Volkswagen will spend EUR1.4bn (US$1.7bn) on new technology including electric trucks and buses by 2022, its trucks chief Andreas Renschler said.
The money will go toward electric drives, autonomous vehicles and cloud-based systems, he told Reuters on the sidelines of a company event on Wednesday (11 October).
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He also said a spin-off of VW’s trucks business remained an option, the news agency added.
Navistar International and Volkswagen Truck & Bus announced plans last month to collaborate on electric vehicles, saying they would launch an electric medium duty truck in North America by late 2019.
Daimler last month delivered the first of a smaller range of electric delivery trucks to customers in New York, Reuters noted.
Renschler earlier told Bloomberg he expected electric trucks for local deliveries to exceed a 5% market share by 2025.
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By GlobalDataOn development, Volkswagen Truck & Bus is pooling its brands’ resources using lead engineering where responsibility for a joint development project is assigned to one brand, coordinated by central R&D.
CTO Anders Nielsen said: “We are organising collaboration and by doing so apply lead engineering which delegates responsibility for common development projects to one brand. This is to avoid duplication and leverage synergies by re-using technologies across the brands. This will allow us to free up research and development resources to focus on new technologies as well as to be faster to market in a cost-efficient way.”
