Deals on Wheels #464

The most
woeful
truck ever to
grace our shores
The Ford Cargo arrived
from England in the
early 1980s.
Photo courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons
answers would be: “What are the worst
trucks you’ve come across?”
Vastly easier. Indeed, they can even be
split into respective weight divisions –
light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty,
with a few ‘honourable mentions’ thrown
in. In fact, there’s even an outright winner.
The worst truck by far, hands-down, is an
absolute shocker, but we’ll get to that.
Not-so heavy hitter
Starting at the big end, there’s just one standout
winner. Leyland Marathon!
Back in the late ’70s when Leyland
believed it still had a future in Australian
road transport, the Marathon was brought
here as a benign attempt to rekindle the
dying Pommie powerhouse’s past glories.
As something of a young buck with the
once esteemed Truck & Bus Transportation
magazine, I often rode shotgun with
our regular test driver back then, Don
McGlinchie. Over a number of years I would
come to learn so much from this man about
the finesse and pride of driving a big truck
well, but when it came to the single-drive
Marathon test truck there was nothing but
derision on both sides of the cab.
So poor was the ride, so weak was the
performance, so awful was the whole
package that we gave Leyland the benefit
of the doubt and held our report for a few
weeks until a 6x4 version was provided
to tow the same trailer over the same test
route. Surely, we thought, it couldn’t be as
bad as the first truck.
Well, it was a whisker better, but not
enough to depose Marathon from the
memory bank as the worst heavy-duty
unit ever tested. Even so, our report went
relatively easy on the truck but it made no
difference because most of the nails had
already been driven into Leyland’s coffin
anyway.
However, in the lighter end of the heavyduty
class, there’s a six-wheeler rigid worthy
of a few lines, not so much because it was a
dud of any great note but because its reason
for being was so way out-of-step with the
standards of its creator – Kenworth!
The truck was the K300 and it remains a
riddle to this day why Kenworth Australia
in 1995 chose to introduce an anachronistic
model with a Brazilian-built Volkswagen
cab to tackle local delivery work.
A truly dud choice that achieved the
absolute minimum of success it so richly
deserved.
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