Who builds trucks in Europe

There are more truck badges on a European motorway than there are companies behind them. Six industrial groups build essentially every heavy vehicle sold in the European Union, and one of the six is currently changing owner. Knowing which badge belongs to which group is not trade trivia. It decides whose dealer network you depend on when a vehicle stops on a Friday afternoon, whose engine and gearbox are actually under the cab, and how wide the aftermarket turns out to be for the part you need.

The six groups

Daimler Truck sells in Europe as Mercedes-Benz, with Setra for coaches, and carries Freightliner and Western Star in North America, BharatBenz in India and Thomas Built Buses. Around 100,000 employees across 35 main locations.

TRATON GROUP is Volkswagen’s commercial vehicle arm and holds four brands: Scania, MAN, International in North America and Volkswagen Truck & Bus in South America. Sales revenue of €44.1 billion, more than 107,000 employees, 26 major production sites. Scania and MAN compete for the same European customers while sharing a parent, an arrangement the group manages by keeping their engineering identities deliberately separate — which is why a Scania S-series and a MAN TGX share almost nothing you could put your hand on.

Volvo Group owns Volvo Trucks, Renault Trucks and Mack, with factories in 17 countries. Volvo and Renault Trucks are the closest of the nominal competitors: they are assembled in shared plants and draw drivelines from the same group engine and transmission works.

PACCAR is American, and its European brand is DAF. DAF builds in Eindhoven, Westerlo and Leyland, with further plants in Brazil, Australia and Taiwan, behind a network of about 1,100 independent dealer locations.

Iveco Group carries eight brands: IVECO for trucks, IVECO BUS and HEULIEZ for buses, FPT Industrial for engines, MAGIRUS for firefighting, ASTRA for quarry work, IDV for defence and IVECO CAPITAL for finance. More than 35,000 employees and 26 plants.

Ford Otosan is the outlier — a joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Koç Holding that builds Ford Trucks in Turkey and sells them across European markets.

Where the vehicles are physically built

The badge and the postcode rarely match, and for lead times and parts logistics the postcode is the useful fact.

Mercedes-Benz assembly centres on Wörth am Rhein, the lead and largest volume plant in the network, running in the mid to high five figures of trucks a year depending on demand. Its output includes the Actros L as well as the Arocs and Atego.

MAN builds the TGS and TGX at Munich, with diesel and electric variants on one mixed line, while Kraków covers the entire portfolio at more than 200 vehicles a day. Nuremberg makes the engines and, since 2025, MAN’s own battery packs; Salzgitter supplies non-driven axles and crankshafts across Europe; Starachowice in Poland and Ankara in Turkey build the buses, Ankara being MAN’s largest bus plant.

Scania concentrates every cab in its European production at Oskarshamn, a plant of 2,700 people, and feeds them to the chassis assembly lines.

Volvo Group assembles Volvo trucks at Tuve in Gothenburg and at Ghent, with cabs from Umeå; Renault Trucks come from Bourg-en-Bresse and Blainville, and Blainville builds Volvo vehicles too. Engines and transmissions come from Skövde and Köping in Sweden and Vénissieux in France.

IVECO’s Madrid plant is the only heavy-vehicle production site in Spain and builds the entire heavy range, taking cabs from Valladolid already welded and painted. Its 2,700 workers handle roughly 40,000 possible configurations across 267 base models — an average configuration is built about three times a year, which tells you more about European truck ordering than any market-share table.

Ford Otosan’s Eskişehir plant is unusual in combining vehicle, diesel engine and powertrain on a single site: Ford Trucks tractors, road and construction ranges alongside the Ecotorq engines fitted to them, with 2025 capacity of 22,500 truck and tractor units.

The map is moving

In March 2026 Daimler Truck announced a new plant at Cheb in the Czech Republic, around 25,000 units a year and more than 1,000 jobs, taking assembly pressure off Wörth while painted cab bodies continue to be shipped from Wörth. More than €2 billion goes into the German sites through 2030, over half of it at Wörth. Aksaray in Turkey stays in the network with an adjusted programme. The stated reason is complexity: too many variants for one site to absorb.

MAN is doing something comparable in Poland. Kraków becomes the group’s second electrified truck site after Munich, with eTGL production starting in mid-July 2026 and the medium-duty eTGM to follow, behind an investment programme of around €1.2 billion that roughly doubles the production area from 130,000 to 270,000 square metres. Electric assembly is moving into the volume plant rather than being walled off in a specialist one.

And Iveco Group is changing hands. Tata Motors agreed in 2025 to acquire it at €14.1 per share, roughly €3.8 billion, with the defence business IDV carved out and sold separately. For anyone running Iveco vehicles the commitments matter more than the price: headquarters staying in Turin, no material restructuring or plant closures as a direct consequence of the deal for two years, and no workforce reduction envisaged.

Who makes their own driveline

This is the split that matters most if you buy parts rather than trucks.

Mercedes-Benz, Scania and the Volvo Group brands are vertically integrated. The engine, the automated gearbox and the axles are the manufacturer’s own: Mercedes OM engines with PowerShift, Scania engines with Opticruise, Volvo D13 with I-Shift. Renault Trucks sits inside that same architecture.

DAF, MAN and IVECO take the other route on transmissions, buying automated gearboxes from ZF while keeping engines in-house or in-group — PACCAR MX for DAF, MAN’s own D-series, FPT Cursor for IVECO, FPT being an Iveco Group brand in its own right.

The practical effect is on your sourcing. A ZF transmission component has an aftermarket spanning three truck makes and a large independent supply base. A Scania gearbox component effectively has one channel. Air system, braking and electrical components run the other way: those come from a small shared set of suppliers across all six groups, which is why an independent parts business can serve every make on this list without stocking six of everything.

What to take from it

Dealer coverage is group coverage. When you assess whether a make is serviceable on your routes, you are assessing the group’s network, not the brand’s marketing.

Cross-shopping within a group is less useful than it looks. Scania against MAN is a real comparison despite the shared owner; Volvo against Renault Trucks is much less of one.

And ownership changes are worth watching for exactly one reason: they change the parts and service organisation eventually, whatever the two-year commitments say at signing. A fleet buying an IVECO today is buying into a network whose owner will be different by the time the vehicle is three years old.