Transport plays a significant role in global climate change. Daimler Truck wants to make CO2-neutral transport a success and thus contribute to combating climate change.
Green Products
Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. To combat it, we need to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Road traffic plays an important role in this: According to a study by management consultancy firm PwC, it is responsible for 17 percent of global CO2-emissions. More than half of this is attributable to commercial vehicles, especially heavy-duty trucks used for long-haul transport.
As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of trucks and buses, we are facing up to our responsibilities – and are working consistently on decarbonizing our fleet. We are also committed to the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement, and are aligning our strategic goals with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Our ambition
We are pursuing a consistent objective of decarbonizing our products: We strive for our new trucks and buses to be CO2-neutral on the road in Europe, the US and Japan by 2039 – and globally by 2050.
It is important for us that we contribute to the transformation of the transport industry as a whole.
We are fully committed to make transportation emission-free. Thus, we are implementing our dual strategy with battery-electric and hydrogen-powered drives and bring vehicle after vehicle into series-production.
Our path
Daimler Truck is working purposefully to make vehicles more environmentally friendly and, in particular, to focus on product-related climate protection.
To fulfill our ambition, we are following three paths:
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The future belongs to alternative drive technologies
We are focusing on batteries and hydrogen – and are consistently bringing forward the expansion of these technologies. We are relying on two complementary technologies to supply energy to the engines in the decarbonization of transportation and passenger transport: batteries and hydrogen fuel-cells.
We already have a whole range of battery-electric truck and bus models in series production (more about our ePortfolio can be found here). By the end of 2023, we will have ten battery-electric trucks and buses in series production.
We have also made a big step forward with regard to hydrogen: We are already intensively testing the first fuel cell truck prototypes of the Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck on public roads in Germany and Europe.
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Expansion of a charging infrastructure
Together with strong partners, we are supporting the expansion of a charging infrastructure for CO2-neutral transport – both for battery-electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles.
We believe that the transformation of passenger and freight transportation can only be achieved through a collective effort by governments, vehicle manufacturers, technology, and energy companies. This is why we are not only launching new CO2-neutral vehicles on the market, but we are also speeding up the development of the required charging infrastructure. In this way, we are aiming to continuously increase the sales of emission-free vehicles in the markets and at the same time decrease the number of conventional vehicles.
We are a member of several initiatives aimed at providing charging technologies across the board and increasing the availability of liquid hydrogen at petrol stations. This includes partnerships with Siemens, Shell, TotalEnergies, and BP.
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Resource Consumption
We take great care with natural resources and thus protect the climate. Even during product development, we rely on recycling and the longest possible service life. And thanks to efficient technology and an aerodynamic, lightweight design, we are reducing the energy consumption of our products in driving operation.
We are aiming to minimize our consumption of natural resources. That’s why we are promoting the establishment of closed material cycles in our production.
To avoid waste, we are working to extend the service life of all vehicle components – for example, by using particularly durable materials. We are also addressing recycling solutions for our high-voltage batteries: Our vehicles only have reusable batteries.
What we have already achieved
- We are already producing eight battery-electric truck and bus models in series worldwide.
- Hundreds of customers have already covered millions of kilometers with our battery-electric trucks and buses.
- Fuel-cell joint venture established together with the Volvo Group to build one of the largest series productions of fuel-cell systems in Europe.
The next steps
We still have a long way to go on our journey towards zero-emission road transport. These are the next milestones:
- We plan to launch the series-production version of the eActros LongHaul truck with a range of 500 kilometers from 2024.
- We are working intensively on the battery-electric eAtego for medium-duty distribution haulage.
- We are further developing our hydrogen-powered Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck. Therefore, the fuel-cell joint venture between Daimler Truck AG and Volvo Group, cellcentric, aims at building up the series production of fuel-cell systems.
- We are working on electrifying the complete city bus portfolio for the European market by 2030. Our aim is to have an electrically powered interurban bus in our portfolio from 2025, and to offer coaches with a hydrogen-based fuel cell drive from the end of the decade. In addition, by 2030 we aim to offer CO2-neutral models based on batteries or hydrogen for local applications in each segment.
