Anyone Can Drive Volvo’s New VNL Semi Truck, But That Won’t Make You A Trucker

“If you want to do the bank, we can,” my Volvo instructor Eric let me know after I jokingly pitched the idea to him. I was in the driver’s seat of a new Volvo VNL heavy duty truck, going 40 miles per hour on my second loop of a three-mile track. Despite having never driven a semi truck before, I was feeling cocky. Instead of a fighter jet’s worth of dials and switches and a three-foot shifter, I encountered a driving experience familiar to anyone who has been in a passenger car lately: parking brake, gas pedal and an automatic transmission.

Hauling a load of 70,000 pounds of gravel in a full-sized trailer didn’t really change the equation for him either; I wanted to hit that bank at speed, and my instructor was all smiles and thumbs up. Suddenly, Mr. “drive at the speed you feel safest” turned into Mr. “put up, or shut up.”

I never thought I would be driving a semi truck, let alone getting a heavy duty truck slightly sideways on a 45-degree banked turn at the Michelin Laurens Proving Grounds near Greenville South Carolina. Driving the truck was as straightforward as its cockpit. The intimidating became friendly in less than three miles behind the wheel. As complex as a big rig can seem, Volvo has made one that is downright approachable, and even extremely comfortable. But make no mistake, all the special mattresses and finely tuned suspensions in the world won’t make heavy duty truck driving easy, and the only gig tougher than driving these trucks might be selling these made-in-the-USA trucks in Trump’s America.

Full disclosure: Volvo Trucks invited me out to South Carolina to experience its new semi truck, paying for my flights and putting me up in a hotel.

It’s been 25 years since Volvo came out with a truck that’s practically brand new from the tires up, and the average age of the trucks out there on the road (about 8 to 9 years, according to Volvo) means it is long since past time for trucking companies and independent operators to put new rigs on the road.

But even Volvo Trucks admits this is a tough time to release a brand new truck, one of which can cost up to $200,000 depending on the specs. Truck buying is in an extended downturn, the worst Volvo Trucks Marketing Vice President Magnus Koeck has ever seen in his 36 years in the trucking industry.

“We’re in a down market and have been in a down market for probably one of the longest times. Sales were booming immediately after COVID. Pent up demand skyrocketed and suppliers couldn’t keep up with the demands of the market,” Koeck told me. But tariffs are making everything uncertain and, for a business like Volvo, extremely costly.

Trucks and truck makers are taking a double whammy from tariffs; the cost of raw materials to build the trucks has shot up, and the tariffs are having a stifling effect on shopping and shipping. For Volvo, building in the U.S. has actually been a hindering factor in terms of cost. It is paying tariffs on raw materials and components that would not hit the company if they were assembling the trucks in Mexico.

“All trucks built in the U.S. in Dublin. The engine production in Hagerstown. components are built in Canada and Mexico. You buy and build them all. They pay the tariff on every component eligible for a tariff, we pay the tariff,” President of Volvo Trucks Peter Voorhoeve told us. “If you had a factory in Mexico, the steel and engine components- you don’t pay tariffs. You can build that whole truck in Mexico and roll it across the border as a USMCA compliant product – you don’t pay tariffs on that truck. They have a competitive disadvantage.”

Still, the company is devoting to building trucks for America in America. Volvo invested $400 million to retool its plant in Dublin, Virginia. But the tariffs have a second effect: a shaky economy leading to less freight, and less need for long-haul sleeper trucks like the VNL. Koeck told us that the company closely monitors freight coming into port, and the rates are just not good.

“Freight costs are going up because there isn’t enough freight. Smaller owner/operators have gone out of business. Lots got into the business after COVID and now we are in a low position. Companies are not hiring. Consumers are not spending enough because we are uncertain,” Koeck said.

Koeck has been telling truck owners that right now, new trucks are the cheapest they’re going to be. Not only is inflation and uncertainty making trucks more expensive, truckers also have to deal with skyrocketing insurance costs and potential problems due to emissions regulations. Voorhoeve said EPA 2027 could still cause problems for truckers, though I personally don’t put as much stock into the rule of law in the U.S. as he does. Volvo Trucks even told journalists it expects the sales downturn to continue for some time.

So why burn $2 billion in redesigning a heavy duty truck, plus another $400 million in retooling a factory? Because it’s time, and everyone knows it. Like passenger cars, heavy truck fleets are getting older and older on average. Unlike passenger cars, however, the costs of keeping older trucks on the road can quickly become astronomical and every little bit of saving counts when you’re living on the cutting edge of profit margins. The new VNL promises to tackle the three main costs for truckers and fleet managers: fuel efficiency and maintenance, safety, and driver turnover.

