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.
Just had a flashback to that Disney TV movie of the Nineties in which a group of high school kids are racing their solar-powered car across Australia…and they have a run-in with a local “road train”. It only seemed that the road train’s prime mover was one of these.
Damn that brought me back. I had to go look up the movie. It was Race the Sun (1996) and freaking Halle Berry and Jim Belushi were in it. Might have to watch that again
The cabs on the Gigant and the Goliath look as if they are normal European cab over truck cabs, plucked from a normal truck and bolted on. Very strange.
Somewhere I have some lovely glossy black and white professional advertising shots of enormous dumper trucks made by Aveling Bradford in the UK, because in the late 70s we lived next door to someone who lived there. They made the machinery look very glamorous.
Makes a lot of sense, really. A company that specializes in super heavy duty chassis welding and drivetrains could source complete cabins, modified to their spec, and keep to their their own competencies while avoiding all the crap that goes with designing, sourcing, manufacturing etc. of seats, steering wheels, glass, gaskets, mirrors, ten thousand other things.
I have a cousin who is the fleet manager of our hometown. So he is the dude who buys all the school buses, fire trucks, dump trucks, loaders, bulldozers, and all the other mechanized stuff that a town needs. His office is PLASTERED with fancy glossy brochures from all of the makers of this stuff. The guys who buy these love that sort of thing too, and it’s all marketing at the end of the day. Pretty pictures of all of the big-boy toys, with nice tables of specs and options. No different than buying a car. Of course, you can also get the REALLY technical brochures too – but it all starts with the pretty pictures.
Heck in my area of Enterprise IT, Dell, HP, Lenovo, make glossy brochures for *servers and disk arrays* with all sorts of artistic pictures of the things, and they spend real money on fancy front plates (ESPECIALLY nVidia) to make them look cool that serve no useful purpose other than branding – and probably somewhat inhibit cooling. If you want somebody to spend a few hundred grand on your crap, it actually does help if you make it *look* expensive. The engineers are rarely the guys signing the checks for this stuff after all.
On my only visit to DC years ago, i was amused that half the advertising posters on the subway platforms seemed to be advertising panasonic “rugged” laptops being used by in the field by people in full battle dress (is that correct terminology?). I had this image of logistics and acquisitions clerks staring bleary-eyed at these waiting for the morning train to the pentagon, before their rational minds were awake. Getting the seed planted before the caffeine kicks in. It would’ve been cooler if there had been alternating posters showing fighter-bombers or bedpans. Maybe one of the other lines had those. The other 99.999% of the metro riders could just count rats or pick their noses i guess.
Those incredibly niche billboard are one of my favorite parts of the metro/Union Station/National airport. You may have been kidding but ads for fighter jets, helicopters, etc are pretty common. And anytime there’s hot-button legislation on something, you see all these “hey this is just an ad for regular people that just happens to be related to stuff in Congress but its really not about that its just because we care” ads that only exist on DC transport. When internet privacy is being debated on the Hill, all of a sudden there’s lots of ads for “New Instagram Accounts for Kids under 7: Now with 75% fewer messages from adult strangers!” or “Google privacy settings!: Control what the AI tells people about your underwear status!”.
Now I want to see a picture of one of these parked on a pier at twilight with an attractive couple (man in blazer, woman in evening dress) standing casually nearby fishing off the end of the pier while their pet dog stands dutifully by.
Or maybe in a nice green field as a hang glider comes into land.
I have seen brochures for fire trucks with waaay too hot women in turnout gear riding on them. It’s *hilarious*.
They do it because it works. Don’t think for a second that the emotional appeal of slick marketing materials doesn’t work just as well for corporate and institutional buyers as it does for individual consumers. Except now it’s much more expensive than full-color brochures – it’s video with CGI, effects, narration-sometimes with a recognizable actor. Just look at what gets produced for the defense industry for proof.
Are those garbage truck tires solid rubber?
and if the red beast is built like a locomotive, does it have electric engines driving the wheels?
They are probably solid tires, yes. I have a ’22 Diamond T 2-1/2 ton truck that has solid tires, the cab on this looks to be early- to mid-20’s to me so probably the same. I think for heavy duty this was common of the era.
Nope, 18.9L Cummins diesel, Allison automatic with a 2-spd transfer case. Similar drivetrain to the big 8×8 truck cranes.
