Winner of the inaugural Truck of the Year Australasia in 2023, the K220 is a landmark model for Kenworth. An entirely different machine beneath a form factor that continues to acknowledge lineage on the one hand, yet pokes the bear on the other. Will 220 continue to honour one of the greatest evolutionary legacies in automotive history? Who knows, but Guy Knowles Transport offers one of the best transport operations in which to open its account.

Behind the middle door of the three-bay shed sits the latest addition to the Guy Knowles Transport fleet. One of the first two Kenworth K220s to land on our fair shore, the Knowles’ truck was a validation unit sporting some of the key 220 features that will separate it from its predecessor beyond the easily identifiable. There’s the air-suspended electrically tilted cab, hydraulic clutch, inner front wheel guards, the swanky digital dash, and of course the aerodynamic sleeper cab profile – minus the vista windows. Seen as cab/chassis on the Southpac stand at Wheels at Wanaka 2023, fleet No.83 was certainly the focus of much attention, not in the least part due to that cab profile.

In the race

As all of its predecessors in the business have done before, No.83, rego ‘KW220’, will quickly become familiar with the lower North Island to Auckland linehaul route via the National Park. It’s the preferred Knowles passage on account of the reduced traffic. That’s not to say you won’t see members of the fleet in any other corner of Godzone, but if you’re pushed for time and can’t end your truck-pic roadie without a member of ‘GKT’ secured on the SD card, that corridor will certainly be your best bet.

As the middle door rises, the first instantly distinguishing factor on the new model reveals itself. The grille shape is more angular, aligned to its T610 conventional stablemate. Personally, there was a shock factor with the K200 when I first encountered one, and familiarity, comfort, and then eventually bonding took time. The K220 felt familiar in an instant, and bonding took mere seconds – the grille, the new bumper, it all looks on-point. Of the two new-era Ks, its form factor makes it feel more of a natural successor to 108. That’s just me though.

Like all Guy Knowles trucks the inherent practicality is overshadowed by spectacular, and it’s not until you’re working in and around the fleet you realise just how usable they actually are. This is a fleet designed in every detail by a trucker – the lesson being, makeup and looks aside, Flo Jo was still fast. That said, the owner’s zest for productivity does mean there are gin traps for the non-vocational types. These aren’t trucks you could plonk a novice in and then go to bed without a worry as they motored off, lights aglow, into the northern night.

They are certainly a ‘more you look, the more you’ll see’ affair and the attention to detail is mesmerising. For Guy and Helen, relationships are at the core of everything they are about – whether customer, staff or supplier. This is handshake, commitment, delivery, territory. As a supplier, get in the gate and you’ll enjoy a long and fulfilling relationship that goes well beyond the transaction – you’ve just got to have the same approach to business as them.

Southpac, Fruehauf, SAF, Tauranga Canvas, Marty’s Signs, Hella, BroLube, they all have long associations.

“I try and do something a little different on each one,” says Guy as we walked around. “It’s getting harder though. We did painted tanks, then visors, then did some stuff with the lights and stainless strips on the bottom of the tanks, toolboxes and toolbox handles. There are always different curtains on each one.” Then he points to the rolled stainless edging on the front guards. “Look at this, Chris Stanley, he’s bloody good isn’t he?”

It’s here you realise the infectious positivity, so evident in retelling his own story, is not just all about him. Rarely will you ever hear him say anything negative about suppliers. “No, no we’re treated pretty bloody good really, we’ve got long relationships and that’s important. There’s no one we deal with we can’t talk to about little things here and there, things we could improve, and it’s all good, we get these little things sorted and we’re all good, driver, you know?

“I like to keep everything local, deal with local people, that way when you have a problem there’s someone to go to and it can be sorted and improved on. Even things as simple as lights. I stick with Hella here and you can get things done, it’s easy, no major at all.”

Like every new truck that comes in the gates, Guy will drive the 220 for the first couple of hundred thousand, until the next new truck arrives and then he’ll hand this one on. It’s a model that’s existed here forever, and although it might not appeal to every driver reading this, like Carey Turner at OTL said about Isuzu trucks in the November 2023 issue – that’s how it works here, you know it from the get-go.

“Look, it’s just a ‘me’ thing. It also allows me to deal with any teething troubles, I hand on a truck I know works to the driver. It also means the suppliers know I’ll be turning up with the teething problems, not a driver who might not get the level of attention an owner does.”

Walk-around done, Aunty H’s lunch and drink in the fridge, we idle out of the shed into the sunlight. A toot as we roll down the drive, through the gates and out onto the lane.