These heavy duty trucks aren’t just a ride or a tool for a job; it’s a home away from home as well as a workplace in an industry where turnover is astronomical and retraining can hit up to $10,000 per driver. In short, Volvo’s new VNL trucks might be pricey, but it pays to invest in a luxury vehicle with all the amenities. The first focus of the VNL is the cost of gas and repairs, which are a hard, measurable savings.

The new truck is designed with a low-slung wedge shape in order to cut through windy air like butter. The design not only gives the driver an expansive greenhouse — you literally can’t see the hood when you’re behind the wheel — but also cuts fuel costs on average about 10% for an annual fuel savings of about $5,500 a year. That may not seem like much to us civilians, but that can translate to serious cash if you’re running, say, 20 or 200 trucks in a fleet. The savings is greater the older your fleet is. Koeck estimated that fuel efficiency in big rigs has gone up at least 18% in the last ten years. Plus, a newer truck doesn’t require a lot of expensive maintenance.

The VNLs I drove had a 445-horsepower engine, but with anywhere between 1750-1950 pound-feet of torque depending on the spec. There’s a lot of pull in these giant diesel machines, and it takes a long time to break them in — about 65,000 miles. At around 1.2 million miles a truck will start to have frame and body issues that become unsustainable to maintain. America’s post-COVID fleet is flirting with this cut-off point.

Thanks to the sleeker, aerodynamic design and plenty of sheeting and sealed body panels, everything about this truck is designed to make fuel go farther. During our over-the-road portion of the ride with Volvo Trucks’ marketing team at the wheel (they all have CDLs and took us on a little trip from South Carolina to North Carolina on public roads) we only scored an industry standard 7 or 8 miles to the gallon. But they were just showing us what it’s like on the open road. Real drivers with real money on the line have found lots of ways to squeeze every dollar from their new trucks. Joel Morrow, owner and operator of Alpha Drivers Testing & Consulting, was on hand to explain how his drivers use the new Volvo trucks to assist in his company’s laser focus on efficiency, and it’s not just the new aerodynamic shape of the truck that keeps the dino juice working longer.

“I can anticipate the lay of the land. It can see the grade better than I can, especially at night. It’ll be doing things at night where I can’t really see grade and I can’t prepare the trucks for what is going on and it knows exactly what to do,” Morrow said about the VNLs. “It knows when it needs to climb a hill or slowly come down. It knows the weight you’re hauling, when to shift the transmission it will know if i’m facing a steep grade with 80,000 it will proactively downshift. Or if I have 10,000 pounds I’m going to keep it in the same gear and kick it up three quarters of the way up to coast over the top.”

Just like in a passenger car, drivers can choose between Performance mode or they can choose Economy Plus. In this mode the truck uses satellite mapping of major roadways to calculate how to use its own momentum to save on fuel while going down hills in order to have enough oomph to go up the next hill. Downhill cruise control will work to keep the truck at a reasonable speed. Using all these tools, spec’ing the trucks for optimum fuel economy and keeping speeds between 58 and 62 mph, means Morrow’s drivers can squeeze 12 to 13 mpg out of his VNLs.

Getting behind the wheel of a VNL is just like driving the VNL; it looks tough at first, but Volvo’s made it so easy you wonder why you were worried in the first place. Hop up three steps integrated into the body of the truck and you’re there. The seat is on hydraulics to keep the driver’s experience smooth, even when the road gets rough. Volvo designed the cockpit to be ergonomically comfortable for 90th percentile of heights and weights, and everything is adjustable to get the drive into their perfect spot.

Volvo had me climb in the driver’s seat again after I took the new $200,000 truck along a bank, so I guess I did alright. This time, it was to experience its stop-and-go cruise control, meant to keep the driver from getting too fatigued in city driving. To demonstrate this system while I was driving the VNL on the track, they had a marketing manager cut me off in a tiny Volvo XC90 and then slam on the brakes right in front of the truck. The truck came to a slow, smooth stop thanks to the cruise control from a crisp 25 miles per hour, but I can’t say the same for my heart. It was just a little taste of what a truck driver faces every day, and man, I definitely could not do this dangerous dance of weight and speed for 9 hours a day.

Driving a truck is exhausting. You’re in control of a giant gingerly making its way among seemingly suicidal dwarves that zip in front of your massive feet. It takes constant vigilance to keep the road from becoming a highway of slaughter. And then there’s the loneliness, the isolation, and the physical stress of driving. It’s little wonder that 80% of new drivers quit. And quitting costs trucking companies a lot of money — it can take some $10,000 to train a new recruit. Keeping drivers on their payrolls is a huge draw for trucking companies and you do that by making the job less miserable.

