ON A CHARGE

By Richard Simpson, industry pundit

DAF Trucks is now line-building batterypowered vehicles, and, as anyone who attended the recent Millbrook Ride & Drive event will attest, there is plenty of interest in them from operators and drivers.

It would be wrong to say that most operators are prepared to start the transition to battery-electric trucks now, but there is certainly positive interest in an electric future: interest that can only grow as the deadlines of 2035 and 2040 for the end of the sale of new diesel trucks looms.

But that is not being marked by any great signs of commitment from the organisation that imposed the move to electric trucks in the first place; the UK Government.

When looking at the transition to electric trucks, there’s an important acronym: RIP. Not ‘rest in peace’ but Range, Infrastructure and Payload.

Range and payload play off against each other. Order a new batteryelectric DAF today, and the key decision will be how much battery capacity to mount on the vehicle. You can choose five different battery capacities: from 210 to 525 kWh; but every increase in power will cost you payload. And once the decision is made, it is set in stone. Battery capacity cannot be adjusted after the truck is built.

One of the key factors in determining range and maximising payload is the third word of our acronym: infrastructure. To suit an electric truck for most transport tasks, the ideal solution would be to be able to get enough charge into the vehicle to take it for at least four-and-a-half hours in 45 minutes. That way, recharging could be synchronised with the driver’s mandatory breaks and productivity maximised.

And there’s the problem. Most of the electric trucks currently in service in the UK are engaged on short, regular, back-to-base transport. Everything is done to a pre-arranged schedule, and charging opportunities are carefully accommodated within this. It’s almost like running a bus service; and electric buses have generally proved successful.

But the hurly-burly world of general haulage is nothing like this at all. Drivers must expect the unexpected, including unscheduled nights out, and being ‘weekended’ in an industrial estate in Darlington. It comes with the territory.

It follows then that the industry will need a robust and appropriately-sited infrastructure of public truck-capacity charging stations, but will it get it?

In the United States, it almost certainly will. One of the world’s richest and most astute men, Warren Buffett, has invested $8.2 billion to acquire the American company Pilot Travel Centers. If you’ve travelled in America, you will have seen Pilot, Flying J, and Mr Fuel truck-stops. They are all part of Pilot Travel Centers, and Buffett now controls them all. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, has also invested heavily in companies rolling out electric vehicle chargers.

You really don’t have to think too hard to see which way this is going. Chargers for trucks in truckstops.

What are the chances of it happening in the UK?

Slim, indeed. The last attempt to set up a nationwide network of truckstops was BP’s, back in the 1980s. This was in response to outfits like Little Chef and Happy Eater outrageously buying-up long-established cafes and truckstops and banning all but private cars from using them. BP hoped that profits from diesel sales would support the provision of decent facilities for truck drivers, the business model used by Pilot Travel Centers in the USA. However, the Government had other ideas, and brutal increases in fuel duty in the name of the environment trashed BP’s grand plan in the UK. It’s very different in the USA, where another truckstop chain, Travelcenters of America (TA), has just been purchased by BP, or New Zealand, where BP operates 60 truckstops.

In both these markets, it will be comparatively easy for BP to use its financial muscle to install truckspecific chargers where and when required. In Europe, Bosch, a leading supplier of components for EVs, is getting involved in truckstops.

So, this is where the UK Government’s logic leads us. It destroyed the only nationwide chain of truckstops decades ago in the name of the environment, and now expects some enterprising organisation to finance and construct a nationwide chain of truckstops with charging facilities, in the name of the environment. You could not make it up!