Why do so many Americans hate European trucks?

I was thinking Old Europe has a leg up on American stuff. We stopped at 8 tons and even 9 ton per axle they go crazy. Old Europe appears to be happy with 10 ton and 12 ton axles. Bleah. What Europe should be doing is stop building so #### small. Open it up and bigger roads and enjoy the larger Conventionals.

I was thinking today of a tractor capable of scaling say... 22,000 steer, 45,000 tandem and another 45,000 tandem. That's 110,000 gross. Awesome. But we are not doing that.

Instead of bleating that we americans are stupid with our large conventionals and saying OH please we don't have the space, start cutting your rigs down to 12000, 34 and 34 on the tandems. But you Europeans cannot do that can you?

That also tells me that your bridges are stronger than ours, your pavements are stronger than ours. We crumble and rebuild every decade while yours exist since world war two.

There is no amount of money in America willing to build roads and bridges that big and trucks that heavy empty. They just wont do it.

 

The problem is not the highways, in fact in several countries much longer trucks are allowed on the highways. The problem are the other roads, smaller roads between and in towns and cities. These roads are hundreds of years old, sometimes 2000 years or even older. There are old buildings alongside them. It is not possible to straighten these roads, and building completely new ones to replace them is sometimes possible and desirable, but more often not. European trucks have to deal with those conditions, and that is what they are build for.

The road surface can not handle 45,000 lbs axles. Tarmac is a liquid, very thick, but still a liquid. It needs time to recover once a heavy loaded wheel has passed it, that's why the wider the spacing is between two axles of a tandem, the more weight can be applied to the axles.

In Europe a steer axle is just a single axle. A non-driving axle has a maximum load of 22,000 lbs, a driving axle 25,000 lbs. With tandem axles etc. air suspension also influences the maximum load.

Not quite, we rebuild, extend, maintain our infrastructure. The government pays for it. But guess what, the government needs tax money to do so, Europeans understand that, Americans don't.

I know, it's time your politicians dare to tell you that if the people wants a good infrastructure, good schools, and whatever they expect from a government, it has to be paid for by taxes.

 

[/QUOTE]

Ok, I'll go along with all of that except one. Air suspension does not influence max load. Remember you can always add air to a suspension can until you lift a load high enough to be useful.

 

We understand that taxes are required for proper infrastructure, etc. What some of us do not like is that so much of what we pay in taxes goes to things that we do not need, and now paying against an ever increasing national debt and providing more than our share of world wide defense.

 

I understand that NATO has been allowing for self defense of all europe without need of American Arms. Consider the Germans, they have approx 5000 deploying and the Polish has been making work to allow for frontier deployments. As are others in various Member Nations of Europe.

The thing I do not understand and accept is that NATO itself thinks that Russia is a aggressor and a threat to Europe. It's difficult to consider that Europe has forgotten 1000 years of history and continues to bang it's head against the Russian Frontiers.

Perhaps it's time to abolish Nato and let each European Nation provide for it's own defense using the massive millions of workers displaced by the inflow of immigrants. Surely such a peaceful process will lead to less expenditure in overall taxation.

What I personally hate about taxes if any, they instantly evaporate as a growing interest against trillions of debt. I view the United States with it's developing gas and oil fields to perhaps become a CREDITOR Nation in about 100 years if we just can get it together and get started. But I think we will be bought and sold across to another Nation when we are no longer willing to carry debts. It will not be our land or resources to work properly for our own gain, thus we managed to charge it all gone. Bye bye.

Europe will do well to make less war movements and more providing the necessary gas pipe line connections that is offered by Eygpt and Israel rather than war torn Syria or possibly a future glassification of existing pipe lines from Russia or Saudi/Qatar.

America is now converting to export to either Poland and Italy or other ports eventually placing Europe in a position to purchase gas at 3 or 4 CCF at the house level rather than the inflated 10 to 14 CCF in Euro to Russia and others.

I think this will be a real gain to the Nation and worth making sure that we get it done. I rather do it with commerce rather than Defense.

 

Exactly. A large portion of my property taxes go towards schools. Why the heck should I be paying for other people's kids to attend school? Same with welfare. I'm tired of working so some lazy SOB can sit on his ###, get drunk and beat his wife. We put our tax dollars towards entirely the wrong things IMO.

 

It's better than schools. We just finished a fight at the County Level to provide a sum of money to the Fire Department to upgrade hoses and gain a new engine that is needed to improve our overall fire rating for insurance purposes. That was a minor tax increase. However considering the one new major store opened and the resulting flow of revenue making our Town Fathers somewhat narcotic in joy and riches abounding in pleasureable spending....

Ugh....

 

Then its stupid stuff like what the city did this spring. Swept all the streets. Once that was done, they washed all the dirt off the dividers and medians. Then they had to come back and re-sweep the streets again. My brain hurts trying comprehend that level of stupid.

 

I have one better. We started paving. Streets that are declared a local emergency and must be paved.

Consider that we had dirt and gravel since ethe 1840's and our King Ranches and Red Rivers Strong trucks are more than adquate for such a basic level of transport around a City that does not need such wonderful modern pavement.

He he he.

 

That's not the point. Air suspension is much kinder to the road surface, that's why these rules exist. You can read about it in Annex I, and much more in Annex II of the European Directive I mentioned before.