Speech by Dr. Gerrit Marx, CEO, Iveco Magirus AG, at the IAA International Press Workshop held in Frankfurt, Germany
We will be present at the IAA with three of our eight brands, predominantly the commercial vehicles. The Iveco trucks will have six products on display and the Iveco buses would have two new projects. There shall be important innovations around the powertrain division from FPT Industrial. A few things to highlight are autonomous and AI. We have autonomous trucks capable of Stage 4 that aid us in running as we speak on test tracks in Europe. One of them actually is well-operated. On the battery side we are developing our batteries for producing them actually later this year for the electric daily.
We have autonomous systems for the buses for easy mile and a great partnership as well as with Amazon Web Services where we use the Alexa speech layer to basically connect all the systems of the truck connected to all the systems with the central control room as well as the haulers and the dispatchers. We are not using the data of Amazon – it’s just the layout of Alexa which is addressing another issue of the driver shortage in Europe.
Massive Presence
We will be at the IAA Booth Hall 24 and have 16 vehicles inside, 27 outside and 10 for test drive including the electric Nikola TRE truck built in wood. We are going to use one of those vehicles that we are preparing for the port of Hamburg and you will have the pleasure to try this, which is the most powerful electric heavy-duty articulated truck you can drive without any shifting.
One of the key world premieres that we are going to showcase at the IAA is the electric daily which is our white market’s segment leading cab chassis vehicle where we have 25 million market shares to capture the segment. We are going to have it in a fully modular platform which you can see on the sustainability side. You can choose one two or three batteries and it’s fully modular and all the superstructures that you can fit today on the on the e-day without any change. With the PTOs sitting in the same place, the electrification was done with a very clear target to keep it as simple and not the same for every superstructure that would be put on the electric table.
The battery power is 37 kilowatt hours per battery. These batteries are produced by FPT Industrial based on microscopes and then we are also going to have those batteries on display including batteries that are capable of serving any segment. A wide range of chassis and trolleys options suitable for all body types with e-PTO up to 15kW and the same towing capacity as with diesel will be available. We have charging infrastructure available as well with this configuration. What we are also going to show is a prototype of a daily with fuel cell.
We just remove these batteries and then we put fuel cell into the space and what young companies or startups call in a fancy language a surf board or skate board. IVECO has never abandoned the chassis. It is nothing but the same concept of the surf board or skate board and with electrification this gives us a great advantage to electrify this very important segment. From three and a half to up to seven tons you will see the full line-up of the e-daily. The fuel cell range extended prototype would give us in the 7.2-ton configuration a range of up to 400 km. This would imply about 10 kg of hydrogen at the seven other bar gauges pressure so that this shall be enough for this segment and will be fully dedicated to zero emission. We are going to showcase special editions of the daily and also minibus versions available in gas, CNG and hybrids.
Nikola TRE
From the e-power train lineup we know that in 2019 when we announced the partnership with Nikola we were the first to go after a full electric e-Accent. There was an obvious way to do a retrofit of the diesel with an electric engine in the middle with transmission in between and then you just use a conventional reactor which is from a vehicle packaging that is impossible or at least it’s completely not deliberating the value of the range that is required. So, the first step was that it will always be an electric Accent but basically the engine, the clutch, transmission, the prop shaft and everything else consolidates into just the axle in order to allow a fully modular paper packaging.
We are going to showcase the full lineup of the e-axles that we have developed from a light e-axle to a medium duty and heavy-duty axle which is in its first generation in serious production. We are going to have on display the European version of the Nikola TRE 4 x 2. So far you have only seen the US version. So, we are going to have the 4 x 2 there which is on the production line as we speak and we are going to also showcase the fuel cell electric production version of the Nikola TRE for the European market. You are going to see the battery electric property and you are going to see a completely reworked next version of the fuel cell electric 6 x 2 for the European market on a fully modular platform where you can exchange OEM battery electric technology and bootstrap technology on the same platform.
These are not retrofitted and this is not a rip-off the diesel engine. We populate the space components you can find among suppliers and call it electric. These are electric-borne platforms of the first generation with an electric axle and full modularity and the 4 x 2 will enter production for European customers mid of next year and the fuel cell electric version end of the year which were by the way the targets we gave ourselves back in September 2019. Regardless of the pandemic and supply chain interruptions and regardless of what’s happening right now in Ukraine, we will stay true to our promise. We are going to have the battery electric version for test drive at the IAA.