Four Daimler Truck design studies sketch autonomous maintenance, electric freight, airship travel and vertical logistics as speculative visions far beyond current product plans.
Daimler Truck has pulled a set of long-range design studies out of its development centers, and none of them are coming to a dealership. The project sits inside the company’s “130 Years of Forward” anniversary program, marking 130 years since the first truck.
Designers from Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Freightliner, Setra and BharatBenz each sketched a different piece of freight transport as they imagine it by 2070. The studies range from robotic maintenance systems to a Zeppelin-inspired passenger airship, and Daimler Truck is upfront that they are exploratory.
Global Design Inspiration IAA 2026 – Bharat Benz
The initiative is called “Global Design Inspiration,” and it pairs veteran designers with younger talent across Daimler Truck’s international design centers. Stefanie Eßers, head of design for Mercedes Trucks, said the goal plainly: the teams are meant to “think beyond today” and explore how people and goods might move decades from now, not next year.
The Mercedes Trucks entry follows a “do more with less” logic, stripping down components and pushing modularity to cut material use and simplify manufacturing. It is the most grounded of the concepts, reading less like science fiction and more like a sustainability exercise applied to a familiar truck silhouette.
Context is important here because Daimler Truck already sells a real electrified product tied to this same anniversary push. The Mercedes-Benz eActros 600 carries a battery pack over 600 kWh and a stated range of 500 km (311 miles) on a single charge, and it is currently hauling beer kegs to two of Germany’s biggest folk festivals.
Global Design Inspiration IAA 2026 – Freighliner
The Freightliner team in Portland built its study around autonomous freight and what the company calls vehicle-robot interaction. The concept imagines automated systems handling maintenance and roadside assistance on their own, cutting humans out of tasks that currently require a technician and a service bay.
Setra‘s contribution, named “Miyanoura,” takes the farthest leap with an airship-style passenger vehicle drawing visual cues from Zeppelins. The idea is not speed or efficiency, it is recasting travel as a comfort experience, something closer to a lounge in the sky than a bus route with wings.
BharatBenz closes the set with “VertiHaul,” a logistics concept built for vertically stacked cities and industrial facilities. It imagines goods moving through multidimensional infrastructure, stacked loading points and vertical corridors, rather than the flat road networks trucks rely on now. Like the other studies, it is a design-center thought experiment with no stated path to a factory floor.
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Daimler Trucks
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