JBM makes fully integral vehicles at its 20,000 capacity plant in Haryana.

The company says its engineering team has focussed on making the ELON 3X ultra-light weight and modular in design. It is based on, what Blackbuck calls, the ‘ELON skateboard platform’, which is seen as a way to offer other length models, like ELON 2X (10.5m) and ELON 4X (14.5m) in the coming years.

Tata Motors has delivered a further 100 StarBus EV buses to Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), as part of a contract for 921 units of Tata Motors’ Urban 12m electric buses. (Deliveries to date account for approximately 40% of the contract, Tata Motors states).

The ULE bus offers a gross vehicle weight (GVW) rating of 16t and is powered by Ashok Leyland’s H-series 6-cylinder 4-valve 184 kW (246 hp) rear engine matched with an automatic (Allison) transmission.

Although a specific volume has not been agreed, L&F could produce enough to meet ONE’s needs at its gigafactory in Van Buren Township, where cell output could reach up to 20 GWh in 2027.

Vietnam’s commercial vehicle market over 2 tons gvw continued to decline in the fourth quarter of 2023, by over 16% to 14,877 units from already weak year-earlier sales of 17,766 units.

The Thai commercial vehicle market over 2 tons gvw plunged by 37% to 68,295 units in the fourth-quarter of 2023 from 108,498 units a year earlier.

The South Korean market for commercial vehicles over 2 tons gvw declined by more than 5% to 59,190 units in the fourth quarter of 2023 from 62,497 units a year earlier.

It is designed for commercial vehicle fuel cell engines (150-200 kW) but can also be applied to larger engines (240-260 kW) under turbine energy recovery.

Delta claims that its new 500kW DC fast EV charger (UFC 500) can fully charge a 460 kW powered electric truck/bus within two hours, whilst simultaneously charging two EVs at up to 250kW each. The USP, according to Delta, is the power ratio versus its compactness/footprint ratio. This is largely due to the patented internal circuit topology.

On 2 October 2023, Behr and Hella agreed to sell their respective 50% stakes in the company to AUO for EUR600m.

BorgWarner has installed a “super-fast” 960kW liquid-cooled high-power supercharging HGV electric charger at the Decathlon warehouse in Goodman Citylink near Beijing.

2,300,000 Class A ordinary shares were sold during the underwritten public offering, which closed on 6 March, at a price of USD6.50 per share.

Daimler Truck has signed an MOU with state-owned renewable energy company, Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar), to explore the feasibility of importing liquified green hydrogen from Abu Dhabi (in the UAE) to Europe by 2030.  

REE claims the P7-C is the very first vehicle to be certified to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and Environmental Protection Agency standards to feature steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and drive-by-wire technology.

Build it and they will come. This is the approach being taken by the Moroccan government to grow its automotive industry, which is the largest in Africa but still modest by global standards. The kingdom already has major plants owned by Renault and Stellantis, alongside components production from European, American, and Japanese firms. Relying on foreign companies to do all the work can have variable outcomes, however: for example, a new EV plant which was proposed by Chinese automaker BYD in 2017 has failed to materialise.