HVIA’s Chief Technical Officer Adam Ritzinger and Chief Engineer Rachel Michaud were recently hosted by German truck manufacturer MAN for a factory tour at the MAN Truck Forum in Dachauer Str. Munich.
The team was also joined by Smedley’s Engineers’ Engineering Manager David Clark, NTI Chief Claims Officer Alan Hasted and NTI National Manager, Repair Management, Ben Johnson.
MAN was founded in 1840 by entrepreneur Ludwig Sander and engineer Jean Gaspard Dolfus. For most of the 1800s, the company was known as Maschinenfabrik Augsburg and was renamed M.A.N. in 1908 (stands for Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG).
The truck maker is also home to the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolf Diesel, who made his first working prototype in 1893, provided with primary financial and logistical support by the company.
The famous Braunschweig lion MAN logo was adopted in in 1971 following its takeover of the commercial vehicle manufacturer Büssing.
The Munich site produces roughly 100 trucks per day with an additional manufacturing facility located in Krakow Poland which manufactures around 300 trucks per day when running at full capacity.
Both heavy-duty electric and diesel TGX and TGS models are produced at the site, all on the same production line with each vehicle made to customer specification. Production of battery-electric trucks started officially in 2024 with training for over 2,000 employees in high-voltage underway. The site itself is the equivalent on 140 football pitches, which covers more than 100 hectares.
The tour was hosted by Pierre, who took the party of five Australians through the complete assembly line from the chassis rails to the final vehicle where the engine was being started for the first time. This is considered by the plant to be the ‘birth’ of a new truck.
Whilst many of the processes used to produce the trucks are automated, it was great to see the assembly line up close and the friendly nature of the workers putting together the vehicles. The sling and pully mechanism used to flip the chassis 180 degrees was quite interesting as it was so simple, but quick and effective in achieving the outcome. The digitalised quality recording of each bolt torque was handy and allowed for better quality control checking and troubleshooting.
The team was able to view how both horizontal and vertical spaces are completely utilised in these factories, with the axles coming in from a line running along the top and then dropping down. There was almost as much to see looking up as there was looking directly at the line. Being on the ground floor made it possible to observe each key stage, all perfectly timed down to the minute for each line movement.
Thank you to Martin and Florian Lichte and the MAN team in Germany for organising the tour and to Kyunghwan Choi for making the group feel welcome and hosting us on site.