Residential covenants mean we’re on a strict 20km/h for the kilometre or so out to the main drag on the southwest side of town. It’s actually a neat way to kick-off, ease the truck into it, and as Guy says, great for when you come home, simply drive in the shed and shut it down.

Steelfort is located on SH3 at the western entrance to Palmerston North and it’s there we load for Auckland – a substantial yard for turning the rig around and placing in the loadout bay. Of course many would say being a Kenworth it’s just as well it’s a big pad, but there’s the first uppercut the K220 will dish out. “Watch this, driver,” and with that Guy swung on the wheel and around went the truck as no other Kenworth I’d ever driven or seen had done before. It would later repeat the trick, again to my amazement in a far tighter environment at Kiwi Brands DC. I trawled the literature trying to get a radius number, but alas no luck – I guess the plethora of wheelbase and suspension options change it constantly, but Guy has certainly struck a sweet combo here.

Multiplex wiring, electric tilt etc are great, but for truck drivers out in the heat of time-constrained battle, a good lock is real, especially when you think how many of these will end up in rural stock applications. ‘K220 – turning more than just heads!’ See, I’ve even nailed the ad slug!

Two iconic intersections in North Island linehaul

All in a day’s work

One of the signs of a true operator is the masking of a slick loading and unloading time with an apparent lack of fuss. That sums up Guy to a tee. Of course, he’s aided by trucks he specs to his applications on jobs he’s now done for a long time. Things like corner-board holders angled and present on both sides of the truck and trailer. Straps on one side and buckles on the other. Their work also affords the luxury of not having to carry clunky AusBinders, ‘scratchy’ chains and the like.

The toolboxes are nothing short of art. Stainless steel with beautiful recessed lockable T handles, interior lights, and pull- out drawers. Designed by Guy of course, and built by Steelfort Engineering. This is no in-house job either, they do this sort of thing and it’s an area they’re interested in investigating more. Amazing and well worth a look.

One of the things that does set the Knowles fleet apart is the incredible adherence to ‘cloneism’. Line up the five trucks together and they’re all identical in dimension, meaning no one’s disadvantaged by pricing, whether the truck in terms of revenue, or the customer in terms of product moved. That’s great for customers because they can stage loads and know every member of the fleet will get it on.

The Knowles’ trucks are big caverns, there’s no mezzanine floors; no need according to Guy. The Fruehauf bodies and trailers are equipped with aluminium decks and recessed cross members. “One of the things we did a while back was move from fibreglass front walls to Mono-Pan laminated composite walls. That saved a huge amount of weight and gave us critical inches.”

Agh, critical inches. Remember I was saying as simple as the set-up is, these machines are not for novices? With a 2.3m aerodynamic roof sleeper and 23m overall length, the Knowles trucks can accommodate 38 Chep pallets with millimetres to spare. That means the inter-vehicle space is a mere 1050mm, and that in turn means vigilance must be high the second things like entrance ways have an upward kink. Any angle at ground level will amplify itself 4.30m up; suffice to say that gap closes mighty quick. “It’s just a care thing, and we’ve got a great crew currently.” There is a drawbar extender on each unit for manoeuvring in tight spaces, but the trick is, knowing when to deploy it.

The units run at 50MAX; there’s nothing to be gained going any higher, and on average they’re good for about 31 tonne. Payload concession is not something Guy is overly known for but he specs the trucks with double-skin curtains just to give the signage a little more protection from the working world inside.

The relationship with Fruehauf New Zealand is probably the longest and it’s a zero-hesitation answer when you mention bodies and trailers. “Just the best in my view; again that’s just me. It’s a long association and they know my spec so well. When I order a truck, I place the order with Jeffrey [Mear – CEO Fruehauf NZ] and they start on the trailer right then.”

Looking around, there are the obvious signs BroLube has a role to play here with central lubrication; that runs to the trailer also. Having disc brakes all round means there’s only the ball-race on the trailer to grease, so running a line makes sense. “Dave from BroLube lives at Himatangi and he does great for us. I had a wee issue the other night with a broken line and he was at home when I got there. You can’t ask for more than that, can you?”

The fleet names generally come from either an Eagles’ song or moments in the company history, and so with our load of mixed product equating to about 14 tonne payload, New Kid in Town pulled out onto SH3 at a featherweight 31 tonne gross.

Payloads do vary considerably and a load of produce will easily make the most of the available limits.

