Wise from experience
Dare to do something new, and then take a few knocks: The Haller family has known how to do this for generations. Our author Stefan Ruzas met Andreas Haller for the spring/summer issue of LfA Magazine. He spoke with the founder of Quantron AG in Augsburg about innovations, new business ideas and how the transportation of goods and us humans will change. Photographer Florian Generotzky captured the interview in pictures.
When Gottfried Haller recommends to farmers around Augsburg after the Second World War that they take their horses and oxen off the field and use a diesel-powered tractor instead, the farmers counter indignantly: "You're crazy! That's the devil's stuff, you don't do that!"
His descendant Andreas is no different. When talking to major vehicle manufacturers, he usually hears, "We do diesel and it stays that way." Which is somehow logical when you have developed a well-functioning diesel engine that consists of around 25,000 individual parts. By way of comparison, a standard electric motor has just 2,000.
In the meantime, more than 500 vehicles converted by Quantron partners are already rolling on Europe's roads.
But manufacturers remain reluctant. Even when more than half of German municipalities are already tackling the electrification of their urban fleets. So here it is again, this key moment on the road to a new age. In 2019, Andreas Haller founds Quantron AG, a kind of electrified offshoot of the family business Haller Nutzfahrzeuge.
"The future starts now," he promises in presentations, brochures and discussion panels. Quantron stands for e-mobility in passenger and freight transport. The idea: to use existing resources as sensibly and sustainably as possible, existing or used vehicles are converted; either purely electrically or together with a fuel cell system. In technical terms, this is known as repowering. This works for transporters for logistics or the trades as well as for refuse collection vehicles, airport buses or 44-ton trucks for construction. Depending on the effort involved, the conversion costs from 35,000 euros.
"Our real innovation is that we've built a whole ecosystem in barely a year and a half. And that includes, among other things, consulting as well as financing and policy offerings," Haller tells us. Even the names have already been decided: Q-Consulting, Q-Bank and Q-Insurance. Quantron plans to go public this year, possibly even in the United States. "Honestly, without LfA's Innovation Loan 4.0 and without digitization, our baby would not have been born," says Haller.
You can read the company portrait of Quantron AG in full in the LfA Magazine Spring/Summer 2021. The German version of the main contents of the issue are also available online at lfa.de/magazin.
Storyboard has been producing the customer magazine of LfA Förderbank Bayern since 2016. Twice a year, the state development institute of the Free State of Bavaria uses the magazine to provide information about news and financing opportunities. In the spring/summer issue 2021, the focus was on "Innovations".
