ZHODINO, 29 December (BelTA) – The Belarusian automobile engineering company MAZ has opened an enterprise in Zhodino, Minsk Oblast for the sake of assembling electric vehicles, BelTA has learned.
The enterprise will make various modifications of trolleybuses and state-of-the-art electric buses. It will be able to assemble over 300 vehicles per annum.
The assembly wing occupies over 6,600m2. The premises will be used to make MAZ-203T trolleybuses, including those with an increased autonomous cruising range, and MAZ-303E10 buses. Their assembly will begin in 2021.
The assembly process will include all operations, including welding, checking and adjustment, and paintwork. Individual sections have been set up to tune control systems, diagnose electronic systems, receive and release products.
Plans have been made to ship MAZ's latest products to Belarusian cities and export them to CIS and non-CIS states.
The new enterprise has created over 130 jobs.
Belarusian Industry Minister Piotr Parkhomchik said: “Over a short period of time we've managed to build a unique enterprise to assemble electric vehicles. It took us six months to go all the way from an idea to the established assembly lines.”
The official underlined that it is a unique case of public private partnership between MAZ and its partner OOO ETON. The industry minister noted that this kind of cooperation will be adopted in other cities across the country soon.
Piotr Parkhomchik also mentioned that the portfolio of orders of the new enterprise for the year 2021 is full provided the enterprise will make 300 vehicles. On the whole, the new enterprise virtually doubles the country's ability to make passenger electric vehicles.
In turn, MAZ Director General Valery Ivankovich noted that more and more attention on the main target markets is being paid to ecology and the use of electricity for the sake of transportation. “The construction of the Belarusian nuclear power plant expands the market for selling electricity. We can generate electricity on our own unlike fuel. This is why we need to produce environmentally friendly transport domestically. We will explore all the opportunities and will develop passenger electric transport on par with the world standards,” he said.
The MAZ director general said he hopes that the development of competences in the area of electric transport construction will allow creating an entire lineup of passenger transport and will allow being present in all segments of the market.
In his words, the company is now working on an electric bus, which charging time will be four hours at most. A full charge will enable the bus to transport passengers for 24 hours. “A trial run of the electric bus demonstrated that the vehicle can travel for about 270km on one charge. The standard length of a line serviced by an urban bus is 200-240km. The new kind of transport will be charged at night and will work during the day. We believe it is a very effective solution,” Valery Ivankovich stressed. MAZ is now making a batch of ten electric buses in order to polish the technology and determine price parameters of the required components.
