UD Trucks remains committed to going the extra mile
2025 sees UD Trucks celebrate 90 years of existence globally. This significant milestone reflects the brand’s legacy as one of the leading brands in the commercial vehicle industry. Locally UD Trucks SA’s founding dates back to 1962 and the brand enjoys an enviable reputation for offering cutting-edge products in the Light, Medium and Heavy segments, produced at its assembly plant in Rosslyn, Pretoria.
Product improvements that meet growing customer business needs
With the brand’s proven success of providing ultimate dependable trucks that offer excellent fuel efficiency, reliability, durability, drivability and uptime, UD Trucks continues to challenge itself with product development and future mobility solutions that cater directly to the customers business requirements and industry’s demanding safety and environmental standards with modern technology.
With innovation that puts people first, the Quon features enhancements that set the benchmark with regards to safety and uptime with features such as traffic eye control cruise with stop and auto go, improved traffic eye brake system with Vulnerable Road User capability, an improved driver alert system and emergency brake signal.
In addition to product innovations, UD Trucks places a strong emphasis on driver training as a core offering to ensure that customers derive maximum value from their vehicles.
Maximising uptime
Maximising uptime and profitability remain at the core of UD’s offering as they strive to ensure that customers avoid unexpected interruptions and costly repairs. These solutions allow vehicles to spend more time on the road driving business success and less time in the workshop.
Uptime services include UD Trust Standard or Ultimate Service Agreements, which offer predictable maintenance costs for up to five years with options for service only.
One of the biggest impacts on customer uptime is the time lost while waiting for parts and key to improving customer uptime is ensuring that parts are available at the dealership when required. Through the support from Japan, with a specific focus on the South African market, implementation of predictive systems, a dedicated team that investigates exceptional demand patterns as well as the data received from vehicle sales and collaboration with service agreement data, UD Trucks SA have been able to make sure that parts are available in the locations where they are required more efficiently. UD has been able to strive for minimum availability of 96%, the best achievement in the last decade, which has ensured that at dealerships parts are available in the morning when technicians commence work on trucks, resulting in efficiency and productivity in the workshop.
UD’s uptime services also include the industry leading UD Connected services, telematics solutions that enable business owners to monitor driver behaviour and vehicle health, ensuring operational efficiency and safety.
Genuine Service is also a key contributor to delivering uptime by providing maintenance schedules customised to individual specification and conditions of the vehicles, keeping them in prime condition to deliver maximum uptime.
Selling more than just vehicles
What continues to set UD apart is the fact that they sell more than just product, they sell complete solutions to customers with all the bases covered.
It is this strategy that differentiates UD from other brands, especially some of the newcomers to the market.
For example, UD have been offering Euro 5 and Euro 6 solutions to South African customers for some time now, despite there being no government regulations enforcing this. This strategy showcases UDs commitment to providing customers and South Africans with cleaner solutions despite it not being mandated by government.
Government regulations governing clean fuels have now been pushed out to July 2027 but despite these delays UD expects that fleet managers and operators will continue to move towards Euro 5 vehicles when the time comes to update their fleets.
UD continue to offer a competitive product offering along with many benefits as they consider the total vehicle offering and all related services. UD remain committed to building on their strengths which includes offering vehicle solutions that prioritise uptime and durability.