Writeup with some details: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/truck-stop-classic-1989-faun-hz50-goliath-8×8-diesel-locomotive/
I imagine these brochures exist because industrial trade shows exist.
Companies do these because their competitors do. Once the first company made one… it was game over. People purchasing these things are influenced by pretty pictures. Imagine this scenario… (cut to scene of bureaucrat sitting in a cubicle who doesn’t know a thing about trucks… but has to buy one):
One vendor has a pretty brochure. The other choice has a crappy spec sheet. Bureaucrat invariably thinks (correctly or not)… “Pretty brochure company must have their shit more together than company who only has a crappy cut sheet. They must have the better product.”
The smart ones only have them as pdfs, though.
Not in the ’80s they didn’t.
Granted. I meant “these days.”
If any of you are into this, you need to buy Snowrunner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1_ty7esAnI
Great game! It’s the reason I’m constantly searching Marketplace for an old International Loadstar 1700 that I have zero uses or space for.
I just inherited a white/freightliner COE. I have no idea what to do with it but I want to put knobby tires on it and haul heavy things so bad
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Also, for executives like Trump who won’t read?
Can we not devolve into this? I come here for cars.
Really? It’s a very, very, tame joke about a well known fact. I come here for brilliant writing and wit about cars. If you want nothing but the facts, may I suggest CarFax? I also suggest not reading anything I write lest it damage your psyche. I sure hope you never write anything that isn’t 100% car related or I will call you on it every time.
Finally, are you a member? If not, you should become one or upgrade today. Seriously. If this site gets 100 new or upgraded members in January, I will spend a month sleeping in a child’s bunk bed with worn out children’s mattress that causes me back pain every single morning. I will suffer for your enjoyment.
Damn dude, I’m just tired of seeing TRUMPTRUMPTRUMPBIDENBIDENBIDEN every 5 seconds on every single website I visit. It’s why I stopped reading Jalopnik years ago. This place is like an oasis from the non stop political commentary we all get blasted with constantly, I just don’t want it to suffer the same fate as so many other places on the internet.
Okay, I concede, relent, and sincerely apologize. My joke was honestly meant in a totally low temp way. Furthermore, I was just promising to DT two days ago to not get political quite as much.
However, I am deadly serious about the bunk bed thing. I can even hang a blanket so it kinda looks like a tent. I will suffer such for the good of the site. Become a member today!
I have a weird attraction to dual steering trucks (two front axles)
I do worry about the front end alignment however. It’s hard enough to get a single steering front end aligned properly, I have no idea how they do it with dual steer.
The tires are probably so tough it’s in “fuck it, just get it close” territory.
There is more play in the steering system (wheel, column, rack, joints) than any alignment would compensate
You can ‘sorta’ drive a Faun Goliath in the game SnowRunner:
Snowrunner ganggggg whatup. Still in Michigan, last 2 contracts for logging.
Used it to haul some slate blocks out of the quarry just the other morning
My old man spent many years in general aviation sales/service, then later in large business jets ($45-$60 million) before retiring. Yep, they still did glossy brochures at tremendous expense, even though most people would say “Derp just look it up on teh intarwebs!”
When the pics and the stats are all sitting right there on your office table in easy-to-reference hard copy, it’s like nonstop advertising. And if it’s not the execs, it’s the head of the flight departments who usually hold a lot of sway. I imagine it’s much the same with heavy equipment in general. Humans are pretty basic creatures, even when millions of shareholder money is at stake.
Senior executives are more likely to blow hundreds of thousands of company money on something because of a shiny brochure than they will based on the carefully considered selection process performed by underlings.
I once had to translate a decades worth of CAD data to a new format (which rendered all the data uneditable) because the design manager “felt it was time for a change”. I got a year of overtime out of it, and a week away doing a training course, so I kept my mouth shut, but it was deeply stupid.
I worked for a company that depended heavily on digitizing unwieldy financial statements in oversized booklet form from thousands of companies (before electronic filing became the default). In the early ’90s, one exec decided it would be great to bring in this newfangled scanning technology, cut apart all of the paper statements and scan them so the analysts could pull the scanned pages up on their desktops, easy as pie. Except that the memory and computing power to make all of this work at a usable speed didn’t exist–at least not within this company’s budget. But it provided several months’ employment to the temp operating the scanner.
