fingermissing:
Don’t know why people are worried the 7.5 ton market is dead.
Except it isn’t, and barring a change in the law regarding weight limits, it won’t be for many years. Local authorities still use thousands of them for a start.
The elephant in the room is electric trucks. For an electric van to carry the same payload as a diesel powered one, it needs to be correspondingly heavier. If the limit stays at 3.5 tonnes, that effectively means that a long wheelbase Sprinter will be going out with about half a tonne of payload, no better than a small postman’s van does now. So to take up the shortfall, you’d need twice as many vans and twice as many drivers; but there’s only the same amount of revenue plus the vans themselves are much more expensive, so that means recruitment issues or higher delivery prices.
Now, given that many modern 7.5 tonne trucks are not much bigger than a LWB Sprinter van anyway, and have a trend towards being more of a bigger Iveco Daily and less of a scaled-down “real” lorry it’s even less of a step than it perhaps was in 1997.