Daimler, Volvo Execs Praise Inaugural NACV Show
ATLANTA — North American executives from Daimler Trucks and Volvo Group offered an early post-event endorsement of the North American Commercial Vehicle Show just ended.
The show, scheduled to run here in odd-numbered years, was designed to hook up original equipment manufacturers and top fleet executives.
“The vision for NACV was to create a forward-looking show focused on technology for our industry and create an opportunity for our customers, dealers and partners to interact and learn about future products and industry trends. Based on the comments I heard from our customers we have accomplished this goal and have a solid foundation to build upon in years to come,” said Richard Howard, senior vice president of sales and marketing for DTNA.
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“Our measure of success of the show will be the quality of those most-important interactions and relationships with both our valued current and new customers,” Howard said.
Sept. 25-28 was the first-ever NACV Show, held at the Georgia World Congress Center. Show management said Oct. 2 that 6,000 attended NACV.
Magnus Koeck, vice president of marketing and brand management for Volvo Trucks North America, said the event “proved a good venue for connecting with many of our valued customers and showcasing our new VNL and VNR models for a broader audience for the first time.”
“It’s clear that fleets are eager to begin introducing our new trucks and integrated technologies to their operations to boost their fuel efficiency, driver productivity, safety and uptime,” Koeck said.
Howard said the event was a major production.
“We truly pulled out all the stops for NACV — and this was the first year ever we combined all brands to showcase products together with our Daimler family. With the combination of Freightliner, Western Star, Fuso, Thomas Built Bus, Detroit, Mercedes-Benz Vans, aftermarket, and our financial services organization, we created a showcase of our complete product line like we’ve never done before,” he said.
Howard by John Sommers II for TT
“Our goal was to ensure that visitors to NACV were not only connected with our products in the booth, but also we created an environment to connect with each other by offering the Connect Café where our guests could grab a coffee, snack, or lunch. Additionally, we hosted special ‘TEC Talk’ sessions for our customers to engage directly with senior engineering leadership from Freightliner and Detroit to experience our cutting-edge technology, efficiency and connectivity,” Howard said.
“Thanks to so many customers wanting to check out our new Mack Anthem model, the traffic and overall energy in our booth at NACV was outstanding,” said John Walsh, vice president of global marketing and brand management for Mack Trucks, also a part of Volvo Group.
