Club of Four
truck cab
The Club of Four was an alliance of four European truck manufacturers: Saviem, Volvo, DAF, and Magirus-Deutz.
Officially called the Société Européenne de Travaux et de Développement (ETD), the team was based in Paris. Founded to develop a shared range of light trucks, its main success was a shared cab design. Cabs can be one of the most expensive parts of a truck to design and build; the alliance allowed one cab design to be shared among four different truck manufacturers, allowing economies of scale. In 1978, Saviem was merged with Berliet to create Renault Véhicules Industriels (RVI), but the new company continued as a member of the Club. Magirus became later part of Iveco.
The cab was used on a wide range of different trucks. It was even used on Mack trucks in the USA. It remained in production for almost a quarter of a century. Although initially intended for medium trucks it was also used on light trucks, even the 6-tonne Magirus-Deutz 90M6FK.
Development
The creation of a completely new cab design was tasked to Renault Centre de Style to submit proposals.The cabin not only had to be modern in design, but also had to be able to be tilted. Initially there was also the idea of building the models of the four participating brands in one factory, but this was abandoned at an early stage.
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This entry incorporates text from “Club of Four” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.