The stop-and-go cruise control is just one small portion of the driving safety systems that not only protect you and I on the road, but take a mental load off the driver. Unlike advanced driver-assistance systems in cars, modern trucks keep drivers in the center of the action. You won’t find a digital head-up display or hands-free driving mode here, but things like automated emergency braking, road sign recognition, lane-keeping assist and lane-departure warning, and camera-radar detection for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles all make a significant difference. Drivers can spend more time paying attention to the cars flowing around them, cutting down on accidents and stress. Morrow told us this is the first truck in his 36 years and 5 million miles of experience that feels like it could “out-drive” him, meaning make his driving experience noticeably better and safer. Driving is a stressful job, so anything that lightens that load could go a long way to retaining drivers.

Other engineering dynamics makes the actual work of driving a truck a more enjoyable experience. Vehicle Dynamic Steering, for instance, adds an extra electric motor around the hydraulic steering shaft. “So what,” I hear you say, we’ve all got power steering. But this system goes a step further, receiving input from sensors 2,000 times per second about what the wheels of the truck are doing in relation to the driver’s steering wheel input, as well as speed and other data points. If there is, say, wind pushing your truck from the left or the right, the system sees the wheels changing as opposed to the steering input of the driver and will automatically correct this shift. Potholes, sudden objects in the road, and even natural drift — VDS will steer things back into place. Volvo even designed a new form of GRAS suspension in order to be softer on back-and-forth motion of stop-and-go driving on driver’s necks.

The final stop on this triple threat of a truck is the comfort it provides drivers physically both behind the wheel and in the sleep compartment. A ton of thought has gone into how the driver lives in their rig as well as drives it.

Older trucks have what is called a parking cooler jammed on to the back of the sleep compartment. It makes sense; put the cooler in the place that needs to be cooled. But drivers end up with what is basically an AC unit on steroids screaming through thin sheet metal all night. Not ideal for sleeping conditions. Volvo integrated the parking cooler into the drivetrain rather than sticking in on the back of the sleeper compartment, leading to less noise and vibrations in the sleeping cabin for the driver. When the integrated cooler’s 8 hours of charge runs out and the truck needs to kick back on to charge them, the process causes less disruption than a traditional unit.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend the night in the cabin, but my fellow journalists who did mentioned that, while they did wake up when the truck kicked back on to charge the cooler’s battery, they quickly fell back asleep, as if the rumble of the truck had its own kind of soothing magic rather than a grating interruption.

From the very nice 74-inch wide mattress, made of the same high quality memory foam Volvo makes its cushy seats from, a safety suite of available cameras and external screens allows the driver to always know what is going on around their rig both on the road and in the parking lot. Even with the windows at the head and foot of the bed covered they can still see what is happening around their rig. Comfort and peace of mind all rolled into one.

As for living in the truck, there are so many cubbys and netted spots to put all your stuff into that the VNL puts VanLifers to shame. The trucks we tested came with a mini fridge and microwave. Not huge appliances, to be sure, but enough room for a few cups of noodles at least. Full sized 24-volt outlets and USB ports litter the walls of the sleeper, giving drivers plenty of places to plug in and unwind after a long day.

An overhead storage area can be used as a bunk as well and is rated to hold over 200 pounds. That’s a lot of stuff if you don’t have a driving buddy. There’s plenty of storage space under the bunk as well. At 5-foot-7, I felt like I had a cathedral’s worth of head room and space to move around.

Not only is the driver comfortable, they are safer as well. If they wake up bleary eyed and ready for coffee and forget to park the truck properly, it will do it for you. The VNL will put on the parking brake if it senses the door opening, hopefully leading to an end of dangerous rollaways that endanger the lives of drivers. Volvo is the only trucking company making its cabs entirely from high-strength steel, and the only company offering side curtain airbags standard on its trucks.

Look you, dear reader, probably are not in the market for a semi truck. I mean, if you are, the Volvo VNLs are definitely worth a look, but as a driver sharing the road with these behemoths, and an American living in unprecedented times, this is a fascinating world. It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get stuff from ports to your home, and while the VNL might make it look easy, the job is probably one of the hardest behind a steering wheel. Looking out for driver safety and comfort while also building more efficient trucks may be a winning marketing strategy, but they are also simply good things to do. Also, stop cutting off semi trucks, you turds.