Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV) in collaboration with Motherson Group has unveiled the BSafe Express, a solution to transport the COVID-19 vaccine across India. The partnership aims at building trucks in the quickest and most efficient way to execute this mammoth of a logistics task. The entire BSafe Express project will be 100 per cent Made in India and will be the world’s largest COVID vaccine drive with over one billion vaccines set to be delivered.
The BSafe Express trucks will be based on BharatBenz’ ten tonner to 42 tonner reefer trucks depending on various factors like location, terrain and size of shipment. Reefer trucks, in short, are refrigerated trucks designed to meet the needs of the cold chain transport sector. The container that will carry the vaccine was designed by Daimler to be modular and easy to assemble and will be manufactured by the Motherson group. The modular container can be built on an existing truck chassis in under 96 hours, an incredible time given the size and safety parameters that they have to meet in order to maintain the efficacy of the vaccine. It will have sensors on-board to regulate the temperature at all times and a different set of sensors to maintain a log of when doors are locked and unlocked to make sure the vaccine isn’t tampered with in any way. DICV and Motherson will also launch an app for various logistics parties involved to track this information in real time. The whole reefer container itself is built using strong but light Glass Reinforced Plastic (GRP) and the insides are lined with Extruded Polystyrene Foam (XPS), a required insulation for any sort of medicines transport.
Apart from the newly designed container, BharatBenz is also offering more features as standard in BSafe Express to keep the drivers safe and comfortable. In what Daimler calls the ‘COVID free cabin’, it gets air suspension seats covered in an infection-free fabric, basic safety kit, partition between the seats and the driver rest area, AC with recirculation, power windows and a driver monitoring system. As an optional extra, the trucks are also available with UV and fogging disinfection systems. Also, the fact that BharatBenz trucks are the only ones to have been crash tested in India makes it all the more safer on the whole.
Currently, reefer trucks take up just 15 per cent of the truck market and with the BSafe Express, Daimler claims that the numbers are set to change dramatically. They reckon that more than 12 to 15 thousand trucks are required to carry out the entire operation. With the added safety and comfort features and an innovative way to assemble these purpose built vehicles fast, the BharatBenz BSafe Express trucks seem ideal for this delicate operation.