Talk:Mercedes-Benz Actros

Expanded article

I just expanded the article. Most of the things I've written are known by personal experience with the Actros. My expansion needs verifications (if you can find any... I didn't), and please, if anyone finds some personal reference left over -- remove it. The Actros manuals are quite apocryphal on the Web, and I found some bloggers sharing the same problems I've encountered. However, they could hardly be held as a solid verifiable source, and MB doesn't provide any specs, so I decided to share my experience. Further improvement needed is finding verifiable sources and putting internal links. --lasombra bg (talk) 21:16, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Weight verification

Is the Actros range really available up to 250 tonnes as stated in the article!? – Kieran T ^(talk) 13:51, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

No, actually the highest rating is 4456, which is on an Actros tipper. The highest rating for a semi is 3356. This is on an Actros tractor for heavy haulage, and it gives 33 tonnes gross weight of the tractor. Given the fact the tractor itself weighs approx. 8 tonnes, it leaves you with 24 tonnes weight supported by it. That would result in approx. 40 tonnes gross weight of the semi-trailer. However, the limit in most countries is 40 tonnes gross weight, so a fully laden 3356 would be massively overweight. It's designed for heavy haulage (under special licenses), or for mining jobs.

A fully laden 747 weighs approximately 250 tonnes. It's ridiculous to think that such a load would ever be supported by any road. Runways are reinforced, whereas public roads are not. It's not impossible to think that a truck would pull a fully laden 747. Actually, the tractors that pull them around the airport are way below the power of high-end SUV like Porsche Cayenne.

It's just that they pull the airplanes, they do not support their weight. They don't drag them around faster than 10 mph, and most of the braking is done by the airplane itself (by connecting the brakes of the tractor to the brakes of the plane). Having said that, it's likely that a 1844 Actros (18 tonnes gross weight, 440 bhp) would be able to drag a 250 tonne airplane along. It would probably drag even a 737 attached an A380. But this is not 250+ gross weight.

Apart from the obvious problem of a public road collapsing under this weight, common sense shows there's no use for a 250 GVW truck anywhere. The GVW has nothing to do with the weight it can pull (except for the friction of tyres), so there would practically be no need for such a load to be placed on a vehicle instead of pulling it.

--lasombra bg (talk) 21:16, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't suppose the OP was actually suggesting the data in the article could be right! However, there *are* trucks at those kind of total weights, albeit not road-going... just not Actros-based ;) http://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/off-highway-trucks/mining-trucks.html 82.37.157.134 (talk) 20:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Cab-Over-Engine?

All of the pictures on the page show a cab-over-engine configuration, but I'm seeing no indication that all Actros trucks have this layout. Are there any conventional-layout Actros trucks? --Badger151 (talk) 16:57, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

"16 speed gearbox"?

Sorry but that seems unlikely to me, especially for the first generation truck. I don't know how they do it in Europe but in the US commercial vehicles usually have a gearbox and a two-range rear axle, effectively doubling the number of available ratios, so a 5 speed gearbox will give you 10 available gear ranges though different combinations of gearing, 1L, 1H, 2L, 2H, 3L, 3H, etc. It's hard to believe that they fit 16 ratios into a heavy duty gearbox, especially that long ago, or that they then downgraded to a mere 12 speed box ten years later. And assuming Mercedes work like American trucks that would give the driver 32 gears to sift through in manual mode.

I think it's more likely that it has an 8 speed gearbox, and 16 gear ranges, which isn't the same thing. Idumea47b (talk) 12:46, 18 November 2024 (UTC)