History

STILL products get moving.

The first half of the Forties was marked by the Second World War and no-one in Germany remained unaffected by this period.

The STILL company continued to produce generating equipment and production capacity was continually expanded. At the beginning of 1945 the STILL work force had grown to almost 1500 people and production had virtually tripled. But, following the post-war collapse, reconstruction began with a work force shrunken to barely 500 employees.

Almost half the production area lay in ruins and at first STILL had to keep its head above water by the repair of electric motors and transformers. By July '45 however the development of new products had already begun. A two man "Vehicles" design group was brought into being and by the following year was already able to present the "EK 2000 electric trolley". This electrically driven transport vehicle with a capacity of 2 tonnes introduced a basic change into the focus of STILL's production. From now on the emphasis was increasingly on mobility, on the building of "industrial trucks". (The manufacture of electrical machines was completely given up in 1969.)

With the "EK 2000" new ideas were already being put into practice. The new type of single wheel suspension and the tiller steering gained their respective patents in 1948 and 1952. In 1947 the EK 2000 gained an important customer - German Railways.

With further innovations, the upturn became noticeably more dynamic: A three-wheel tractor, the so-called "Mule-mobile" was developed (1948), and only one year later they were able to celebrate production of the 100th Mule-mobile. In the same year (1949) the next new product followed: STILL's first forklift truck, the EGS 1000.

It was not only its products that STILL made mobile, but also its Service. At the end of the Forties STILL began to use its own service vans. The first, a VW bus, was purchased in 1947. Since then the service fleet in Germany has grown to around 750 vehicles. World-wide there are more than 1000.