Futuricum is building 12 electric garbage trucks for Basel

Following the decision by the City of Basel to purchase 20 electric refuse collection vehicles, the Swiss commercial vehicle maker Futuricum prevailed in a tender. The Designwerk brand will deliver the first twelve garbage trucks starting at the end of 2020.

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The first two electric garbage trucks are scheduled to arrive in Basel by the end of 2020, with ten more to be delivered in stages until mid-2021. The vehicles are the Collect 26E model. They will replace conventionally operated refuse collection vehicles in Basel.

For the procurement of the first twelve vehicles and the associated charging stations, the city’s Grand Council approved a budget of around 19 million Swiss francs (around 17 million euros) last year at the request of the governing council. However, as Designwerk is now reporting, there is a positive surprise in terms of costs from the city’s point of view: “Contrary to expectations, the purchase is around 30 per cent, or 3.5 million Swiss francs, cheaper than expected for the city canton,” it says.

The electric fleet is to be charged overnight at a total of six locations and in the workshop of the civil engineering office. The municipality intends to use only green electricity. Basel sees itself as a pioneer in the field of electric mobility throughout Switzerland. The background to this is an overall cantonal concept according to which, among other things, the Civil Engineering Office will replace 90 per cent of its 240 vehicles with electric ones at the end of their service life within the next five years.

A Futuricum Collect 26E is already in use in Thun and elsewhere. The electric waste vehicle is based on the FM series from partner Volvo Trucks, while the electrically operated superstructures also come from Contena-Ochsner AG. The heavy-duty vehicles have an output of 500 kW and (in the Large version) feature two 170 kWh batteries on board. Designwerk puts the consumption in collective operation at 190 kWh per 100 kilometres. Two of the models for Basel are equipped with roof cranes for underfloor containers.

Designwerk has been working on the development of the 26-tonner for several years. It is closely linked to the founding of the commercial vehicle subsidiary Futuricum AG in 2017 – a kind of forerunner of Designwerk Products AG, which was founded in 2019 following a restructuring process and now carries the Futuricum brand. According to the company’s head office, in future up to 200 fully electric vehicles per year will be built in Winterthur.

Update 16 November 2020: The first of 20 planned electrically driven refuse collection vehicles has now gone into operation in Basel. The Swiss commercial vehicle brand Futuricum from Designwerk won a tender for the first twelve vehicles and plans to deliver the eleven other e-waste trucks in the next three months. The city of Basel will probably put the remaining eight vehicles out to tender in 2021.

According to the Department of Construction and Transportation (BVD) of the Canton of Basel City, the electric vehicles are expected to be comparable to diesel vehicles over their useful life, despite the higher purchase price. If all 20 electric waste vehicles are in use, however, 380 tons of CO2 per year will be saved, when compared to a diesel fleet.

designwerk.com (German), , 20min.ch, designwerk.com, bs.ch (all updates in German)