Daimler has presented its own fully electric urban delivery truck. The electric truck is capable of hauling up to 26 tons.
The new “Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck” debuted yesterday in Stuttgart, Germany, in what is being pitched as a key step in the journey towards zer0-emission cities. Daimler Trucks shared that it will be bringing the vehicle to market in an extremely nebulous “beginning of the next decade.”
The fuzzy date by which Daimler will bring the truck to market is a bit of a joke. Daimler is not a startup. It is one of the oldest and most successful automotive companies in the world, with a correspondingly large R&D budget and team. If they had already been working on this for sometime, the dates would be more firm, would be sooner, and would be accompanied by production volume numbers.
Daimler shared that it will be leaning heavily into electric drive technology for its trucking division, noting that “a considerable part of the future investments by the truck division in the fields of research and development flow in the further development of the full electric drive.” That’s exciting to see for everyone and even if they haven’t been working on an electric semi truck for a few years now, they are surely focused on building electric trucks moving forward.
The new Mercedes-Benz Electric Truck will be based on a “heavy-duty, three-axle short-radius Mercedes-Benz distribution truck.” Re-using an existing platform will help the project to move forward faster, presumably, but one has to wonder what compromises (if any) will be made to accommodate the re-use. The vehicle will use an electrically driven rear axle that has already been developed for the Mercedes-Benz Citaro hybrid bus, powered by batteries housed in a crash-proof enclosure inside the frame.
Collectively, Daimler’s 6 truck brands sold more vehicles in 2016 than any other manufacturer, at 365,000 new vehicles registered. That’s nearly double the nearest competitor, Dongfeng, which only saw 201,000 new vehicles registered.
ource: Daimler & Daimler