From 1 Person to 50 Pilots: Scania’s Speedboat Team

Scania can forecast what its customers need for the next two years. For everything after that, it sends a small team ahead to run pilots that buyers pay for and partners help build.

A cruise ship carries thousands of passengers in comfortable cabins. As the ship is so big, turning, speeding up, or braking takes a long time. Its captain therefore has to set the route far in advance.

Tony Sandberg, Vice President of Scania Pilot Partner, uses that picture to describe the 135-year-old company. Scania has turned a profit every year since 1934. Its lean, customer-first operation is built for steady improvement, so it can forecast what customers will need next year and the year after. Beyond those two years, the forecasts get much weaker. Electrification, connectivity, and automated driving are bringing new players into trucking, which creates more possible combinations of technology and business models than anyone can predict.

Five years ago, Scania set up a small team to act as the ship’s speedboats. In Tony’s picture, a speedboat goes ahead of the ship and reports back what it sees. In real life, the team, called Pilot Partner, tests new trucks and buses with paying customers before Scania commits to them.

Suppliers, integrators, and infrastructure partners help build and run each pilot, sharing the risk with Scania. In São Paulo, local partners helped Scania put an electric bus into service within 12 months, after which the operator bought 400. In Germany, a truck Scania first turned down for DHL is now changing the company’s strategy.

According to Tony, both pilots worked for the same reasons: a real customer problem, partners who shared the risk, and trust between them.

Before Pilot Partner could bring a single outside partner on board, Scania’s own leadership had to trust the team. Tony earned that trust by scouting ahead for the business. Between 2005 and 2020, Scania had tried several other formats to innovate beyond its core, but according to Tony, most of them stalled on the company’s culture.

The first speedboats ran ahead of the ship along Scania’s main strategy. They looked for icebergs, cliffs, pirates, and other dangers, then reported back to the captain, meaning Scania’s leadership. The captain decides what to do with each report.

In practice, each speedboat is a real commercial test with a real customer. Pilot Partner builds a working vehicle, sells it to the customer on commercial terms, then checks how well it fits the customer’s daily work. Since the customer pays for the vehicle, both Scania and the customer carry part of the risk.

By scouting the main strategy for leadership, Pilot Partner won permission to send speedboats along other routes toward the same target, which today is sustainable transport. As a result, Scania has a plan B ready if the main route runs into trouble.

On every route, Pilot Partner follows Scania’s internal rules. Tony has to stay aligned with Scania’s target, comply with finance, and keep to his budget. On top of keeping to the budget, he has to show the team is worth its funding, or in his words, needs to “deserve my budget internally.”

The team also depends on the rest of Scania to deliver every pilot. R&D, production, sales, and the workshops build and support the vehicles, so Tony needs those teams to want to work with him. But even with that support in place, Tony still had to decide which pilots to start, and with which partners.

When R&D brings Tony a new technical solution, he answers with a question: “Sure, but why? What is the problem?” Because Scania puts the customer first, Pilot Partner starts a pilot only after a customer comes to the team with a problem.

With a customer problem in hand, the team then needs three more things: a solution, a business case that works, and confidence that Scania can scale the result.

Building that business case means looking past the customer. Scania’s customers are transport companies, the businesses that run trucks to move other companies’ goods. When one of them buys an electric truck from Scania, it needs help from three other groups to make the switch worthwhile:

Because these groups depend on each other, a pilot has to solve a problem that matters to all of them. Pilot Partner therefore brings each group into the pilot as a partner.

Tony says the job of forecasting the future of transport is so large that Scania needs partners for every part of it. Partners help the team understand the real problem and the range of possible solutions, and they take on part of each pilot’s risk. Tony says those partnerships rest on shared learning and shared risk.

To scale a pilot, Pilot Partner agrees on a three-step plan with every partner. The team moves to the next step only when all partners can keep the same pace. Large companies and small suppliers move at different speeds, however, so keeping them on the same path is complicated. “But that is what it takes,” Tony says.

Pilot Partner began its work in Sweden, where it built the first electric timber truck in 2022, carrying 62 tons of timber. The team also ran electric trucks with Swedish mining companies LKAB and Boliden. Those mining pilots caught the attention of customers in Australia, which has since become a large mining market for Scania, with many pilots now testing electric trucks in mines.

Beyond mining, the portfolio covers megawatt charging, fuel cell trucks, and second-life batteries for packs that have worn out in trucks. Some pilots also answer regional needs, since a city in Latin America, for instance, may need something different from a city in Europe. In the past, Scania developed every solution centrally in Södertälje, Sweden; Tony says that approach belongs to the past.

