Wrightbus adds repowered trucks to its portfolio
Wrightbus has unveiled its first repowered truck as part of plans to grow its share of the market in the zero-emission transport segment.
The manufacturer – which makes around 1,000 buses a year at its Northern Ireland headquarters – also has a bus repowering division, known as NewPower, in Oxfordshire, which strips out diesel engines and replaces them with electric powertrains. It is said to be the largest such facility in the UK.
Now the firm has revealed its first truck conversion, a 19-tonne twin-axle DAF, in a development which is expected to create 160 UK jobs over the next two years.
Wrightbus says that, with the cost of zero-emission vehicles still out of reach for many, its repowered truck comes in at less than half the price of a new one, following a conversion process that can take as little as four weeks involving the removal of the diesel engine and gearbox and their replacement with an electric powertrain.
Wrightbus engineers have reportedly spent 11 months on the project, which has seen the DAF vehicle modified to accommodate a 282kWh battery capable of a 290km range.
The company says that the 19-tonne truck was selected due to its duty cycle DNA which was “remarkably similar” to that of a bus – comprising urban deliveries with fixed routes and back-to-base. As such, Wrightbus’s BEV powertrain has been adapted to suit, with more than 90 per cent parts commonality.
In the future, says Wrightbus, all trucks will be repowered at NewPower’s Bicester facility. Meanwhile, service and maintenance will be offered via a fleet of mobile engineers and a strategic partnership with SVS, which already supports Wrightbus’s zero-emission Rightech trucks brand.
The new truck repowering venture represents part of a wider expansion for Wrightbus across the UK, Europe and Asia. In addition to its service centres in Ballymena and Bicester, the company also has sites in Coventry, Brühl in Germany and Selangor in Malaysia.
According to CEO Jean-Marc Gales, the repowering project is a cornerstone in the fight to decarbonise the truck sector.
“Buses have led the way in decarbonisation for the last two or three years: year-to-date sales of new buses in the UK are 75 per cent zero-emission, but trucks are lagging way behind, with less than 1 per cent of the sector switching to EV,” he said.
“We believe that repowering is the simplest and most cost-effective way to ignite the market and our incredible Wrightbus engineers have more experience than anyone else in replacing internal combustion engines with electric powertrains.”
He added: “We’ve also partnered with a service team that understands trucks like no other, complementing our growing fleet of mobile service engineers.
“Operators and fleet managers can have complete confidence that we can provide a 360-degree solution; helping bus customers adapt from diesel fleets to zero-emission fleets seamlessly, maintaining them with 98.6 per cent uptime, and with each bus covering an average of 50,000 miles per annum.”
