Truck Innovation Award for MAN autonomous driving

MAN’s autonomous driving projects, the ATLAS-L4 and ANITA, have won the 2024 Truck Innovation Award.

The International Truck of the Year (IToY) journalists presented the award to Lukas Walter, senior vice president engineering truck MAN Truck & Bus; Andreas Zimmermann, head of electrics and electronics automation system; Amelie Jacquemart-Purson, head of the ANITA project; and Sebastian Völl, head of the ATLAS-L4 project, during Solutrans, the biennial trade fair for haulage and urban transport professionals.

It’s the second time MAN Truck & Bus has won this trophy – which acknowledges the enormous technological changes and energy transition within the automotive sector – having taken home the inaugural Truck Innovation Award in 2019 in recognition of its aFAS Level 4 automated driverless safety truck.

The Truck Innovation Award was awarded by the IToY jury, comprising 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 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 project, which stands for “Autonomous Innovation in Terminal Operations”, started in 2020 to automate handling between different modes of transport. ANITA aims to use autonomous trucks to stabilise the processes involved in transferring containers from road to rail, thereby making them more efficient, easier to plan, and also more flexible.

The ATLAS-L4 research and development project (Automated Transport between Logistics Centres on Level 4 Expressways) aims to put Level 4 autonomous trucks on the road in real-world operations. The project stems from the German law on autonomous driving. Approved in 2021, in principle the law allows automated driving on defined routes under technical supervision.

“MAN’s ANITA and ATLAS-L4 projects prove 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,” noted IToY chairperson Gianenrico Griffini.

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

Certified by Dekra

The votes for the International Truck of the Year and the Truck Innovation Award were independently collated and certified by Dekra. The company has eight service divisions offering a broad portfolio of services: vehicle inspection, claims and expertise, product testing, industrial inspection, consulting, audits, training, and temp work. This portfolio focuses on safety on the road, at work, and at home across 60 countries and five continents worldwide. Dekra has around 44,000 employees and generates a turnover of approximately €3.4 billion.