MAN’S Autonomous Driving Projects Win 2024 Truck Innovation Award

MAN’s Autonomous driving projects ATLAS-L4 and ANITA won the 2024 Truck Innovation Award. The International Truck of the Year journalists presented Frederik Zohm, Executive Board Member for R&D at MAN Truck & Bus, with the prestigious award during the press day of Solutrans, the biennial trade fair for haulage and urban transport professionals, in Lyon, France.

It’s the second time MAN Truck & Bus has won this trophy, after the inaugural Truck Innovation Award edition of 2019 in recognition of its aFAS Level 4 automated driverless safety truck.

The Truck Innovation Award - which acknowledges the enormous technological changes and energy transition within the automotive sector - has been awarded by the International Truck of the Year (ITOY) jury. This group comprises 25 commercial vehicle editors and senior journalists representing major trucking magazines from Europe and South Africa.

With a winning score of 97 votes, MAN’s advanced projects fought off the competition from ZF electrified eAxle, Quantron-as-a-service (QaaS), a zero-emission platform provider for fuel cell and battery electric commercial vehicles, and Westwell Q-Truck, an autonomous electric heavy-duty truck for innovative container logistics.

The ANITA research and development project - Autonomous Innovation in Terminal Operations - started in 2020 to automate handling between different modes of transport. ANITA aims to use autonomous trucks to stabilize the processes involved in transferring containers from road to rail, making them more efficient, easier to plan, and, at the same time, more flexible.

The ATLAS-L4 research and development project (Automated Transport between Logistics Centers on Level 4 Expressways) aims to put Level 4 autonomous trucks on the road in re- al-world operations. The project already takes into account the framework conditions of the German law on autonomous driving passed in 2021, which basically allows automated driving on defined routes under technical supervision.

The IToY journalists praised the advanced characteristics of both projects, the contribution to hub-to-hub and intermodal transport automation, and the fruitful project cooperation between MAN Truck & Bus, logistics providers, component suppliers, research institutions, and public public infrastructure operators.

Summing up the jury vote, International Truck of the Year Chairman Gianenrico Griffini commented, “MAN’s ANITA AND ATLAS-L4 projects proof that autonomous driving is feasible today and can have a role in making transport operations safer and more efficient, laying the foundation for innovative transport and logistics concepts”.

Source: ITOY