aussie operators?
Answer: Import the truck as a glider, bolt the engine and transmission package in at a workshop dedicated to the purpose and hey presto, you have a prime mover with the ‘street cred’ to satisfy the significant demands of some typically hard-nosed truck owners.

This is exactly the approach taken by Western Star Trucks Australia (WSTA), in conjunction with Cummins at Brisbane, when higher powers in the US decided to no longer offer a Cummins option in Western Star. And locally, Western Star had good reason to pursue such a path.

Despite a slim range of just six conventional models, the last few years have been extraordinarily good for Western Star. Sure, the numbers went off the boil towards the end of last year – as did most other brands – but Star still finished 2008 with a creditable 9.8 percent share of the heavy-duty truck market, just 0.1 percent behind a rampaging Isuzu but like everyone else, well shy of heavy-duty market leader Kenworth on 22.6 percent. Still, what must be particularly pleasing to WSTA and its hugely wealthy master, Brisbane-based businessman Terry Peabody, was the brand’s substantially stronger performance than several of its high profile competitors including corporate kin Freightliner.

While arguably a good deal of Western Star’s success in this country can be attributed to having products which in hardware terms go head-to-head with those of arch rival Kenworth, it appears that at least one shrewd business decision has also played its part in Star’s success in recent times: The decision to import fully trimmed glider kits and install Cummins ISX engines and Eaton transmissions at its Brisbane facility. 

From the outside looking in it might seem a strange decision. After all, with the availability ...
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