TRUCK #100,000 AT STE. THERESE

August 3, 2011 Vol. 7, No. 16

First off, kudos to Kenworth for building the 100,000th medium-duty truck to come out of the PACCAR plant in Ste-Therese, Quebec, just outside Montreal. The facility was opened in 1999, an all new plant that has been kept very much up to date over the years. Chakib Toubal-Seghir is plant manager.

I last visited there a year or so ago and was impressed by the positive spirit of the place and a very buttoned-down approach to the truck-building job. Frankly, I’ve spent time in all but one of the company’s North American plants and a couple in Europe, and that description characterizes all of them.

The factory has earned the International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001:2004 certification for effective environmental management systems established to help build trucks in an environmentally sustainable manner. It also has IS0 9000 quality assurance certification and OHSAS 18001 health and safety certification as well.

It also assembles Peterbilt medium-duty trucks, of course.

Truck number 100,000 was a T370 tandem tractor going to Altec Industries, which makes aerial lifts, derricks, truck-mounted cranes, and specialty equipment for the construction, contractor, electric utility, telecommunications, and other such industries. This Altec T370 features a PX-8 engine rated at 300 hp with 1000 lb ft of torque, an Allison 3000RDS 5-speed automatic transmission, and Dana Spicer’s D1600 16,000-lb front axle and DSP41 40,000-lb tandem rear. Altec plans to equip the T370 chassis with an aerial lift bucket for sale to a tree-care company.