PERSONALITY
HIT THE
GAS
In late 2021 IVECO Australia stalwart, Marco Quaranta, assumed the position of Strategic Relations and Industry Relations manager with a focus on future propulsion.
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ommencing work with IVECO 34 years ago, Marco Quaranta has held technical and sales roles and more recently product management. A certain level of exposure in the industry comes with that. Quaranta is also involved in meetings with the Truck Industry Council and Heavy Vehicle Industry Association, but the institutional relationships are not all he does. PRIME MOVER: What is it about alternative fuels that has helped prepare you for this new role? MQ: I follow special projects including the evolution of our factory. With alternative fuels it’s my prolonged exposure with the product development and evolution in Europe where my contacts provide a certain level of the knowledge of market segments and customer demands. PM: Is the lack of facilities the main reason gas hasn’t been successful in Australia? MQ: No. Gas fuelling facilities have grown in Europe and now there are 4,000 stations spread between CNG and LNG. There was growth because there was demand. The large fuel companies would never have started to build an infrastructure unless they were sure that there were manufacturers supplying the vehicles and customers buying them. PM: What has driven the growth in gas? MQ: They key to the current growth of gas trucks in Europe, and also in the near future of electric vehicles, are the incentives and the benefits that, first the central government in Europe, and then the individual country governments, put on the table. This has filled the gap in the 66
fe br u a r y 2022
Marco Quaranta speaking at an IVECO event.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the gas truck. Today driving a gas truck is pretty much the same as driving a diesel truck in terms of cost of operations. PM: Does gas still have a future in Australia? MQ: Gas had a spike in 2009-2011 when the diesel price was up and it looked like it was getting some momentum so there was some LNG trucks produced but when the diesel price went back to normal everything died because there was no support or incentive to create infrastructure and to create the demand. PM: Is that support what we are going to need for EVs? MQ: Australia has taken a big commitment recently to achieve certain targets as promised at the recent COP26. The discussions, which I have been having with the industry organisations and the government, are now quite different and at the moment there are tangible signals
of investment. It’s happening in Europe where 30 per cent of the new trucks on the road need to be zero emission by 2030 because that is what has been imposed by the government. The German Government were the first to offer incentives for gas trucks and they have been the first to put on the table incentives for EVs and the infrastructure is actually being created there. It is not by chance that our first customer for the first batch of the Nikola which will come out of the Ulm factory in 2022 is the German Port of Hamburg. PM: Is there a future for diesel other than niche applications? MQ: Once you have a radical change of technology like battery and hydrogen, which in my view go hand in hand, probably in 20 years’ time it will not be efficient to produce both kinds of vehicles. I don’t see two different technologies which require constant development in terms of safety, emissions and so on, go hand-in-hand because you would duplicate
