Leading global industrial truck manufacturer Linde Material Handling is celebrating a milestone in manufacturing at its main plant in Aschaffenburg, Germany with the assembly of its 750,000th truck. It also announced the biggest ever investment at the Aschaffenburg site – worth about 60 million euro – which will be focused on expanding the busy site by 2021.
The future owner of Linde Material Handling’s 750,000th truck is the BMW Group, a long-standing client, which will use the Linde E50 electric counterbalance truck, for loading and unloading lorries in its components plant based in Wackersdorf, Upper Palatinate.
Featuring a load capacity of five tonnes – equipped with cab, heating system, and 2.30 metre long fork arms, the anniversary truck is part of the current range of Linde models equipped with an electric drive and can be applied to the automotive industry as well as the food and beverage industry, building-material trade and chemical industry.
The truck benefits from twin-motor front-wheel drive, combi steering axle which is a compact drive axle with integrated power modules that uncouples via spring arms, as well as the traction control fitted as standard and an automatic handbrake.
Together with three different output modules and the optional high-frequency on-board charger, the trucks are efficient, economical and comfortable.
Sabine Neuß, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Linde Materials Handling, said: “Linde has more than 50 years of expertise, from the first range of diesel trucks which were produced in 1959, we have expanded our range due to demand from the companies we work with all over the world.
“By the seventies we were producing 2,000 diesel trucks each year, and it was in 1982 that we introduced the first electric counterbalance trucks. In 1985, the introduction of diesel truck series 351 made a significant contribution to the overall success of the company, and was positioned in the ‘premium class’ of between 2 and 3.5 tonnes. In fact, between 1985 and 2001, 100,000 units of these models alone were assembled at Linde’s factory base in Aschaffenburg.
“This achievement saw Linde receive the accolade of manufacturing ‘Europe’s most produced truck’ and secured the company’s position as market leader in the region in terms of trucks driven by an internal combustion engine.
Traditionally, the number of Linde trucks with an internal combustion engine has always far outweighed the number of those with an electric drive. Over the past decade, gradually the proportion of trucks manufactured in Aschaffenburg featuring an electric drive has increased with the proportion of each being around 50%.
Sabine continued, “We now consider ourselves to be the market leader in Europe for the electric truck segment, too. By making investments worth about 60 million euro by 2021, we will further expand our production capacity at the Aschaffenburg site, and simultaneously optimise our processes even further.”
Linde Material Handling GmbH, a company of KION Group AG, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of forklift trucks and warehouse technology equipment, and is the market leader in Europe. The company also offers the expertise it has gained from many decades of developing and producing electrical drive systems to external customers for a wide range of applications. Active on an international scale, Linde Material Handling operates production and assembly plants in all key regions worldwide, as well as a global sales and service network with representatives in more than 100 countries. In the 2013 financial year, Linde Material Handling employed a staff of around 13,800 and achieved sales of EUR 2.881 billion.
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