Still rare: trucks at the charging station. Here two eActros.
Image: Boris Schmidt
Daimler Truck, which continues to call its vehicles Mercedes-Benz, wants to become purely electric by 2040. A first step is the eActros, which is now coming onto the market.
All well-known truck manufacturers are working to bring electrically powered commercial vehicles onto the road in larger numbers, alongside efforts to supply them with hydrogen as an energy carrier. Now Mercedes-Benz is pushing ahead and celebrating the market premiere of its electric Actros, which is initially intended as a solo vehicle for heavy regional distribution traffic. The permissible total weight as a three-axle vehicle with a wheelbase of 4.60 meters is 27 tons. Towards the end of this year, the possibility is also to be created of coupling another trailer so that the maximum 40 or 44 tons can then be moved. In addition, Daimler Truck wants to bring an electric tractor onto the market by 2024. With this so-called long-haul truck, ranges of up to 500 kilometers should be possible.
Boris Schmidt
Editor in the “Technology and Engine” department.
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The E-Actros does not go quite that far, it is delivered with three or four battery packs placed in the ladder frame, which provide 336 or 448 kWh of energy. Depending on the application, this is enough for up to 300 kilometers. Direct current is charged up to 175 kW, Daimler believes that more is not advisable. The possibility of using alternating current is deliberately avoided. It is also a question of costs, and they are still immense. Such an E-Actros, which like conventional Actros is also built at the Daimler plant in Wörth am Rhein, costs three and a half times as much. Nevertheless, Jean-Marc Diss, Daimler Truck boss for Europe, hopes to be able to build and sell around 600 units in 2022. Supply chain issues did not play a major role. Up to 80 percent of the additional costs would be covered in Germany thanks to various funding pots.