SIMPLE is the mantra of the Hitachi ZW50 Tier 4F and ZW80 Tier 4F compact wheel loaders. Could Hitachi have made their compact loaders as complex as others? Yes, of course. But why would you engineer and build something that is counter-intuitive to what the marketplace needs?

At first glance, compact wheel loaders might be easily confused with their big bucketed brothers. But appearance is where the similarities end.

Compact wheel loaders are used much differently than their larger brawny counterparts. Most large wheel loaders see continuous operation with heavy duty cycles; they largely operate in high volume material handling production operations, with engines and operators working them continuously for one, two, or three shifts a day. On the other hand, most compact wheel loaders see much lighter duty cycles, often only seeing a few hours per day. Many compact loaders log 300 – 800 hours annually with frequent startups and shutoffs being the norm. Often compact wheel loaders do not run long enough to get the engine warmed up before they are shut off to cool down and sit while awaiting the next task at hand, be it a landscape yard filling a pickup truck with mulch or topsoil, a fertilizer yard bulk filling a farm tractor spreader, or a salt yard filling spreader trucks in the winter.