It all started with vegetables

To be more precise, with quite a lot of vegetables that Gartencoop Freiburg wanted to transport across town without a car.

So we built, welded, tested, and rebuilt. The result was CARLA—a cargo trailer that makes it surprisingly easy to transport even really large and heavy items by bike.

That was in 2014. What started as a project among friends became CARLA CARGO Engineering, and those first homemade trailers grew into a whole CARLA family.

Today, our cargo trailers travel on roads far beyond Germany’s borders. They deliver packages, transport tools, bring plants to customers, and serve as mobile workshops, market stalls, and kitchens—and sometimes as things we never would have imagined when we built the first CARLA.

From crowdfunding to starting a business

From the very beginning, CARLA was designed to do more than a traditional bike trailer: electric assist, a high payload capacity, and an integrated overrun brake made it possible to transport even heavy loads by bike.

With the help of crowdfunding, the first CARLAs were built at the Schattenparker trailer park. This was followed by over a year of development, tinkering, and numerous test runs.

In the summer of 2014, the time had finally come: The first CARLAs went into regular use for the Freiburg Garden Cooperative—and what started as an idea became a cargo trailer for real-world transport tasks.

Scaling

CARLA CARGO Engeneering GmbH was founded in spring 2018 to accelerate series production and meet the growing demand for CARLAs. CARLA CARGO distributes its products throughout Europe and cooperates with selected cargobike dealers. Today CARLAs are used worldwide and transport heavy loads e.g. in Germany, the Netherlands, France, England, Sweden and the USA.

Robot automation

Since the end of 2020, the majority of our frame production has been manufactured on a welding robot at Wecubex just 6km away. In this way, we make an important contribution to leaving the smallest possible CO² footprint even during production and thus guarantee high availability. We are able to react very flexibly even to larger order quantities and create a high degree of independence compared to otherwise rather common long-distance imports. Hard to believe, the frame can be welded through every half hour and gives us the opportunity to make even more impact with our CARLAs for a more climate-friendly future.

New Basecamp

Since the summer of 2023, the first CARLAs have been produced in our new BASECAMP in Herbolzheim, in the immediate vicinity of our manufacturer, which produces the frames on the welding robot less than 50 meters from us. We are all very happy to be able to produce CARLAs for you every day in the light-flooded rooms designed with lots of wood. The location in the industrial area suits us perfectly and reflects our vision of a post-fossil society with its park-like character in an extremely charming way.