MAFI Brand Guidelines: The Roll-Trailer and Terminal Tractor Maker of Tauberbischofsheim

A Württemberg firm, four letters and a move north.

MAFI is a German maker of heavy vehicles for ports and industry: the tractors that pull containers and trailers around terminals, and the low roll trailers that carry cargo on and off ships. The company traces its history to 1957, when, it says, it began by building drawbar and low-bed trailers for industry, cargo handling and seaports.

The paper trail starts a little earlier and further south. A German trademark archive compiled by Axel Oskar Mathieu records a MAFI mark dated 30 November 1954 under the firm Martin Fiala K.G. of Korntal in Württemberg, and pairs that firm name with the letters MAFI. The same record lists MAFI-Gerätebau GmbH & Co. KG, also of Korntal, in February 1962. The archive gives the mark date; the company gives 1957 as the year it started, so the two dates sit side by side.

The decisive step came in the 1960s. MAFI says it developed its Roll On / Roll Off system in 1963 and 1964: a tractor, a gooseneck and a roll trailer working together, so that cargo could be driven up a ship’s ramp instead of lifted by crane. The company says roll trailers came to be called simply “MAFIs” around the world. In 1965 it built the MAFI Trac 65/A4, which it describes as its first universal tractor for RoRo and terminal work, with a hydraulically operated fifth-wheel plate and an automatic transmission.

In 1975 the business was reorganised as MAFI Transport-Systeme GmbH in Tauberbischofsheim, in the north of Baden-Württemberg, where it has made tractors, heavy-duty trailers, roll trailers and goosenecks ever since, according to its own history.

Tractors, trailers and a lizard.

MAFI’s range grew around that RoRo core. In 1987, the company says, it took on the Eidechse (“lizard”), an electric towing truck for moving heavy loads inside factories, which it first built at Schwieberdingen and later moved to Tauberbischofsheim. From 1989 it added special vehicles such as platform wagons and rail-mounted platforms, some self-propelled and some part of automated systems.

That side of the business did not stay. MAFI says it shifted its focus in 2008 towards higher-volume markets in diesel tractors and trailer systems. The trademark archive records that in 2009 the Fulda maker Hubtex took over parts of the MAFI heavy-load range: electric platform trucks, electric tow tractors and rail wagons.

The tractors became the centre of the catalogue. MAFI redesigned the whole range in 1990 as the MT generation, from the MT25 to the MT45, built on a modular system across the family, the company says. In 2002 came the Trac-Lift MTL, built in Tauberbischofsheim for moving swap bodies; in 2005 the MT 25 YT terminal tractor with a new cab; and in 2010 the Terminal Trac T 230, with a redesigned cab and changes for newer diesel exhaust rules.

Today MAFI describes its products as transport and towing vehicles for containers, semi-trailers, cargo and roll trailers and special container chassis, used in container terminals, logistics centres and industry. It lists customers in the automotive, steel, aluminium and paper industries as well as seaports and airports, and says it works with more than 50 dealers and service partners worldwide. The company names its quality certifications itself: DIN EN ISO 9001 since 1997, welding certification to DIN EN ISO 3834-2 and an environmental management system to DIN EN ISO 14001:2015.

MAFI also builds for a sister brand. TREPEL Airport Equipment, which makes aircraft tractors, cargo loaders and other ground support equipment, shares its site, and MAFI says it manufactures for TREPEL in Tauberbischofsheim.

Design and documentation.

Port and terminal equipment is sold to a small, specialist audience: port authorities, terminal operators, shipping lines and the logistics firms that move containers inland. The makers’ own websites and brochures tend to show the machines at work rather than on their own, because scale is the point. A ship-to-shore crane is pictured with its boom reaching out over the stacked deck of a container ship; a gantry is shown against the quay it serves.

The smaller machines are presented in the same working settings. Straddle carriers appear in long rows between container stacks, reachstackers lift boxes at the edge of a yard, and terminal tractors pull trailers and chassis between the quay and the gate. Forklift trucks and empty-container handlers are photographed in timber yards, steel mills and inland depots as well as in ports, since the same makers sell to heavy industry and distribution.

Automation has added a second kind of picture. Alongside the machines, the pictures now include control rooms and screens, and a maker such as Kalmar lists automation systems and charging solutions as products in their own right. Kalmar says the first fully automated straddle-carrier terminal opened in Brisbane in 2005, and ZPMC lists automated terminals in Xiamen and Shanghai among its projects.

Delivery is part of the story too. Large cranes are often moved fully assembled by sea: ZPMC says its own fleet carries large products whole, and English Wikipedia says it ships cranes in a fully erected state, so a crane standing upright on a heavy-lift vessel is a familiar image in the trade. The guides in this group follow makers across Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United States and China, and set out what each company says about itself alongside what independent sources record.

Two owners in two years, one factory.

For years MAFI sat inside a German industrial group. In July 2024 the company announced a new chief executive, Roland Hartwig, formerly head of the Austrian trailer maker Schwarzmüller, succeeding Werner Berger, who had led MAFI for more than 30 years. That announcement described MAFI and TREPEL as part of the NDW Neckar Drahtwerke group, based in Eberbach, and spoke of a two-brand strategy.

Ownership changed in 2026. On 3 June 2026 the law firm Noerr announced that it had advised NDW Maschinenbau-Holding on the sale of MAFI Transport-Systeme and TREPEL Airport Equipment to the Munich investment company Mutares. Mutares said on 2 September 2026 that it had completed the acquisition, placing both businesses in its Infrastructure & Defense segment, with about 410 employees. MAFI’s own site now names Mutares as group owner.

Where the vehicles are made is consistent across sources. MAFI says its headquarters and production are in Tauberbischofsheim, on a site of about 75,000 square metres, and calls its products “Made in Germany”. Noerr and Mutares both describe an integrated production facility in Tauberbischofsheim, with a service location in the United States, which Mutares places in Georgia.

The mark has changed with the company. The trademark archive shows three versions: a triangular emblem with the name across its base on the 1954 mark, a plain boxed wordmark in orange dated 1981, and a grey MAFI crossed by globe-like lines with the words “Transport Systems” beneath, dated 2015. Across all three, the name is set in heavy capitals.

For a design guide, MAFI shows how a brand name can become the word for the thing it makes, and how a short acronym carries a heavy-vehicle identity through several owners. Compare Terberg, a Dutch family-owned maker of terminal tractors, and Kalmar, a port equipment maker with its own terminal tractor range. For this guide we use an orange, a rust ink and quay greys with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MAFI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.