Big Boys Toys – Volvo Days 2026

Managing Editor Richard Edwards is more used to small EVs than big trucks. So naturally we sent him to Sweden to drive the biggest machinery Volvo makes.

We test cars for a living, with the odd ute or van thrown in when something with a tray comes along. What we do not usually test is a rigid hauler that weighs as much as a small apartment block, or an electric loader that can pick up four tonnes of rock without breaking a sweat.

But when TDX, the New Zealand distributor of Volvo Construction Equipment, invited us to Eskilstuna in Sweden for Volvo Days, the answer was always going to be yes. Who turns down the keys to a 100-tonne rock truck?

The Glastonbury of diggers

Volvo Days is not a trade show in a convention centre with bad coffee and lanyards. It is held every two years at Volvo CE’s customer centre in Eskilstuna, about 90 minutes west of Stockholm. This year’s event ran over four weeks in June and pulled in more than 4000 customers, dealers and media, the biggest turnout since the first Volvo Days back in 1971. Eskilstuna is the spiritual home of the brand, and Volvo CE is now spending SEK702 million (around NZ$115 million) on a new excavator plant here, its first in Sweden, due to start production in 2028.

The machines cover everything from compact excavators you could park in a suburban garage through to haulers carrying more than 60 tonnes in a single load. These are the machines that build New Zealand’s roads, subdivisions and quarries, and Volvo is one of the biggest names in the game. TDX handles the brand here, running 18 branches nationwide from its Christchurch headquarters.

Before anyone drives anything, Volvo puts on its famous machine show, a choreographed routine of excavators, loaders and haulers operated by people who have spent careers making 50-tonne machines dance. It is a useful humbling exercise before you have a go yourself, because it shows what these things can do in the right hands.

The electric loader New Zealand loves

Our first drive has an unexpected Kiwi connection. The L120 Electric is an all-electric wheel loader built at Volvo’s factory near Shanghai, and New Zealand has one of the highest penetration rates for the model anywhere in the world. Not that the bar is high in absolute numbers, there are only four or five in the country, but more are on the way, and for a market our size that is a big deal.

The spec sheet reads more like an EV road test than a piece of earthmoving kit. Under the back sits a 282kWh LFP battery pack. Peak charging runs to about 165kW, so a 10 to 90 per cent top-up takes around an hour and a half, and the L120 will run for between five and nine hours depending on how hard it is working. Plug it in over the lunch break and most operations will get through a full shift.

The naming convention is a quirk worth knowing. Take the zero off L120 and you get 12, the tipping load in tonnes with the frame fully articulated. Its working payload is six tonnes. Being electric, it has found jobs a diesel loader never could. It is already working in logging and aggregates here, and there is interest in using it to scoop bulk food, something you would never do behind a machine belching diesel fumes over the product.

Then it was our turn. Driving a loader means juggling three things at once, drive, boom and bucket, and doing it smoothly is the difference between an operator and a tourist. We scooped up four tonnes of stones, swung around and dumped them on the pile. The silence is the strangest part. All that mass moving and barely a sound beyond the crunch of tyres on gravel.

Learning to dig

Excavators were next, and we took the sensible route, starting on the little EC18, a compact machine of the sort you would hire for a driveway job, before working up to the big stuff.

The controls take some rewiring of the brain. Right hand runs the boom and bucket curl, left hand controls the arm, with sideways movement swinging the whole upper structure around. It is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, except the stomach weighs several tonnes and is full of dirt. Our instructor scored our first effort at 140, which she assured us was pretty good for a first-timer. We chose to believe her.

Then came the EC750E, a 75-tonne crawler excavator. The control layout is the same as the EC18, but nothing about sitting in it feels the same. The pedals and levers that move the tracks are strictly off limits for beginners, feet on the floor, hands only. Flip up the safety guard and the machine goes live.

The power is what stays with you. Drop the bucket into the pile, drag it back, and the machine barely registers the effort. We asked our instructor how much we had just lifted. About eight tonnes, came the answer, delivered with the tone of someone describing a light snack. It felt like we might be damaging the thing. We were assured it is built for considerably worse.

