Hino’s ready-made tipper range based on the 300 Series is making huge strides in the transport equipment market, boasting an automatic transmission where most of the competition is banking on an automated manual (AMT) solution.
According to Hino’s Product Planning Manager, Daniel Petrovski, the difference between the two concepts is simple. “You still need to know how to drive a manual when you drive an AMT. In an automatic, however, you simply stock it in drive and just go,” he says. “For light-duty customers you simply just can’t go past an automatic.”
While Daniel says the AMT concept definitely has a right to exist and is already performing well in many a vehicle, it’s “horses for courses” in the light tipper market. At Hino, the figures currently show an almost 50-50 per cent split between manual and automatic models, but the automatic version is gaining more and more ground.
In 2013, Hino sold 76 factory-made 300 Series tippers with an automatic gearbox.
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