The National Association of Bus Manufacturers is forecasting the worst year this century for the Brazilian bus industry, with performance comparable only to 1999, when only 12,098 bodies were produced.

Andreas Tostmann CEO of MAN Truck & Bus officially opened the MAN eMobility Centre in Munich on June 9, 2021, for staff training in electric truck assembly and manufacture and for ‘eTruck’ manufacturing production and process development, with start of series production of electric trucks said to be sometime soon.

While the European market is growing at a phenomenal rate – the European electric bus market is forecast to grow from 2,114 units registered in 2020 to more than 12,760 units in 2030 - the market in Asia really accounts for the lion share of the electric city bus market, stated Rueben Scriven - Senior Analyst at Interact Analysis, during an on-line presentation at the Sustainability Bus conference last month.

The price of steel charged by producers in Brazil in the last 12 months has increased by almost 100%, according to Norberto Fabris, president of ANFIR - National Association of Manufacturers of Road Implements.

Mercedes-Benz do Brasil in February this year announced it had plans to hire around 1,000 additional people for the São Bernardo do Campo plant in ABC Paulista, which currently employs 8,500.

Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus exported 180 units to Uruguay in the first quarter this year, some 291.3% higher than in the same period of 2020. In March it sold 100 vehicles, which VWCO suggests was the largest volume it has ever sold in a single month.

Since the launch of the Class 2 Utilimaster Velocity F2 walk-in-van (WIV) in October 2020 by The Shyft Group Inc, the company says the model has attracted significant orders from parcel delivery companies.

The Indian Commercial Vehicle Industry in 2020, which started the year with sales continuing to fall from the 2019 level, was then thrown into chaos with the effective closure of the marketplace because of national lockdown measures introduced in March 2020 as an endeavour to stop the spread of the coronavirus, writes Rajesh Khanna, Chief Executive Officer at RACE Innovations Pvt Ltd.

Following the announcement by ACEA-PIK on delivering fossil-free trucks by 2040, Alastair Hayfield, senior research director for commercial vehicles at market research firm, Interact Analysis made the following comments: “Currently, the medium- and heavy-duty battery electric truck market is very small: in Europe it amounted to 124 units in 2019 (44 medium-duty trucks and 80 heavy-duty trucks).

High-pressure composite and aluminium cylinder manufacturer, Luxfer Gas Cylinders in Q4 of 2020 delivered bespoke hydrogen fuel systems for 15, Wrightbus double deck buses now in operation in Aberdeen and 50 Hyundai Xcient Fuel-Cell 19t trucks.

A short briefing last month by Alastair Hayfield, senior research director for commercial vehicles at market research firm, Interact Analysis UK, provided an insightful analysis about future demand for the internal combustion engine and the rate of its replacement with zero emission technology in different global regional markets.

“For the UK market as a whole, the peak year of commercial vehicles with an internal combustion engine (diesel/petrol or hybrid) was 2019!” says Alastair Hayfield, senior research director at market research firm Interact Analysis, in a recent review of the UK truck powertrain market.