Maersk has been embroiled in a year-long court battle with Swedish autonomous transport 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 over the container shipping giant’s termination of the agreement.
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The plaintiff said in a court filing that Maersk and its California-based subsidiaries rejected the deal “after failing to meet its own electric capacity sales targets.”
As for the defendant, Maersk told the Wall Street Journal that 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 had already ordered, while also failing to pay its suppliers at the time.
According to the WSJ report, an Einride spokesperson said the company disagreed with Maersk’s characterization of the circumstances, prompting 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 lawsuit under seal, citing sensitive business and pricing information contained in the contract.
“[Einride’s] “Clients could use this information to demand greater concessions from plaintiffs, regardless of the clients’ individual circumstances,” Judge Robert Broadbelt III said in the order. “Their competitors could use this information to gain an unfair advantage over the plaintiffs in their own negotiations with customers, for example, by offering the same vehicle specifications at a lower price or by using the plaintiffs’ projected revenues to gain insight into their customer strategies or business plans.”
Judge Broadbelt also indicated that competing electric transportation companies could reveal 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 deployment of heavy-duty electric trucks to date.” The deal included Class 8 trucks made by Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD.
They were to be used by Performance Team, the ocean carrier’s warehousing, distribution and transportation subsidiary, and would be the first large-scale use of Einride’s Saga digital road freight operating system. According to the partnership, the subsidiary would load the solutions built by Voltera near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
