My love for promotional sales videos is well known here. They provide a cool look inside different companies and products from the past and to me, they are fun to watch. None of them has been as fun to watch as this high budget, highly produced look at the Caterpillar 785 off-highway haul truck which was new at the time of this video’s creation.
This truck had a 150-ton capacity, a 51.8L V-12 engine, 1,380hp, and a six speed automatic transmission to get the power to the axles. Designed to be worked 24 hours a day for as long as a mine needed it to be working between service intervals the machines are as rugged as they are huge.
Being that this is a Caterpillar video and it was pitching trucks that cost millions of dollars (we’re assuming) to buy, no expense is spared here. The production value is higher than most 1980s television shows…by a lot. The music, the narration, how it was actually shot. All of it is feature film worthy.
The talk about how the trucks are developed and tested is interesting, especially in today’s world of simulations and modeling. The ability to do that stuff was limited by the horsepower of the available computing technology in the 80s, even for Caterpillar. Lots of physical testing and validation was doe along with some older school computational methods as well.
If you love big trucks, this is the jam!
