Tatra Trucks a.s.

Tatra has been making vehicles in Koprivnice, in Czech Moravia, since 1850, which puts it among the oldest surviving vehicle makers anywhere. The present company, Tatra Trucks a.s., dates from 2013, when two Czech families bought the assets out of a long financial collapse. Czechoslovak Group holds 65 percent and Promet Group the remaining 35. Roughly 1,600 people work at the plant. What sets the product apart is a chassis concept the firm has kept since the 1920s, a central load-bearing backbone tube carrying independently swinging half axles, which lets each wheel move without twisting the frame. Buyers who care about broken ground pay for that and nothing else, which is why Tatra sells into armies, fire brigades, mining and heavy construction rather than the road haulage market.

Tatra Force, the military and firefighting range formally designated T 815-7, is the volume product. It is configured from 4x4 up to 16x16, with two-door, four-door and extended four-door cabs seating up to eight, and engines that run from the air-cooled Tatra V8 and V12 on military F-34 fuel to Cummins, Caterpillar and Volvo units for export customers on Euro 6. A third generation appeared at Eurosatory in 2024 with a redesigned cab that won a Red Dot award, and military versions entered series production in 2025. Slovakia signed a framework contract in 2025 covering Force vehicles in 4x4, 6x6 and 8x8 form across 24 configurations with a ceiling above one billion euros. Defence work accounted for more than a thousand vehicles in 2025, several hundred more than the year before, and the company has put around 700 million koruna into production technology to reach 2,500 units a year.

Tatra Phoenix, built on the T158 platform, pairs the backbone chassis with a Paccar cab and DAF driveline for construction and logistics, and it also appears in armoured form, including a 10x10 bridge carrier fitted with the KNDS Leguan superstructure. The Tatra 810 is a lighter medium truck sold purely to defence customers as the 810 M. Tatra chassis are supplied bare to other integrators, which is how the same running gear ends up under the KNDS Caesar 8x8 self-propelled howitzer bought by Denmark and the Czech Republic and under the Czech DITA gun from Excalibur Army. The Force e-Drive line covers battery electric, range-extended and fuel cell variants, shown as an 8x8 in 2025 and aimed first at civil users. Around 14,000 vehicles left Koprivnice between 2013 and 2024, split between defence, fire and rescue, construction, mining and other heavy industrial users, and specialist bodies range from firefighting superstructures to the pyrotechnic vehicles used by the Czech Police. Service centres, spare parts and a factory service school round out the offer, and Tatra has been putting Siemens digital manufacturing tools into the Koprivnice plant. For a company that nearly disappeared a decade ago, the order book now runs years deep.