If someone asked you to draw a long-distance semi-truck, what would it look like? That depends where you are in the world. If you’re based in Europe or Asia you’d likely draw a truck cab with a flat front, whereas those of you from North America would draw something that looked like a dog’s head with wheels, and probably minus the ears.
But the flat-fronted “cabover” (cab over engine) style of truck was also once hugely popular in the U.S., so what happened? There are pluses and minuses to both cabovers and long-nose “conventional” trucks, but the reason Europe and America once favored the same flat-front cabs and have since taken different roads is largely down to legislation, specifically laws concerning overall vehicle length.
Trucks in Europe must conform to rules governing the maximum overall length of the combined truck and trailer unit, and for much of the 20th century the U.S. also had similar laws. But following a rule change in the late 1970s the maximum length stipulation for American trucks only concerned the length of the trailer, not the entire vehicle, and truck manufacturers and trucking companies began to switch to the bigger long-nosed cabs.
Cabovers have certain advantages over conventional trucks, including better visibility and improved maneuverability, which is another reason why they work well in Europe where the roads are narrower. But that’s not so much a problem in America, where the switch to long-nose cabs allowed drivers to have more sleeping space in the cab, and a lower overall cab height, making them easier to climb into.
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Moving the engine out in front of the cab and stretching the cab wheelbase also meant the drivers were subject to less noise and vibration in the long-nose trucks, and because they didn’t have to tilt the entire cab up to access the engine, they didn’t have to spend 30 minutes tidying all those copies of magazines away to stop them flying around the cabin before performing any maintenance. And lastly, there’s the safety aspect. Trucks in Europe are limited to just 56 mph (90 km/h), but American trucks can go much faster, and we wouldn’t be that keen on having a crash in a semi doing 80 mph (130 km/h) with nothing but a windshield ahead of us.