The Optimal Solution

Transformer in disguise? A Peterbilt 379 is doing a superb marketing job dressed up as a film star for its owner, toy maker Hasbro. T&D finds out more…

- Pip Dunn

Few trucks are film stars but occasionally one is shot into stardom – which was the case for a Peterbilt 379 used as Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, a big box-office hit. To market the toys as best it could in the UK, Hasbro, the toy company behind Transformers, needed a similar sort of truck.

The first three Transformers films, released in 2007, 2009 and 2011, used a 379, but for the revival of the Optimus Prime ‘character’ for the fourth film in 2014 the switch was made to a Western Star 5700, owing to a tie-in with General Motors.

Incidentally, the 379 was chosen on the advice of truck drivers on the film crew who drove the ‘Big Petes’. However, the great British public, especially toy-hungry children, really aren’t too bothered if the Optimus Prime truck they see at shows is the old-style Peterbilt and not the same type of truck used in the latest film. After all, if it’s painted right and has a big bonnet, only us truck anoraks would notice the difference…

An American dream

Andy Graves from Scunthorpe loves American trucks and owns his own Pete 379 for weddings, proms, films, pop videos and charity events, so he was a good choice when Hasbro was looking for someone to look after and manage a UK-based Optimus Prime.

Dating from 1995, the Optimus Prime Peterbilt has a thumping 600hp 60-series Detroit engine under the bonnet. The 6x4 sleeper-cabbed tractor, the standard type of tractor unit in the States, tips the scales at a whopping 9.5 tonnes when running bobtail without a trailer.

“It’s owned by Hasbro,” Andy tells me on a sunny day at his Scunthorpe yard, where the truck is kept under cover when not in use, “but I look after it through my company American Dream Trucks.”