Transport lab

Scania’s Transport Laboratory is used for some of Scania’s own internal transport needs. The operation consists of 45 trucks and coaches, of which 14 are tractors for long distance transport. Since 2018, the fleet has been exclusively running on fossil-free fuel and hybrid powertrains, which reduces the lab's carbon emissions by more than 95 percent.

The Transport Laboratory was founded in 2008 as an extension of Scania’ s research and development department, to help the company learn even more about its customers’ challenges and explore how profitability could be improved. Within its first five years the lab had reduced its fuel consumption by 20 percent and carbon emissions by 50 percent per transported tonne.

“This is about practising what we preach. We are not asking our customers and the industry in general to do something that we are not willing to do ourselves,” says Jan Björklund, Head of Scania Transport Laboratory.

Every day, the Scania Transport Laboratory operates 14 truck and trailer combinations between the manufacturing plants in Södertälje, Sweden, and Zwolle in the Netherlands. Over the course of a year, each truck is driven for approximately 400,000 kilometres, which is about three times as much as a truck would run in the same time in an average haulage operation.

This on-the-job research gives the lab a uniquely quick opportunity to test and assess vehicle quality and performance. Equally important is to test theories about flow analysis and planning as these help Scania to remove waste from the transport system. Driver training ia slo part of the efficiency equation.

“One of the key lessons for us is the effect of planning and driver training. We see that it works and that fairly small adjustments have a big impact. For example, reducing the speed from 90 to 80 km/h in the long haulage operations reduces fuel by 10 percent, while the comparative time loss is only one percent,” explains Björklund.