Portland will be the new home of a $40 million facility geared towards advancing the truck manufacturing industry and helping to usher in low-emission technologies.
Daimler Truck's eCascadia and the eM2 were two of the first electric semi-trucks to hit the highways.
Courtesy of Daimler Trucks North America
Daimler Truck North America will build the 110,000-square-foot engineering facility at its headquarters in Portland. The heavy-duty truck manufacturer said the site will research and test advanced and emerging technologies, some of which focus on lowering planet-warming pollution in the trucking sector. That includes continuing work on battery electric trucking, and researching alternative fuels like hydrogen. The state of Oregon agreed to kick in $700,000 in forgivable loans for the project.
DTNA’s headquarters on Swan Island is where a lot of software development takes place for the company, according to Randy DeBortoli, senior vice president of engineering and technology. He said the current facilities are decades old and weren’t set up to handle today’s advanced manufacturing needs.
“That facility will be set up mostly for configuring our vehicles for our software testing,” DeBortoli said. “Our vehicles have evolved technologically so much just in the past five to 10 years from a software-controlled vehicle perspective that we need those mechanisms and the capacity [...] so that we can do our software testing.”
It will also be the place DTNA tests the efficiency and performance of trucks powered by different fuel sources.
“Another reason why we’re building the facility is — with this highly technical expertise that we need from our people,” DeBortoli said. “We use it as also an enabler to attract and retain talent that we need to keep going as we go through our transformation here.”
The transformation Daimler is going through, DeBortoli said, is to move toward lower emissions technology.
“The work that we do is very rewarding, very interesting. The facilities weren’t set up for it,” he said. “We want to build a facility that people will be proud of.”
The company also said it was investing an additional $3 million in a training center as part of its electric vehicle charging station project. The city’s economic development agency, Prosper Portland, is offering a forgivable loan to cover half those costs.
Some city and state leaders are applauding the decision from the truck maker. DTNA was reportedly considering two other sites for the investments.
“I am thrilled by DTNA’s decision to invest significant resources and continue to lead heavy-duty vehicle technology right here in Portland,” City Commissioner Carmen Rubio said in a press release, calling DTNA an anchor employer in the city.
The company has had its headquarters in Portland since the early 1980s and traces its truck manufacturing on Swan Island to the 1940s. Today the company employs more than 3,000 people in the Portland region.
