With the coming together of four trucks brands, in the Traton Group, the global truck maker is looking into the Traton future and preparing for the the next generations of trucks. PowerTorque asked MAN CEO, Alexander Vlaskamp how that is likely to play out.
Now that the Traton Group includes Scania, MAN, Vokswagen and International in the US, the strategy is for the group to develop a modular platform, a process which is starting out with the driveline. In Europe, in some of the applications MAN and Scania are using a group technology. In the US, it has introduced an engine in the International which also features in the new Scania, a common base 13 litre engine. These two also share a common AMT.
“What we are doing in the brands is we are adjusting our applications, so an MAN driver feels the MAN driving characteristics,” says Alexander. “The driveline, which we have been rolling out in Scania and also in International it will come across later into MAN trucks. That will take place some three years from now, but we will have adapted it for our MAN trucks and make sure that we have the typical MAN drive characteristics.
“We have our own torque curves and our own horsepower curves, and we have to be efficient on that, because we have to jointly, as a group, also invest into the future. The future is electrification to a large extent but we need to have, both on the ICE drive line diesel engines, as well as on electrification to make sure that we are following the path of CO2 reduction.”
The development concept is aimed at ensuring a MAN will always be an MAN and a Scania will always be a Scania, an International; will always be an International, but behind the scenes there is a lot of common architecture driving scale in production numbers to amortise the research and development costs of these new technologies.
“Within Traton group, if you only look at electrification in the coming years, up to 2025, we are spending 2.6 billion euros ($5.9 billion) only on the electrification, on the R&D side, as well as on the building of factories,” says Alexander. “We have announced this last year in Hannover, showcasing our battery electric truck.
“We are investing in our own battery pack production. We are in our own facility in Nuremburg, where we are producing the motors and we are starting to produce the battery packs. We are really working on the future and making sure we have the vehicles ready when the market is ready for them.
“That is a balancing act, which will be different from market to market. We will have the trucks available, we will scale up to production, but for us the big question mark is what will the regulations be like? What will be the infrastructure in place, when it comes to charging infrastructure, but also when it comes to grid availability, the capability to actually add charge trucks?”
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