MAN major order: Hamburg orders 53 electric buses

The commercial vehicle manufacturer MAN Truck & Bus is experiencing an ever-increasing demand for electric buses. Since the sales launch of the Lion’s City E in 2020, the company has signed contracts with customers for the delivery of more than 700 electric buses. In the past fiscal year, the share of Lion’s City E vehicles sold by MAN in Europe amounted to about 5.5 percent of all over 2,400 MAN city buses. According to MAN, this places the company third in terms of registered electric buses in Germany in 2021, which are produced at the MAN plant in Starachowice, Poland.

“Our goal is very clear: to get significantly more electric buses on the road. By 2025, half of our new city buses will be alternatively powered. And we expect that just five years later - by 2030 - 90% of our city buses will be delivered with battery power,” says Rudi Kuchta, Head of Business Unit Bus at MAN Truck & Bus.

New in the order book – two orders from Hamburg

It’s a first for Hamburger Hochbahn AG – the northern German transit company is ordering from MAN for the first time. The order book in Munich includes 17 MAN Lion’s City 18 E buses. The 18-meter version of MAN's electric buses can accommodate up to 130 passengers. MAN relies on two central motors on the second and third axles for the drive, which, according to MAN, benefits the driving behavior. The electric buses offer a range of up to 350 km under favorable conditions over the entire battery life, which are installed on the vehicle roof.

Order No. 2 for 30 MAN Lion’s City E solo buses and six articulated buses comes from the Hamburg-Holstein Transport Authority (VHH), which is opting for MAN’s electric buses for the third time. The delivery of the first buses is planned for this year. The electric solo bus can accommodate up to 88 passengers and is powered by a central motor on the rear axle. The energy for the fully electric drive system also comes from the roof-mounted batteries.

Recently, both Hamburg public transport companies received funding notices from Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing amounting to nearly 160 million euros for the procurement of a total of 472 additional electric buses including charging infrastructure – busplaner reported.