The Volvo B7R that I was traveling in from Chandigarh to Delhi stalled very close to Delhi after a 300 minutes nonstop run. The driver started fiddling with the dash and out of curiosity I looked at the dash to see what he was doing and man was I surprised… I had a fair idea of the Volvo B7R dash as in my earlier travels, I used to check the speedo to see how fast these buses go (and trust me, these mean machines have a nice top speed)
This one had a lot more controls crammed into the Dash with a neat LCD screen in the center. A red triangle with “Stop” was flashing continuously and the LCD screen indicated “____ belt wear predicted”. And as predicted, when the driver opened the engine boot, one of the belt’s had slipped.
I believe the new buses have an integrated Engine management system (EMS2) which take data from several sensors on the engine with scope for diagnosis and fault tracing which was what I saw. Now, if only the semi literate Indian drivers knew how to read the these dash messages!
I also started noticing new multi-axle Volvos on the Mumbai roads…
…and road travel has just got a little better.
