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Its carbon neutral electrification strategy has been boosted by its new interest of Eleo, a Dutch start-up company spun off from a university.

“Yanmar has taken a major share in Eleo,” said Heiko Lange, Yanmar’s regional sales manager, Central Europe, in the company’s industrial power train department. The companies are looking at a highly modular battery with high power density, a specialised design for non-road duties.

“It’s not only a matter of them designing a battery, they’ve already installed it in vehicles, from a 1.5tonne excavator upwards.” The vehicle will be demonstrated, to the amount of space the batteries take up in such a small vehicle. 

Yanmar believes that the move towards electrical power is not just a case of selling batteries, but rather, acting as an all-in-one system integrator. “We would like to be a partner, a system supplier, to other OEMs,” he said.

Retrofitting is going to form part of the company’s future path: “The first concept is to have an existing machine and replace the diesel powertrain with an electrical one. The future will be to design one from scratch. We are about to disclose more details about this strategy.”