MAN hands over first eTruck handed to a customer
It makes for a beautiful picture in Leipzig: While noisy sports cars with combustion engines race along the circuit at the Porsche plant, a truck quietly rolls along an avenue. It is so quiet because it is a very special truck – the very first eTruck that MAN is delivering to a customer. At the same time, the highly symbolic location was chosen because the electric truck will travel daily on a route to the Porsche plant in Leipzig.
Specifically, this eTruck with the model designation eTGX will be used by the haulage company Elflein to transport batteries from the Leipzig battery plant of the supplier Dräxlmaier to the Porsche plant for the electric Macan. The route is less than five kilometres long and therefore rather atypical for the application profile of the eTGX, which was actually designed for long distances. The eTGX handed over to Dräxlmaier and Elflein contains six battery packs totalling 534 kWh (480 kWh usable). It is designed to transport an average weight of 15.5 tonnes on the Dräxlmaier-Porsche route and has a 330 kW motor on board.
The model presented in Leipzig is a “pre-series vehicle that is very close to series production,” as Jens Hartmann, eTruck project manager at MAN, told electrive. The vehicle has already been produced on the series production line at MAN in Munich “and is in no way inferior to the series product that we will see in a year’s time in terms of technical maturity.” However, MAN will not be talking about regular series production until next year, when the eTruck rolls off the production line in large volumes. MAN plans to deliver the first 200 eTrucks to customers before the end of this year – including two more for Dräxlmaier.
The first customer delivery of an eTruck – which includes the eTGS and eTGL as well as the eTGX – is an important milestone for MAN in terms of electrification, especially as there are already 2,500 orders and order enquiries for the electric truck family. That’s quite a lot, because the company has long been the market leader for electric city buses, as MAN Executive Board member Friedrich Baumann emphasised at the event. However, electric trucks have hardly played a role at MAN to date. With one exception: MAN built its first electric truck, the eTGM, in 2018.
MAN manager Jens Hartmann explain the difference between the eTGM and the new eTruck is that the eTGM was a small series of only around 50 units. “We were able to gain a lot of experience there with customers throughout Europe. In comparison, the new eTGX is a completely different vehicle class because the model is significantly heavier. Secondly, the eTGM was only partially industrialised with a lot of reworking in the production process.”
With the eTGX, however, the modular system behind it is designed for great industrialisation, Hartmann explained: “From 12-tonne trucks upwards to 50-tonne trucks, all typical MAN truck products known today can be derived from the vehicle. eTGL, eTGS, eTGX, also with very broad configurability. Customers can choose any battery, from two to seven battery packs, depending on the application, range requirements and payload needs.”
Ultimately, the eTruck is a modular system consisting of various battery systems, motors and charging systems. The charging technology can be either CCS or MCS. And the charging connection can be fitted on the left, right or on both sides at the same time, and further back in the case of the chassis version.
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