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DHL no longer produces street scooters
Deutsche Post has found a buyer for the street scooter production. Photo: Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert / dpa-Zentralbild / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The yellow street scooters with the red DHL lettering are unmistakable on Germany’s streets. For a long time they came from our own production, but that’s over now.
Deutsche Post DHL has said goodbye to the production of electric vehicles. The Bonn-based group announced on Tuesday that it had sold the production rights for the street scooter to the Luxembourg consortium of companies Odin Automotive.
The buyer will continue to build the Stromer. Information on the purchase price was not given. The Streetscooter subsidiaries in Japan and Switzerland also change hands.
A Streetscooter subsidiary with 300 employees will remain with the yellow giant. The Aachener Streetscooter GmbH is supposed to act as a supplier for Odin – this involves, for example, vehicle parts and batteries that are still in stock anyway. In addition, the Post subsidiary continues to take care of the maintenance work and the maintenance of the Group’s own fleet of electric transporters.
The fleet should grow
The Post currently has around 17,000 street scooters in use in Germany, the electric fleet is to be expanded to 21,500 – the production required for this is now to be carried out by Odin. Swiss Post will have a ten percent stake in the Luxembourg company.
In 2014, the Bonn-based group bought the start-up Streetscooter, founded by Aachen professors, and initially duped the automotive industry with the yellow electric cars from in-house production. According to Swiss Post, due to the lack of a suitable electrical supply on the van market, she was forced to take responsibility for the deal herself.
The initial PR coup turned into an expensive affair. The Stromer contributed to the fact that the CO2 balance of the logistics giant could be significantly improved. But there were hardly any noteworthy sales successes to external customers. In 2019, the Post announced the sale of 500 street scooters to a Japanese logistics company, but that remained the only major order. Most of the street scooters stayed in their own ranks. Changes in management fizzled out, expansion plans in China and the USA came to nothing.
Odin has plans
Just a few years after the purchase, Swiss Post was open to selling a street scooter. But no one wanted to find a buyer. Almost two years ago, CEO Appel announced the cessation of production – the stocks should still be processed, then it should be over. The yellow giant wanted to concentrate on its core competence – logistics – again. The new course led to a thick street scooter special depreciation of 318 million euros in the financial year. Swiss Post is finally ending its prestigious but costly excursion into the vehicle manufacturing industry.
The buyer, on the other hand, still has big plans: In a press release from Odin, Streetscooter is said to be the first takeover “in a series of transactions to be completed in the course of the coming year”. The company wants to become “a new global market leader” in the manufacture and sale of electric, light commercial vehicles. At the head of Odin is the manager Stefan Krause, who was previously CFO at BMW and Deutsche Bank. He described the Streetscooter takeover as a “major milestone” for Odin Automotive.