Pushing trucks to the absolute limit

What if your job was to push trucks to the absolute limit of their abilities? To wear them out during a specific amount of time, to discover and fix issues as they arise?

Patrik Holmlund works as a test driver at Scania. He’s either out on the road on a daily basis or putting the trucks to the test in other ways. But it’s a job he thought was unattainable when he was a little boy. During his childhood, growing up close to Södertälje, he’d see the trucks Scania was testing on the roads. That started a lifelong passion.

“I’d always hear about how great it was to be one of those drivers, but how it was close to impossible to get a job like that,” he says.

The desire to travel and experience new adventures grew stronger over the years, and Holmlund took both French and Spanish at school to prepare himself for a life on European roads. After ten years, he’d covered 16 countries as a driver employed by different haulage companies. He started to feel that he’d had enough. The tight margins and irregular working hours had lost their charm. It was time for Holmlund to fulfil his lifelong dream and join Scania.

“Since 2011, I’ve been one of the thousands of people making the greatest truck in the world happen. It’s amazing,” he says.

Holmlund’s journey at Scania started at the chassis assembly via Transportlaboratoriet, but since 2013 he has been working at R&D as a test driver. He says that without his experience of working as a driver for different haulage companies, he wouldn’t be able to perform at the level he does now at Scania. His driving background has often come in handy during demanding truck tests. There have been moments when he’s been out in a blizzard in the middle of the night, swearing to himself. But Holmlund also knows that this kind of experience is of outstanding value to Scania in its development of an even better product.

“I have struggled many times and can relate to the customer’s needs both from the driver’s and the owner’s perspective,” he says.

Patrik Holmlund appreciates being part of the team that is making what he thinks is the best truck in the world even better. But our test driver is not done dreaming just yet. He wants to do the same kind of job he does now, but in South America.

“Scania is a huge company, and I look forward to conquering the roads of Brazil sometime in the future. The job that they said was impossible to get: well, I have it! So I only see possibilities.”