Maersk Clashes with Driverless Trucking Firm in Court Over Failed 300-Truck EV Deal

MAERSK-B.CO -1.39%

Maersk has been engaged in a yearlong court battle with Swedish autonomous trucking provider Einride over the collapse of a partnership that was supposed to provide the ocean carrier with hundreds of its electric trucks.

Einride filed a lawsuit against Maersk in November 2024 in Los Angeles County Superior Court surrounding the container shipping giant’s termination of the deal.

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The plaintiff said in a court filing that Maersk and its California-based affiliates turned away from the deal “after not being able to live up to their own sales targets for electric capacity.”

As for the defendant, Maersk told the Wall Street Journal it had “no choice” but to end the partnership last November. A company spokesperson accused Einride of failing to deliver additional electric vehicles (EVs) that the carrier already ordered, all while failing to pay their vendors at the time.

According to the WSJ report, an Einride spokesperson said the company did not agree with Maersk’s characterization of the circumstances, sparking the legal action.

The news was first reported by Danish business newspaper Børsen last week.

In January, the California court granted Einride’s request to file parts of the complaint under seal, citing the sensitive commercial and pricing information contained in the contract.

“[Einride’s] customers could use this information to demand greater concessions from Plaintiffs irrespective of the customers’ individual circumstances,” said Judge Robert Broadbelt III in the order. “Their competitors could use this information to gain an unfair advantage over Plaintiffs in their own negotiations with customers e.g., by offering the same vehicle specifications at a lower price or using Plaintiffs’ projected revenues to gain insight into their customer strategies or business plans.”

Judge Broadbelt also indicated that competing electric trucking firms could disclose some of Einride’s confidential financial information.

Under the deal, first announced in March 2022, Maersk was expected to add 300 electric trucks to its North American network. At the time, the deal was described as the “largest heavy-duty electric truck deployment to date.” The deal included Class 8 trucks manufactured by Chinese EV manufacturer BYD.

They were to be used by the ocean carrier’s warehousing, distribution and transportation subsidiary Performance Team, and would be the first large-scale use of Einride’s Saga digital road freight operating system. Under the partnership, the subsidiary would charging solutions built by Voltera near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

As part of the deal, the companies also would deploy 150 charging stations between 2023 and 2025 across California, Illinois and New Jersey.

With or without Einride in the fold, Maersk still aims to reduce GHG emissions across all modes of transport and its logistics centers by 2030, with a net-zero emissions target by 2040.

The company was purchasing electric trucks elsewhere in 2022, having placed orders for 110 Volvo VNR vehicles in the U.S. for Performance Team, a year after buying 16 of the EVs. Maersk also purchased 25 Volvo FH trucks in Germany, where it began using them for local deliveries around the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven.

And more recently in Chile, Maersk partnered with local freight transportation provider Sotraser Chile where it will introduce Volvo and Foton electric trucks into its service offerings. Maersk is actively exploring opportunities in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Panama, and Uruguay to expand these solutions.

Through its venture capital wing Maersk Growth, the container shipping giant is investor in Einride, having been part of a $110 million Series B funding round unveiled in May 2021.

At the time, the trucking technology company said the investment would be used to scale up deployments with Einride’s major customer base in Europe and the U.S.

News of the lawsuit broke just days after Einride announced it was prepping to go public via a SPAC merger in the first half of 2026.

The driverless trucking and technology firm says it currently has of fleet of approximately 200 vehicles—still roughly 100 below the 300 that were initially slated to be delivered as part of the 2022 Maersk deal.

In the press release, Einride said it had more than 25 enterprise customers, with one major logistics partner being U.A.E.-based port operator giant DP World.

According to DP World, Einride began providing an electric fleet to the company to assist in reducing emissions at Jebel Ali Port. That fleet is being deployed as part of a multi-phased rollout through 2026, and is capable of moving 2 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) annually.

The port operator did not specify how many vehicles the autonomous trucking company was providing for the project.