Mack Trucks In The 1960s & 1970s

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The Mack Super-Liner.

Mack Trucks’ early history was a time of near-constant change, but the period from 1960 to the end of the 1970s was when the company really began to establish a foothold in the trucking industry. Mack, of course, maintained its innovative streak and introduced quite a few new products along the way, growing all the while, but it also found stability. The company kicked off the era in 1962 with the introduction of the F Model all-steel, cab-over-engine truck, available in sleeper and non-sleeper configurations. This milestone would eventually lead to the introduction of an entirely new line of cabover and conventional trucks from the company over the next two decades and beyond.

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1960s

After the release of the F Model cabover truck, Mack released R Series, U Series, and DM models throughout the 1960s, but even before that, the company introduced the first diesel-powered truck in the Mack B85F in 1960. Five years later, Mack built a single Super Pumper System for the New York City Fire Department. This prolific firefighting apparatus responded to more than 2,000 alarms during its 17-year lifespan.

1966 and 1967 were particularly big years for Mack, because it introduced new vehicles and technologies, some of which stayed in production for years after the fact. Mack replaced its B series of trucks with the R series, which was a heavy-duty diesel truck. With that came the new Maxidyne constant horsepower diesel engine as well as the Maxitorque transmission. The Maxidyne engine was built for maximum fuel efficiency and minimized shifting, which opened the door for five-speed transmissions (rather than 10-speed transmissions, for example). The Maxitorque transmission was built for Class 8 trucks, and was much shorter than other similar transmissions at the time, which helped Mack lower overall truck weights.

In 1969, Mack continued introducing new technologies, including its cab air suspension, which not only improved driver and passenger comfort, but also helped improve the resiliency and durability of the cab. It followed that up with a patent for the Dynatard engine brake a couple of years later, which was specifically designed to work alongside Mack’s heavy-duty diesel engine.

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Mack Trucks released quite a few new vehicles throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the F series, R series, U series, DM series, and MC/MR series, to name just a few. (Photo courtesy of Mack Trucks.)

1970s

Mack started the next decade by moving its world headquarters to Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1970. Five years later in 1975, the company introduced the Cruise-Liner, which would go on to be Mack’s high-end cabover truck model for the next eight years. In that same year, Mack opened up the Engineering, Development and Test Center, also in Allentown, which was a 65-acre facility built specifically for working through new design concepts from design to prototyping and beyond.

In 1977, Mack released the Super-Liner, a conventional truck that was built for heavy-haul applications and was also a big step toward focusing more on driver comfort. The Super-Liner remained in production until 1993. Mack introduced another new line of trucks one year later in the MC/MR series. These low-cab-forward vehicles were designed for construction, waste collection, and local in-city deliveries. The decade ended with Renault buying up a 10% share in Mack Trucks in 1979, the beginning of a relationship that has lasted to this day.

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Mack continued to produce fire trucks during this time period, some of which served their fire departments for 17 years or more. (Photo courtesy of Mack Trucks.)

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