Consistency and change

As we head out of Palmerston North through Awahuri towards Sanson, I wondered how many times this man had done exactly what we were doing now. This is the 15th K model Kenworth to wear the Knowles livery and the bugs have held up their end of the deal admirably.

“Just fantastic. They’ve been a fantastic truck to me, every one of them. I can honestly say I haven’t had a dud at all.”

To be fair he takes a safe approach to specification; the latest machine essentially has the same core components as the first, like the cab/chassis around them, simply keeping pace with evolution. Even then, he’s reluctant to be the first on board with anything new, and believe it or not he never moved away from EGR the moment Cummins E5 arrived, saying he got through without any real EGR horrors against his name.

You do have to be able to swing off a gear lever if you want to breast the control seat here, and probably will do until the OEM deems that impossible. Guy’s not a fan of self-shifters, and although some would say he misses out on key productivity features, like many of his ilk, you do wonder if that is actually the case. Race car driver Jim Richards’ famous quote about the art of motor racing being to win the race in the slowest possible time can be paraphrased and applied to changing gears in big trucks – the art is changing the fewest gears possible to get from A to B. As you can imagine, he is at one with his machine, an innate feel of energy and where it currently resides in the combination, adjusting the transmission in order to put it where he wants.

“Look, they’re [AMTs] really good now, I know, a lot of it is just me, the era I grew up in, and what it means to drive a truck. As I said before, things are different now in many ways. We normally go up one day, unload, have our break, reload and wander home. A lot of the time it’s not pressured at all. Sixty- five hours is a pretty good week for us. What I’m saying is we can just trundle along. His style at the tiller probably explains why a little over 2.0kpl is where consumption usually sits also.

“Kenworth was always an aspirational truck. This is just next level to the K200 and I thought that was pretty spot-on. I bought a 95XF DAF from Southpac early on. I still didn’t think a Kenworth was in my reach, but it gave me the chance to check out the lay of the land there in terms of support and aftersales. That was a lovely truck I have to say, Helen really liked it and named it Annabelle. Eventually I made the big leap to the first K104B; crikey, that was a leap of faith, driver! I’ve never looked back, and Southpac have simply been outstanding the whole way. Steve [Herring – Southpac sales] is just superb, I’ve been dealing with Steve for so long now. He knows the product better than inside-out and he’s a great bloke and mate. Maarten [Durent – Southpac CEO], Richard [Smart – Southpac GM sales], the whole team. I’m not a big operator but that’s not the way you’re treated in my experience.

“I have to mention Aaron Headington and Damian Hooper in the new truck division – they’re fantastic to work with – nothing’s a problem, driver, nothing’s a problem. Chris Stanley of course, and Anders and Brent Morris, Southpac Trucks’ auto electricians for the work they did. They had this thing apart, seriously, and look!”

But none of this might have been so, were it not for decisions made by Mack Trucks in the 1990s. As we said earlier, the Guy Knowles V8 Mack Ultra-Liners were iconic back in the day and when Mack discontinued that model, its idea for its replacement, the Quantum, was certainly not Guy’s. “Look, the Kenworth was aspirational but I always thought out of reach. If they’d kept the Ultra-Liner I wouldn’t have had to start looking. And I’m a V8 fan, I love V8s. Those trucks were so good to me, and they sounded so good.”

But the Ultra-Liners did go, which lead to dabbling in Scania V8s, chosen for their V8 with similar injection systems to the Mack, and of course Annabelle, the 95XF.

“I had a great run from all those trucks. The Scanias were good machines but not quite what I was after and the DAF was more comfortable to sleep in than the Scanias. No, from the moment the V8 Macks went away there was only one make I was after long term.”

Rolling on up the island there really is no effort at all as you can imagine, and we dispatched the Taihape Deviation in 16th, 1300rpm, and 47km/h. Guy said a full load of spuds on the Bombays will see it in 10th at a shade over 40km/h. Given it’s barely 10,000km into work, it’s all semantics.

At Waiouru he swings the 220 northwest, leaving SH1 and shooting down SH49 through Ohakune to connect with SH4 at Tohunga Junction, then on up through National Park and Taumarunui to SH3 at Eight Mile Junction. He knows this road better than the back of his hand and is extra cautious at the narrow two-lane bridge at Tohunga Junction. “They come whipping around and a lot of the newer guys don’t know it’s not two lanes for trucks.” We chat about how such a deathtrap can remain on the main network for so many decades.

