Volume production of ZF’s CeTrax lite electric drive for light commercial vehicles (earlier post) started in April 2023; ZF has now announced that it has already produced its first thousand units. The ramp-up in volume production was steeper than planned because demand from the customer ISUZU increased.

The drive is used by ISUZU to power the latest generation its light distributor truck, the ISUZU ELF EV. Further volume production is set to start imminently this year.

The electric central drive for light commercial vehicles continues the success story of its "big brother" CeTrax, which went into volume production in 2020. The central drive, which is also produced at the ZF Friedrichshafen location, is mainly used in buses with orders from customers in South Korea, the USA, Australia, and Europe.

The new CeTrax 2 dual electric central drive will be manufactured from Friedrichshafen from this year on.

A feature of ZF’s CeTrax concept is that the all-electric central drive is suitable for electrifying existing commercial vehicle platforms. In this way, manufacturers can expand their portfolio towards purely electric vehicles without having to make further significant alterations to their design platforms.

As the volume production of the large CeTrax, which has also been manufactured in Friedrichshafen since 2020, shows, this concept is particularly attractive for manufacturers of city buses, as well as for special vehicles operating in ports and logistics centers. Electrification with CeTrax lite offers just as much potential for small delivery trucks, city buses or special vehicles, which are mainly used for the last mile deliveries to consumers and therefore are suited to operate in low-emission zones of inner-city environments.

CeTrax lite is an all-electric drive with a peak output of 150 kW that sits centrally in the vehicle frame—the space normally occupied by the conventional transmission in combustion vehicles. The key customer is the Japanese commercial vehicle manufacturer ISUZU, which has been supplying its ELF EV vehicles equipped with CeTrax to customers worldwide since October 2023.

ZF is able to generate a high level of production and added value for the CeTrax lite because many of its components will also be manufactured by ZF at other locations for final assembly in Friedrichshafen, including Schweinfurt and Auerbach.