Today in Greenboro, USA a North American VISTA team will qualify for the VISTA world final for the first time in the competition’s history. However VISTA isn’t a new concept in the US and Canada. In fact Volvo Trucks North America have been holding their own VISTA competition since 1995, and started a competition for Mack Trucks in 2009.
“This year we had 120 Volvo teams across North America registered, and we had 74 Mack teams,” says Dave Albert, Manager of Customer Experience Programs, Volvo Trucks North America. “The teams are eliminated through a three round online learning competition. From all of the teams registered we have brought three Mack teams and three Volvo teams to Greensboro for the VISTA final. The winning Volvo team will go to Gothenburg for the international competition.”
The three online rounds roughly correspond with the first three rounds of theoretical questions in the global competition, and the final in Greensboro will also be very similar to the global semi finals. Teams will have their skills and knowledge evaluated through hands-on tests involving fixing pre-bugged faults on trucks, looking up information on Impact, their familiarity with warranty systems and policy, and finally an interview on Volvo’s Customer Satisfaction programs.
The three Mack teams taking part in today’s final are Granit from Wisconsin, The mDRIVEers from Salt Lake City, and Underdogs from North Carolina. The Volvo Trucks teams are DeF Nightshift from Winnipeg, Loose Cannons Inc. from Minnesota, and MFS Yakimawa from Washington State.
Run concurrently but completely independently of the Volvo and Mack Trucks competitions, the Volvo Bus Corporation had 45 teams from the US, Canada and Mexico, taking part in the global competition. Their semi final was held in Curitiba, Brazil alongside the Latin American semi final, which was won by Mexican team Trabus.