Point the nose, the tail will follow

The drive of the day, though, might have been the A35, one of Volvo’s new-generation articulated haulers. Our guide is Hayden Grant, product manager at CJD Equipment, Volvo’s Australian dealer, drafted in from Perth to help run the event. He turns out to be a Kiwi, raised on a deer farm near Tauranga before the machinery world took him across the Tasman. The A35 carries 34.5 tonnes, makes 336kW from its 13-litre six, and will run to 57km/h, though not on our watch.

Hayden talks us around the tech on his demonstration lap, and a lot of it will sound familiar to anyone who has bought a car lately. Automatic traction control that detects slip and locks in drive where it is needed. Hill descent and hill assist, just like a hatchback. Cruise control. A front-facing camera for cresting blind rises. It is six-wheel drive when it needs to be, but left to its own devices it drives as few axles as the conditions require.

The party trick of an articulated hauler is the way it bends in the middle. “See where we point the nose, the tail will follow,” says Hayden, and that is exactly how it works. If the front wheels fit through a gap, the rest of the truck will trail obediently through behind.

Then he hands it over. There is an iron sight moulded into the middle of the bonnet, and your entire job is to keep it in the centre of the track. Do that and the A35 does the rest. From the driver’s seat it does not feel wildly different from a small to medium truck, right up until you hit the undulations and remember there are 30-odd tonnes wiggling along behind you. The hydromechanical steering has proper weight and resistance to it, which you want, because if it were any lighter you would have no idea what the wheels were doing. The suspended seat soaks up the worst of the terrain, and this was the base machine, without the hydraulic suspension fitted to the bigger A40s, A45s, A50s and A60s.

We threaded it around rocks, over a ditch and back into the line-up behind an A50, and asked Hayden if we had the job. “Yeah man, you’re in,” he says. Whether that was on merit or Kiwi solidarity, he never quite confirmed.

We had hoped to also drive the A40 Electric, the battery-powered hauler that is newly in serial production alongside the A30 Electric. No luck. It was the talk of the show and booked solid all day. When a paddock full of jaded motoring media is queuing to drive the electric one, the direction of travel is fairly obvious.

The main event

One machine left, and it was the one we had been eyeing all day. The R100 is Volvo’s big rigid hauler, the classic quarry truck with the sloped nose and a tray you could hold a wedding in. Loaded, the whole combination heads towards 100 tonnes. Ours was carrying around 45 to 50 tonnes of rock, which apparently counts as travelling light.

You sit directly above a front tyre taller than most hatchbacks, and that turns out to be the secret, because you place the truck on the road by sighting down over that tyre. Once you trust it, threading the R100 along a forest haul road is far less terrifying than it has any right to be.

If we were scoring it like a car, the notes would read: performance a bit weak, six gears working hard against enormous mass, though the shifts smooth out once you keep the accelerator pinned. Top speed 50km/h, though it always feels faster than it is. Ride quality surprised us, better over a rough haul road with 50 tonnes aboard than some utes manage unladen. Steering and turning circle, excellent. Practicality, exceptional, if your weekly shop involves 95 tonnes of granite. Our instructor tells us previous guests have described it as driving a house. He is not wrong, but it is a surprisingly wieldy house, and it shrinks around you within minutes. We did a second lap purely because we could.

What we learned

These machines are easier to drive than you would expect. The first 80 per cent comes quickly. The last 20 per cent, the smoothness that separates a professional operator from a journalist on a jolly, would take years of practice.

The electric shift is not a science project either. The L120 is already earning its keep here, the A40 Electric was the busiest machine at the event, and Volvo CE says total cost of ownership on electric equipment can work out up to 30 per cent cheaper than diesel in the right application.

Between drives we also sat down with Hanna Ihnatovich, Volvo CE’s Head of Region International, and the message was that New Zealand carries weight inside the company well beyond its size. Through TDX, this country has become something of a proving ground, an early adopter where Volvo CE places new machines and services ahead of far bigger markets, and where the connected fleet rate is the highest of any Volvo CE dealer in the world. That handful of L120 Electrics did not end up here by accident.

Does any of this matter to you as an NZ Autocar reader? Maybe not directly. But it was a bit of fun, and something different, and we are trying to do more of that. And if the chance ever comes up to drive a 100-tonne rock truck, take it. You will manage better than you expect.