By now we’re getting a taste of one of the 220’s real features, the cab air suspension. K108e/200 was a huge improvement over 108 in terms of ride, and 220 air has raised the bar again. At the time of writing it’s not available on the 1.7m cab. This Kenworth has an entirely different ride and suspends the lateral movement, not just the up/down and fore/ aft. It’s interesting, because that lateral rigidity is the hallmark of the ‘American’ ride and loyalists like it, however there is no hint of laziness, and when I was at the helm later in the afternoon it was rail-like through the bends, as you’d expect and hope.

It’s probably the quietest Kenworth ever also. My sound meter was on the blink on this particular day, but I’ll take a hunch around the low 70s in terms of decibels. [This was confirmed by editor Gavin Myers a week later – good guess, eh?]

Like so many I was shocked to hear the vista windows had gone from the roof and the name Aerodyne consigned to history – you’ll get 100 lines ‘I must not…’ if you blurt it out. This was traumatising, grieving stuff! Yet hand on heart – and it takes a lot to say this – four hours in the 220 and I’m converted. The increased room immediately above the driver and passenger is hugely evident, as is the ambient natural coolness in the cab. Even though improved insulation was one of the 100 changes in the K220, the heat and cold those windows allowed in and out is now evident, and as the ‘pro’ camp says, ‘most people had curtains over them they never touched anyway’. I can so understand now why someone punting one around Australia in the height of summer would be keen on consigning the ‘vistas’ to the Seagull Centre. Outside, it’s maybe a harder adjust seeing a windowless expanse, but like the K200 grille 13 years on, in six months it’ll be like your old gumboots.

Of course the cab does still have some quirks that date it; a little harder to adjust without a clean sheet of paper, namely legroom in the passenger footwell. The driver gets more room – even the pedal assembly has been moved forward a tad, but the conductor is still snug.

Full steam ahead Mr Sulu

The K220, its five-year mission is to go where no K model has gone before. Okay, it won’t be five, it’ll be a decade or more I guess … maybe, but you get the theme. This K model will experience a future no predecessor ever has.

By the time we’re in the northern King Country I’m behind the wheel. Driving the latest Guy Knowles truck with the owner sitting in the passenger seat is not great for the resting heart rate, but I was thrown the keys the next day as well, so I’ll take that all day long.

As I’ve said before, I grew up in an American truck enclave and I felt right at home in an instant, the hydraulic clutch was light as a feather and the Roadranger silky especially when you held up your end of the cog-swapping deal.

Its’ a lovely ‘Kenworth’ place to be. The steering was quite heavy, and it appears to be a ‘this truck’ thing and Guy was working through that with the Southpac crew. It wasn’t like moving anvils around the kitchen bench, just a bit heavier than you’d expect. The only thing that made me a bit sad was the elimination of the optional kick in the top section of the steering column. You have telescope and rake, but no kickback into full ‘lax-out’ mode.

As I say in the side bar, how they’ve made that dash so appealing so quickly bewilders me, but it is a thing of beauty in terms of looks and use. And the few gauges in the wrap – nice and not out of place at all, comfort food. And then the real practical advances for the guy or gal at the frontline – climate systems that work, big buttons, and a Smart Wheel that can now hold its head proud if you like Smart Wheels – thank you platform engineering and ‘snazzo’ looms. Oh, and you wouldn’t buy a K model without platform mirrors, full stop.

The biggest test of any new Kenworth, and it’s a burden of their own doing thankfully, is presenting us with something new without losing its soul. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will only get harder for them. The people who buy these things won’t be hoodwinked by marketing ‘piffle’. They buy them for one reason and one reason alone, and that’s the belief that you’ll pay a hefty sum, put it into arsey work in shithouse places, and after a decade you’ll still need to crack the window to shut the doors. Oh, and it will look cool also, not have its cab turned into something that resembles Elephant Man. And bear in mind, I’m talking about the Kenworth product here specifically. If they can’t maintain that, then I would say retire the Bug. There’s nothing worse than an old champion boxer flailing is arms about and looking a fool.

The great news is, in the K220, they’ve made some pretty bold changes. The roof, and dash, things that were key cultural components; and bugger me, they’ve pulled it off … again. It means they still get ‘it’. The what, for who, why, and where’s the limits we spoke of at the start. PACCAR understand this also, it would appear.

We have another K model that looks and feels like a K model if that’s your jam – and for many, it obviously still is. And this one really will take the K badge into a brave new world. As we said with 200, will this be the last incarnation of one of the great automotive legacies? Will the mood of the market finally shift? And like we’ve said a million times about a million things, only time will tell – but ain’t this just the place to sit back and watch it all happen!