F89, first child of the Volvo Truck division
Construction and maintenance of Trucks

F89, first child of the Volvo Truck division

The Volvo F89 is fifty years old and is a very modern truck, the result of great changes taking place in the Swedish group, which aims to take market share from the great road cars of the time, MAN, Mercedes and Scania. They were the first, complex and difficult, the seventies, and Volvo really got into this business swiftly, driven by one new productive force and design.

But he walked into it moreover, and above all, with an unprecedented industrial organization, sought after by a man who in the future will be remembered as one of its greatest managers, Lars Malmros... To meet the challenges that the Swedish group would face in the short term, it was absolutely essential diversify internally the Group itself.

Volvo Trucks is born

The most important step was the creation of Malmros Volvo Truck Division, at the end of 1969. The Truck Divison project was a lot as easy as difficult: update the entire assortment for five years in order to become highly competitive primarily in European markets, and in the long term - in world markets, and make a profit as soon as possible.

It all went wrong, it took another couple of years to change the entire lineup, but by the beginning of 1978 all Volvo production had changed.

First-born

The first example of this update was l'F89which appeared in the fall of 1970 as a natural evolution of the F88 or L4951 Titan released in 1965. The subject of a major advertising campaign in Sweden and abroad, in which he was presented as Free Yourself Power Package"(Power unit).

A new car was born as great competitor heavy loads intended for this line, which were popular in continental Europe (Mercedes and MAN) and in the Scandinavian countries (Scania) Swedish engineers were faced with a dilemma: to design All new inline 6 or work on the evolution of the old V-6, one of Volvo's first diesel engines?

F89, first child of the Volvo Truck division

Brand new project

The answer was to start by projecting a new turbocharged 12-liter engine developed in the lineup he did.  could in the future work smoothly for any increase in capacity that the market would certainly need in a decade or so.

Despite the development of a new 12-liter engine, TD120, began more or less simultaneously with the release of the TD1965 in 100, the engine that drove the F88 was structurally different and was designed for clearly higher powers: from 300 CV up. 

Besides the engine, also Speed was an exclusive Volvo production: SR61, a eight forward gears and vice versa, completely synchronized... Volvo also produced the rear axle. DR 80 with double reduction gear on the bridge.

F89, first child of the Volvo Truck division

TipTop cab

The F89's interior was essentially the same as the F88 that was there at the time. famous and very modern (for a while) "Great", designed in 1964 for the L4951 Titan and manufactured at the futuristic Umeå plant, a few kilometers from the Arctic Circle.

La TipTop had some features, for that time it was really avant-garde, first of all, when it came out, it was cab of the first dump truck, was equipped with the first but important devices for active and passive safety of the driver, and was built taking into account the parameters ergonomics quite rare at the time.

The cabin did not differ significantly from the previous one, at least for the first year. Was later introduced version with sunroofas the standard air conditioner was still a long way off. F89 was cousin volvo to be imported regularly in Italy and remained in production in more or less unchanged form until 1978.

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