PowerTorque visited the Daimler plant at Tramagal, Portugal, which has been building light duty trucks in Portugal for the European market for well over 20 years and is where up to now, Fuso have been building eCanters for Australia.
The plant at Tramagal produces around 12,000 trucks a year, with numbers rising again this year. Portugal is a relatively small country, with a population of just 10 million, but it is an energetic country, well motivated and well educated. The Lisbon region is home to many tech start-ups. Daimler Truck also has a growing connectivity software business in the region.
The reason for Daimler to set up the factory in a small town outside of Lisbon, begins with taking over a facility, which was started in 1964 by the Bois de Ferreira family producing military trucks. There was a professional truck making business on the site, which was taken over by Mitsubishi Motors. Later, after Daimler took over the commercial vehicle arm of Mitsubishi, the plant became part of Daimler Trucks Asia.
“Our business relations in the company, our interface, our counterparts, they sit in Japan, they sit in Kawasaki, with very few in Germany,” says Arne Barden, CEO, Mitsubishi Fuso Truck Europe. “We were the first to build the eCanter, in 2017 and we have a lot of experience in building electric trucks.”
This Daimler plant has been building light duty trucks in Portugal for the European market for well over 20 years. The Canter has a large market share in Portugal, with significant sales also in Italy, France and Germany.
Although this plant produced all of the eCanters sold in Australia, so far, the next generation models for our market here will be sourced from a full-scale assembly line, recently completed in Japan, which can build both diesel engines as well as electric Canters.
In 2014, the first prototype of the eCanter was produced at Tramagal. Now, the next generation eCanter has already gone into production at the plant, with its next generation battery, e-axle and a number of other innovations.
At the moment, the number of work hours needed to build an eCanter is higher than those needed to build a diesel truck, battery and e-axle fitment take extra time, but as numbers ramp up Daimler expect the eCanter to use as much manpower as its predecessors.
Due to the issues created by a production line handling very powerful electric systems, Daimler grades staff at ten different levels, depending on training and skill levels. only staff at higher qualification levels are allowed in parts of the production line where the high voltage systems can be accessed.
Arne Barden started his career in the Wörth Plant in Germany where Mercedes Benz trucks are assembled. Later, he went to India, for six and a half years and was responsible for the factory setup of the Bharat Benz plant there. He later worked on the launch of heavy duty trucks for the Indonesian market. From there he headed to Kawasaki in Japan, where he was head of supply chain management for four and a half years. Taking on the job in Tramagal saw him returning to Europe but to a much milder climate than that he could expect back in Germany.
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