I’m Always Sort Of Surprised These Exist. Not The Truck: Cold Start

The world is a beautiful and chaotic place crammed full of stuff, all manner of stuff, stuff grown organically and crafted by the work of human, perhaps sometimes robotic, hands. Glossy, full-color car brochures are, of course, part of this glorious set of stuff, as are things like massive trucks designed to haul heavy things. For whatever reason, my mind has trouble processing that those two things have an overlap, but they most certainly do.

I’m always sort of surprised that glossy, color brochures for things like this colossal Faun Gigant haulage truck exist. I mean, I get that Faun wants to sell their trucks, and organizations need to buy them, but things like these are bought by big companies and municipal townships or cities or whatever. I would have thought the information about them would be some kind of spec sheets with a few black-and-white halftoned photos and pages of specs. Maybe a few line drawing diagrams, too.

But that’s not the case! We have things like this:

Fancy, illustrated glossy brochures, with slogans – this one days “The Energy Pact: Giant… It’s Power Is Its Performance” or something close to that, as I had my phone do the translating.

I always wonder who these were for. A brochure like this is usually seen for private cars, and they tend to be very, you know, personal, showing the car in evocative scenes and suggesting a lifestyle that one could enjoy should they have the good sense to buy, say, a Thunderbird or something.

But these? Something like the Faun Gigant would not be bought by a private person! There would be meetings and finance people would be involved and it’d be a line item on some budget and would probably come to a vote. So would this brochure be passed around and mooned over by a bunch of people in suits?

Is there a whole committee of purchasing people crowded around this, looking at that picture and thinking, oooh, that could be us! Maybe!

I do like that picture because it reveals it must have been sort of cold when it was taken because that Fiat 124 there is wearing a grille blind to reduce airflow!

It just strikes me as odd, this whole brochure. Is this how purchasing managers found out about what was available? From a rack of brochures somewhere? Were these distributed to the local town purchasing manager hangouts and bars, called something like the Green Ledger?

I’m sort of baffled. But, it’s a thing, and it very much exists. Like the truck itself, which is an absolute beast. This brochure is from 1988, and here’s a video of a similar 1989 machine, which, it seems, only three were made:

Look at these octo-wheeled monsters! They look like they could pull the blue off the sky if they needed to. These were originally called the HZ-series, and had a surprising variety of diesel engine types available: four-strokes from Mercedes-Benz, and Cummins, an air-cooled diesel from Deutz, and a two-stroke one from Detroit Diesel!

These were road locomotives, really. The Faun name seems comically dainty, sounding like a baby deer, when applied to one of these.

The company was started as an iron foundry in 1845, and grew to specialize in garbage trucks, basically. Like this one that looks like a giant coach’s whistle stuck on a truck:

I don’t think we ever really had these in America. We had our own massive haulage trucks, and I bet they had their own glossy brochures, too, for purchasing managers of counties to collect and drool over.