With over 70 vehicles transporting craft beer and other beverages across a large area of NSW and SE Queensland, the service Motus offers to the brewery is handling all the warehousing and distribution for craft brewers, as beer comes off the end of the production line. The trucks either pick up from the brewery or the brewery delivers it to the Motus warehouse.

It is then stored in a large cool room. It’s not just beer, it’s also sparkling water and and other beverages, delivered on their behalf. Trucks run all around Sydney, to Canberra, Newcastle, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay and SE Queensland. In terms of storage, they have 10,000 square metres in Sydney and another 14,000 square metres in Brisbane.

“This year is a bit of a settle down and consolidate, and just make sure that we’re going to get everything right,” says Andy.

Motus means to move in Latin, and the logo includes a wing, which derives from Mercury’s helmet (Mercury was the Roman god of speed). The recently purchased Hino 300 Series hybrid trucks are named after Greek or Roman gods. These are ideally suited to the kind of metro work most of the lighter trucks in the fleet have to handle.

Image: Toby Zerna/The Photo Pitch

In the fleet, around 40 per cent of the fleet are city vehicles. These are four and six tonne 300 Series Hinos. There is an increasing number of eight tonne, six pallet 300 Series models.

The next size up are the 12 tonne 500 Series, then there’s a few semis (700 Series SS) on the road, which handle line haul to Newcastle and Canberra and there’s also line haul from Brisbane to Byron Bay.

“We only have Hino trucks, we’ve got 70-odd Hino vehicles, and some Toyotas,” says Andy.

Image: Toby Zerna/The Photo Pitch

“We look to Hino, and they’re sticking in that hybrid realm, we’ve got four hybrids on the road, and we’ll start taking a lot more. We would like to try bigger hybrid trucks. The current hybrid can’t take that much weight, we’re just waiting until we get more, and we’ll start putting them throughout the whole fleet.

“They do really well, we use them predominantly for city work, which is exactly what they’re meant to do. We have a lot of younger staff and it helps that the hybrids look very good. All the drivers want to drive the hybrid.

“They say they look good, but also that they drive really well. There’s been really good buy-in. If we could change the whole fleet to hybrid, I’d probably do it tomorrow. We are just waiting for that technology.”

The majority of the drivers, that are driving the hybrids, have been with Motus for a long time. They regard being handed the keys of a hybrid as a reward. Andy reckons they treat them like their babies.

The team have been keen take hybrids on board and give Andy and Emily feedback themselves, showing them little tricks, saying things like, ‘it saves fuel and when I do this’.

“We spend a lot of money on fuel, but, for us, it’s really making sure that we’re very much conscious of the environment,” says Andy.

“We actually had an opportunity to get a fully electric truck, but I don’t think that they’re there yet. We want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing. Our customers haven’t started asking us to reduce emissions a lot yet, because I think that all businesses are working on themselves at the moment.”