(^40) August 2019 Truck & Driver
SLIGO HAULAGE
S
ligo Haulage &
Distribution celebrated its
20th anniversary last year
with a pair of Daf XF
Super Spaces. The
company pulls a lot of freight,
from containers to groupage,
from Dublin and delivers all over
the north-west of Ireland and
beyond. It has a strong
relationship with Daf, ever since
taking on a pair of XF 430 Space
Cabs in 2006. “We had such a
good experience with those
trucks that Daf has made up the
bulk of the fleet ever since,”
explains Gareth Mullen, who has
joined his father Stephen in the
family business and passed his
Operator CPC exams in 2016.
As of 2019, the fleet is 100%
Euro 6. Stephen has been keen
to progressively upgrade the
trucks and is proud of the
company’s efficiency and
environmental credentials. It
ordered the first two Euro 6 Dafs
in the UK in 2014, before even
the official demonstrators were
on the road! “I saw the new
model at the CV Show in
England and put the order in on
the spot,” says Stephen.
Turning point
At that point, the company was
still specifying mainly manual
gearboxes, and in the yard are
2015/16 model XFs with
12-speed manuals that have
performed very well.
“We were never convinced by
the auto ’boxes. We have some
AS-Tronics but the manual was
the better option at the time; one
of those trucks has just turned
over 680,000km and in that time
all it has had is two knock
sensors under warranty and a
water pump at 500,000km. The
turning point was when the
revised model came out in 2017
“We were never convinced by the auto
’boxes. We have some AS-Tronics but the
manual was the better option at the time”
romina
(Romina)
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