For parent Deutz, Torqeedo is a laboratory to study alternative drives. The company, which has produced combustion engines for more than 150 years, already kitted out a telescopic handler and a small excavator with an electric drive, as pressure mounts from cities and municipalities to upgrade construction machines and reduce emissions and noise.
“Almost all of our customers are more or less intensively looking at electric drives,” said Deutz CEO Frank Hiller.
For now, Torqeedo still weighs on its parent company’s accounts. Torqeedo’s operating loss amounted to 8.2 million euros in the first half of this year, according to Deutz’s latest interim report, a deterioration to the previous year’s figure because of a 2.5 million-euro provision tied to product recall from faulty batteries.
Torqeedo gets its technology from the road, adapting components from the automotive industry to save development costs and benefit from economies of scale, Ballin said. For example, the power stores for many Torqeedo drives come from BMW.
“The hardware is the same, we only change the software,” said Soeren Mohr, who works on electric engines for industrial customers at the Munich-based carmaker.
The field in which Torqeedo operates is becoming increasingly crowded. German industrial behemoth Siemens AG has equipped ferries in Norway and Finland. In May, Italian shipyard CCN presented an hybrid-driven super yacht with propulsion systems by Siemens and marine specialist Schottel GmbH.
Besides greener credentials, there’s another benefit of switching to battery power, said Felix von Borck, co-founder of German industrial battery producer Akasol AG.
“If you own a hundred-meter super yacht or a smaller boat, and you are able to navigate silently and emission-free, you get a better berth.”
And in places like Monaco—whether on the crowded landmass or the glitzy harbor below—location is still everything.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.