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.
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