MAN has found its first major customer for its electric heavy-duty trucks. DB Schenker wants to add 100 new electric trucks to its fleet as a pilot customer by 2026 Traton-Daughter on Tuesday with. The first vehicles should be handed over in the first half of 2024.
The truck manufacturer will start producing the electric heavy-duty trucks in a small series at its Munich plant in 2024. According to market prices, the deal has a volume of around 30 to 40 million euros.
The company has been planning for some time to launch an electric heavy-duty truck by mid-decade. The range of the vehicles should initially be 600 to 800 kilometers, from 2026 the truck should cover more than 1000 kilometers at a time. A vehicle needs around six battery units for this – with opportunity charging during the driver’s rest period.
MAN intends to manufacture the necessary battery systems in its own plant in Nuremberg. The group had announced an investment of 100 million euros for this purpose last summer. The systems, which will initially be manufactured manually in the next few years, are to come in large series from the Nuremberg plant from the beginning of 2025, said MAN CEO Alexander Vlaskamp. A production of own battery cells is not planned so far.
When completed, the new factory in Nuremberg is expected to produce 100,000 battery systems per year. The investment is intended to secure 350 jobs at the site.
MAN is part of the listed Traton SE, which is majority-owned by Volkswagen– Group is located. In addition to MAN Truck & Bus, the brands Scania, Navistar and Volkswagen Truck & Bus are also under the Traton umbrella.
Traton announced sales figures for 2022 a few days ago. According to this, the entire Traton Group sold 305,500 vehicles (trucks and buses) last year, exceeding the 300,000 mark for the first time in the company’s history. In the previous year, Traton had sold 271,600 vehicles, an increase of 12 percent. However, MAN’s sales fell by 10 percent from 93,700 to 84,500 in the past twelve months.
Traton has not yet published sales figures for 2022. The latest results were released in late October 2022 for the first nine months of last year. At the time, Traton reported an increase in sales of 32 percent to 28.5 billion euros. Operating profit increased slightly to 1.347 million euros, according to the company. Traton did not provide information on the turnover or profit of the MAN subsidiary.