Friday, January 12, 2007

Green Fuso 1

Driving on the Californian highways is a stressful affaire. Traffic is heavy, intense, aggressive, and anonymous. Nobody drives on the roads anymore for pleasure. Everybody detests it but there is no other way. Say Highway 91 and people’s face change into a grapefruit.
But to reach SANTEK, the builder of the new FUSO expedition vehicle, highways must be cruised and traffic jams suffered.
But eventually a quiet area is reached in between two dead end streets in an industrial area of Riverside immediately to a desert landscape. A large hall houses the birthplace of trailers and expedition vehicles.
There are 12 men working, most of them from Mexico. Highly skilled, efficient and disciplined.
Owner of Santek and general manager is Paul Westphal. He bought the company a year and a half ago after a career in the now by him detested corporate world.
Paul is a remarkable man. He is very relaxed, happy, open and most friendly. No stress and cramps because he knows in this life it is not all about money and career. Paul has come to see the Lord, as he explained, not long ago. He radiates now a fantastic energy and that makes designing, planning and building a new expedition vehicle a great pleasure.

Discussing all the details of the new FUSO SANTEK took 4 hours. Paul being an expert as well was a good wrestling partner to come up with the best solutions for the different issues. Because many aspects of an expedition vehicle have no standard, ready and immediate available solution.
Most issues found a perfect solution and the ones hanging do not need imminent answers yet.
Doing a project like this is allowing something to grow. On the way issues are found and solutions discovered. This makes it all so interesting.
As a consequence, the coming months there will be permanent supervision to share and participate in the building process.

The truck was there.
A green monster shining and being pretty. Waiting for her load to carry.


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