HVIA Tours Daimler Trucks Manufacturing Facility In Germany

Last week, HVIA’s CEO Todd Hacking, Chief Technical Officer Adam Ritzinger and Board Director Robert Smedley were invited to tour one of Daimler Trucks’ expansive manufacturing plants at Wörth am Rhein, near Stuttgart, Germany.

The facility was founded in 1963 and is the largest Mercedes-Benz Truck plant in the world. It can produce up to 470 trucks per day, including the familiar Actros and Atego, and the new eActros and Econic.

Todd, Adam and Rob witnessed first-hand the size and scale of the operation, which boasts over 10,000 staff on a 2.9 million square metre site, and incredibly, features its own shipping port, rail station, power station, and sustainable energy generation capabilities.

“The level of automation built into some of the manufacturing processes, and the incredibly robust quality systems that those capabilities allow cannot be overlooked”, said Adam Ritzinger. “Watching the automated delivery robots transporting parts between each unique body manufacturing cell, without any human intervention at all, was a highlight”, he added.

Notwithstanding, the plant’s assembly lines are flexible and can facilitate the extensive model variation in the Mercedes trucks lineup, and the high level of customisation and requested by fleets. That level of flexibility even allows the eActros to be produced on the same production line as other conventional internal combustion engine trucks, despite featuring many different parts.

The HVIA team also enjoyed spotting some right-hand-drive variants at various stages of manufacture, and even recognised a few prominent Australian fleet colours.

Todd, Adam and Rob would like to thank Romesh Rodrigo and the Daimler Trucks team in Germany for arranging and facilitating the tour.