MULAG Brand Guidelines: Huber & Wössner, the Comet Tractor & a Blue Wordmark

A fitter’s workshop in the Rench valley.

MULAG builds airport apron vehicles and roadside maintenance equipment in the Black Forest, in south-west Germany. The company dates its foundation to 1 August 1953, in a small fitter’s workshop at the Engelberg in Bad Peterstal, in the upper Rench valley. German Wikipedia says it began as Huber & Wössner, founded by Josef Huber and Heinz Wössner, and that its first emblem was a round badge carrying the letters HW, for the two founders. The name MULAG, German Wikipedia says, is an acronym for “Motor Universal Lasten Arbeits Gerät” — roughly, a universal motorised load and work machine.

Its first products were farm vehicles. The company says it built three-wheeled and then four-wheeled tractors for agriculture, and German Wikipedia adds that they were soon exported elsewhere in Europe, with special vehicles for the narrow tracks of vineyards becoming known from the late 1950s. When the post-war tractor market became saturated, the company says, it turned to sewer cleaning vehicles, construction machines and heavy goods vehicles for industry. In 1955 it left the workshop for a new building at the Stöckmatt in Bad Peterstal, which was extended in 1970 to its present size.

German Wikipedia records a change of name on 1 April 1964, to Mulag Fahrzeugwerk Heinz Wössner KG, and dates the start of the airport business to the same year, with baggage conveyor belt vehicles, later joined by apron tractors. In 1971 came the second division still in place today: self-loading mowers mounted as bodies on the Mercedes-Benz Unimog for municipal work, German Wikipedia says. The company itself describes the 1960s and 1970s as the period in which it defined the two business areas it still works in.

Comet, Orbiter and the roadside.

On the apron, MULAG’s range is built around a few named families. The Comet series covers its towing tractors, the Orbiter its conveyor belt vehicles and the Pulsar its container and pallet transporters, alongside special vehicles. The company’s news pages chart the Comet’s development: a “next generation” with a new design in 2017, new engines in 2019, and more recently the Comet 6 E-HV, an electric tractor with a 400-volt drive train for heavy work on the apron and in industry, and a Comet 4 E-HV DK prototype shown at GSE Expo Europe 2026 in Lisbon. For the Orbiter it has added the ULS 3500 loading table for unloading an aircraft’s main deck, and in 2019 it said the Orbiter conformed to CE, SAE and IATA recommendations. The company says drives powered by hydrogen fuel cells or electricity have for years played a major part in its product strategy.

The roadside business is the other half. MULAG makes front- and rear-mounted mowing attachments and combinations for the Unimog and other carrier vehicles, and in May 2026 it unveiled the FBX, a new front boom combination, as a prototype at the IFAT trade fair. It also lists military applications for its vehicles.

The company says it produces its special vehicles “Made in Germany” at two plants. Factory I at Bad Peterstal handles pre-fabrication, cutting, mechanical production and welding, and houses the training centre; Factory II at Oppenau handles assembly, painting and testing. The company says it has moved to continuous flow production, with a Comet tractor assembled in four work cycles, and its website gives a staff of about 280.

Ground support equipment.

Ground support equipment is the machinery that works around a parked aircraft: tugs and pushback tractors, belt loaders at the hold doors, cargo loaders for containers and pallets, de-icers, catering trucks raised to the galley doors and passenger stairs. Its buyers are airlines, airports, cargo carriers, ground handlers and air forces, the customers that makers such as TLD and Oshkosh AeroTech name on their own websites.

The makers in this field present their machines where they work, on the apron: a tug pushing back an airliner at dusk, a belt loader pressed against a cargo door, a de-icing boom reaching over a wing in falling snow, a catering truck lifted level with a galley. Product pages show the equipment at work beside the aircraft it serves.

Trade shows are the other stage. inter airport Europe, held in Munich, is where Oshkosh AeroTech showed its boarding bridges and gate equipment in October 2025, and the International GSE Expo in Las Vegas is where it unveiled a compact deicer the month before. Makers also announce milestone deliveries — a numbered loader or tractor handed to a named operator — as press releases with photographs on the ramp.

Much of the current messaging is about electric and autonomous equipment: TLD runs a programme it calls “Leaner & Greener,” and Oshkosh AeroTech promotes battery-powered charging carts. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family business in the Renchtal.

Oppenau became the company’s centre after 1980, when MULAG built Factory II at Oppenau-Löcherberg; the company says the site was extended in 2000 and 2010 and is now its headquarters, and German Wikipedia says the head office moved there a few years after the site opened. A training centre followed at the original Stöckmatt site in 2013. Looking further ahead, the company says it has acquired a 71,000 square metre site in the new Langmatt industrial park at Appenweier for an additional plant, to be built up in steps over several years; a company announcement published by AviationPros in June 2020 said land of more than 70,000 square metres had already been bought for the planned expansion.

Ownership has stayed with the founding family. The 2020 announcement described MULAG as managed by the third generation of the family and named Werner Wössner as owner and managing director; the company’s legal notice now lists Holger Wössner and Uwe Meißner as managing directors, and its website describes a family business with strong regional roots in the Renchtal. In March 2022 the company announced that it had ended all business relations with Russia and Belarus until further notice.

The identity has lasted. German Wikipedia says the round HW badge gave way in 1964 to a blue MULAG name lettering that is still used in revised form. It also notes that the firm is not the same as Mannesmann-MULAG, a commercial vehicle maker from Aachen that was taken over by Büssing in 1928.

For a design guide, MULAG shows how a rural workshop’s acronym became a wordmark carried on apron tractors and roadside mowers for seven decades. Compare Schopf and Goldhofer, two more German names in ground support equipment. For this guide we use a deep blue, an ink and an apron orange with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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