Whether a pilot follows Scania’s strategy or challenges it, the team needs partners willing to share its risk. And because Pilot Partner is a small team inside a company of more than 50,000 people, those partners first need a reason to trust it.

Tony puts trust at the center of every partnership.

Tony breaks that trust into four parts:

For Tony, a partnership holds when the pilot serves both what Scania wants and what the partner wants, because then both sides gain from it.

Because partners judge a team on what it delivers over time, Tony starts new partnerships with small projects. His advice to organizations still building a partner network is the same: find a partner who shares the same goal, start with something small, then take on bigger work together as trust grows.

When the city of São Paulo decided to allow only electric city buses, Scania faced a timing problem. Scania wanted to sell electric buses, but its own model was still in development. Meanwhile, competitors were already entering the Brazilian market with electric buses of their own.

Bus operators gave Scania a reason to move fast. They had doubts about the quality of the competitors’ buses, so they wanted the durability they knew from Scania. If Scania waited for its own bus, those operators would have to buy elsewhere.

Pilot Partner found the opportunity and looked outside Scania for the parts. Brazilian companies already made batteries and electric motors; so a local integrator, Eletra, agreed to assemble those parts into a bus on a Scania chassis. Eletra handled the mechanical work, but it got stuck on the software that links the new parts to the rest of the Scania bus. Pilot Partner solved that problem by helping build software that separates the Scania chassis from the powertrain and the body, so the chassis could run with parts from other makers. As a result, Scania had to make only one new part.

Each partner got a separate job:

Pilot Partner finished the software in six months. After six more months of testing and road approval, the first bus was carrying passengers in São Paulo, one year after the work began. The operator liked the bus so much that it bought 400 of them, and those buses kept Scania in the city’s market while its own battery electric bus was still in development.

Tony credits the result to one small problem his team solved for its partners. In his words, the team, “with small means, could find a tiny problem that no one else could solve and enable scaling.” Because Scania already planned to sell electric buses, it was ready to scale the pilot. The Brazilian partners simply let Scania start selling those buses before its own model was ready.

DHL, one of Scania’s biggest customers, asked for an electric truck with a small gasoline engine on board. The engine, called a range extender, charges the batteries while the truck drives. At the time, Scania’s strategy called for battery electric trucks for every job. A truck with a gasoline engine is a hybrid, which that strategy ruled out, so Scania turned the request down.

Since DHL knew Scania’s CEO, the request came back, and this time it reached Pilot Partner. Tony sent a manager to DHL’s headquarters to find out what they needed. The manager first tried to sell what Scania already had: a battery electric truck with extra batteries, but DHL turned that down too. The manager came back, convinced the request deserved a closer look.

Over the next few conversations, DHL explained its problem in detail. DHL wanted to run a swap-body truck, which carries a cargo box that lifts off at the depot, between Berlin and Hamburg. A standard Scania battery electric truck can already cover that route. The difficulty came from three other needs:

Overall, DHL needed trucks that keep running when charging is out of reach or overloaded. With that need clear, Pilot Partner built a prototype with a gasoline engine that charges the batteries while the truck drives. Since March 2025, the truck has driven 116,000 km at around 500 km a day. The grid supplied 91% of its energy, and CO2 emissions fell by 91%.

DHL was so happy with the prototype that it now wants to order hundreds of the trucks. In response, Scania is changing its strategy to include the range extender. Scania now presents the truck as a “bridge solution”: an electric truck that gives customers extra range when charging falls short, built so Scania can scale it to other customers. The target stays the same, sustainable transport, while the strategy gains a second route to reach it. Scania now plans to industrialize the truck.

Tony credits the change of strategy to the prototype.

Both pilots worked as speedboats in Tony’s sense. Each one went ahead of the cruise ship, tested a route with partners, then came back with results that Scania’s leadership could act on.

The two pilots also show two different ways a partner pilot can grow inside a large company. A pilot that fits the strategy grows once the company is ready for it, as the São Paulo bus did. A pilot outside the strategy needs a working result strong enough to change that strategy, as the DHL truck did. Inside Scania, one rule applies to both: Pilot Partner scales a pilot only when a part of Scania wants to take the solution on. Tony calls those parts “happy homes.”

The team’s next pilots, including the fuel cell trucks Scania is rolling out to the market, will need the same mix of partners: suppliers that build parts, customers that pay for pilots and explain their real problems, and infrastructure partners that make charging possible.

Pilot Partner keeps those partners by building their trust in small steps. As Tony puts it: “You can’t just order someone to be your partner. It doesn’t really work that way.”