The first truck in the world looked like a cart with an engine and without a drawbar. The engine, called "Phoenix", was a four-horsepower-strong two-cylinder engine located at the rear.
Cummins will take over the development, production and delivery of medium-duty engines for Daimler Trucks and Buses around the world by the second half of the decade.
Daimler plans to spin off Daimler Truck as a separate business and establish two independent pure-play companies for truck/bus and autos, “designed to unlock the full potential of its businesses in a zero-emissions, software-driven future.”
Daimler Trucks zeros in on driver safety and freight efficiency as its main autonomous technology goals.
Daimler announced a strategic partnership with Luminar Technologies, a provider of automotive lidar hardware and software technology, to address a key enabling technology for autonomous truck operation, or what Daimler calls "highly automated" trucks.
An autonomous-truck partnership between Waymo and Daimler will produce a unique version of the Freightliner Cascadia fitted with integrated redundancy for all safety systems, rather than bolt-on components. It will be driven by Waymo's advanced AI driving system, The Waymo Driver.
Daimler Trucks showed off a Mercedes-Benz concept truck powered by fuel cells, with a range of up to 1,000 kilometers (more than 600 miles). Customer trials are to start in 2023. It also outlined when its battery-electric eActros trucks are projected to be available, with a first look at a long-haul version.
Unlike their competitors, Daimler Trucks and Torc Robotics won’t give a definitive timeline to deployment for driverless trucks — and say that in their development, they must be built from the ground up.
In a bold move, Daimler Truck AG and the Volvo Group agreed to join forces in an effort to speed up the development, establishment and acceptance of fuel cell vehicles – at a time when much of the focus on electric trucks among legacy truck makers has been on battery-electric solutions.
A global initiative to set up charging infrastructure for battery-electric commercial trucks launched by Daimler will initially push to establish in the U.S. and Europe charging stations at truck terminals and shops; what Daimler refers to as “depot charging.”