Daimler Trucks sets up automated truck R&D centre in the US

Daimler Trucks & Buses is strengthening its efforts for automated trucks and buses with its new Automated Truck Research & Development Center in Portland (Oregon, USA). This innovation facility is already working in close cooperation with existing development functions for automated driving in Stuttgart and India.

"Automated driving offers enormous advantages in the logistics business, with the potential to mitigate the shortage of truck drivers around the world. From a technological point of view, there is still a long way to go until trucks can drive fully autonomously. Automated vehicles must be as safe as possible. We are putting all our effort into this at Daimler Trucks." 

"Our new research and development centre is an important milestone on this road. We are strengthening our efforts in this area to leverage synergies in the development of these key technologies across the globe,” said Martin Daum, member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, responsible for Daimler Trucks & Buses, at Daimler Trucks Capital Market & Technology Day in Portland yesterday.

The new R&D centre develops and fine-tunes systems for automated driving at Daimler Trucks & Buses according to a comprehensive technology strategy. The centre’s experts are dedicated to all aspects of developing, testing and validating automated vehicles.

Leveraging synergies in Stuttgart and Bangalore
In addition, the engineers in Portland work in close cooperation with their colleagues in the R&D centres at Daimler Trucks locations in Stuttgart (Germany) and Bangalore (India), thus forming a global network. Through close interconnections within the Daimler Group and the exchange of experience and expertise gained from previous research projects, Daimler Trucks & Buses will benefit from valuable synergies with other vehicle divisions in future as well, especially from the passenger car unit.

Daimler Trucks is investing a total of more than 2.5 billion euros in R&D in 2018 and 2019. More than 500 million euros of this will go toward e-mobility, connectivity and automated commercial vehicle technology. This also includes investment in the new R&D centre for automated driving in Portland.