All it needs is a mustache, some really short shorts, and to be yelling at me for not being able to catch a ball.
I’m one of the people brochures like this would be meant for – my job revolves around writing technical specifications for cars and specialized trucks, and getting things built and delivered for our customers – and I like to look at pretty pictures, too!
I want to talk about trucks that are so big that the only sensible place to put the headlights is in the bumper.
Seriously.
I also want to talk about a group of enthusiasts dedicated to such things, that they would lovingly restore one (imagine that job!) and bring it to a car show.
My late uncle was a member of the Antique Truck Historical Society. He took me to a meeting once. They were fascinating guys.
I think that’s the default location for any Euro truck. It’s been a while since I have been on that side of the pond
OK, why does every few Autopian articles have a zero replacing an O? (In this case: “full-c0lor”) This is making feel like I’m losing my mind just a little bit every time I see it.
And are you sure the car is a Fiat and not a Lada?
A “faun” is a mythical figure (the word also exists in German), a demigod that is half human, half goat. The young deer is a “fawn”. FAUN however is an abbreviation for “Fahrzeugfabriken Ansbach und Nürnberg” (no doubt inspired my the mythical figure), which means “Ansbach and Nuremburg Vehicle Works” (Ansbach and Nürnberg/Nuremberg are of course cities).
I think the brochure is about the trade shows. Good catch on the freezing Fiat, I wonder if it started right up for the shoot that day.
Agree. This is trade show fodder. I briefly worked in acquisitions for the Air Force and you wouldn’t believe the money spent on slick presentation materials on everything from aircraft to tools and parts. Plus, great souvenirs (bribes). I imagine civilian commercial markets are much the same.
““The Energy Pact: Giant… It’s Power Is It’s Performance” or something close to that, as I had my phone do the translating.”
Dang, your phone does the grocer’s apostrophe?!? Might be time for either a hard reset or a new phone.
This tickles me in such a way. I’ve never heard it called the grocer’s apostrophe. Dave Barry has a bit about it in one of his early books. I think it’s a generational thing, my Dad is 85 and does it still to this day sometimes.
Generational? I feel like I see it more and more as the years go by.
Speaking as someone in the heavy construction industry, I can tell you that these kind of brochures are generally for the public purchase side of things. The department that wants to purchase said piece of equipment give this brochure to the appointed/elected town/city/state/agency officials that control the purse strings this during a budget presentation to show them how cool it would be to own one with the town/city/state/agency logo on the door.
A private purchase, ie, a heavy construction, hauling, rigging company likely already knows what they want.
Also trade shows.
Government employee here. Can confirm. Employees spec out what they need, provide documentation to agency officials. Then it is put in a budget for an upcoming year and might get something close. The folks that actually purchase are not involved in the use, maintenance, or hooning of the equipment.
However, it is funny to see calendars/brochures of shiny equipment “in the field” without any scratches, faded paint, or debris stuck somewhere.
Is anyone else picturing Leslie Knope?
is anyone not?
If I had ridiculous money, I would have all the usual sporty cars and luxury vehicles, but I like to think I’d buy something like this as well. Just to occasionally putter around in. Maybe go to the grocery store a time or two. Pick up the kids at school. Y’know, that sort of thing.
Maybe it’s good I’m not fabulously wealthy. My car collection would be VERY weird.
There’s a guy in town that runs errands with an early 60s Ford F-700 pumper/fire truck. It’s not huge like this thing, but I want to be that guy.
When I was younger I remember thinking that if I ever won the Powerball I would buy a big bit of property and then a Cat 797 dump truck to drive around the yard, just for kicks. Still cheaper than an McLaren F1 and your buddy at the club doesn’t have a 797, I’d guess.
The few times I drove a skid steer front and loader, I thought to myself this is really fun. Could I charge money and let people drive this thing around. If I had Powerball money, I might start a theme park for people pay to drive heavy equipment.
a theme park with equipment does exist (in Vegas, where else?) https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g45963-d2169633-Reviews-Dig_This-Las_Vegas_Nevada.html
or for the kids: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g46910-d6759517-Reviews-Diggerland-West_Berlin_New_Jersey.html
I never knew there was a West Berlin in New Jersey. I guess East Berlin, New Jersey is just too dystopian to imagine.