Manufacturers issue IAA warnings on electric truck infrastructure
Leading truck manufacturers exhibiting at last month’s IAA Transportation event in Hannover admitted that European targets around the shift to electric trucks could be out of reach unless marked progress is made on the infrastructure needed to support them.
While electric vehicles featured prominently in the lineup this year, OEMs were promoting a variety of driveline technologies including improved diesel engines, in contrast to relative caution around diesel at the 2022 event.
Tier One suppliers were also pushing technology such as hybrid drives intended to make diesels more economical rather than replace them entirely.
Major manufacturers including Traton (Scania and MAN) and Daimler (Mercedes-Benz and Fuso) told Reuters news agency that they were ready to produce electric trucks, but that customers would not buy them unless they could see massive investment in the charging network.
“The trucks are ready and now infrastructure must follow,” said Daimler Truck’s incoming CEO Karin Rådström.
“When the infrastructure is not ready, clients won’t buy and when our clients are not buying, we’ll need to delay the Green Deal.”
Meanwhile Traton CEO Christian Levin said: “It’s not just about cost, it’s also about charging infrastructure, permissions, green electricity, supply of green electricity, and of course pricing. All of that needs to come together.”
According to rules approved by nations of the European Union earlier this year, makers of heavy-duty vehicles will need to have reduced their CO2 emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 as compared to baseline levels from 2020, or risk being hit with fines for sales that are non-compliant.
But Daimler Truck’s chief of technology Andreas Gorbach cast doubt on whether the targets would be feasible given the speed at which the European charging network is being developed. He advocated that the EU targets should be coupled with the pace of progress on infrastructure, observing that: “In the past, somebody had to build the highways to have trucks on them – and the highway of the future is the charging infrastructure.”
Reuters cited a study by consultancy McKinsey also released in September, which suggested that battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trucks would need to reach 40 per cent of total new truck sales by 2030 in order to meet EU targets, as opposed to around two per cent currently.
This is in the context of production costs for electric trucks that are running at between two-and-a-half and three times higher than diesel equivalents.
The McKinsey study found that prices of emissions-free trucks would need to fall by as much as half to make them affordable, and would need to cost no more than 30 per cent more than diesel vehicles. This in turn, however, would necessitate technological advances in the batteries used. In addition, the study suggested that charging costs would need to fall by a quarter to meet EU CO2 goals.
Infrastructure is not the only hurdle facing truck manufacturers. Traton’s Christian Levin admitted that problems at Scania battery supplier Northvolt had held back an increase in the Swedish manufacturer’s production of electric trucks by a year.
“The worst thing was that we had to go back to all the customers and say ‘Sorry, we cannot deliver,’” Mr Levin told Reuters, albeit he added that a new plan formulated in conjunction with Northvolt was now meeting customers’ requirements.
IAA took place shortly after an announcement of the partial mothballing of Northvolt’s so-called ‘gigafactory’ at Skellefteå plant, in the north of Sweden, and the closure of its Borlange facility near Stockholm.
Peter Carlsson, Northvolt co-founder and chief executive, said: “We are having to take some tough actions for the purpose of securing the foundations of Northvolt’s operations to improve our financial stability and strengthen our operational performance.
“While conditions at this time are challenging, there remains no question that the global transition towards electrification – and the long-term outlook for cell manufacturers, including Northvolt – is strong.”
Meanwhile, research outlet BloombergNEF published a new report last month, Zero-Emission Commercial Vehicles: The Time Is Now, documenting the state of the emission-free CV market. While global sales of zero-emission trucks are on the increase, the report highlights the unevenness of adoption. China accounted for 80 per cent of total sales worldwide, it said, boasting adoption of 5.5 per cent in the first half of this year.
“In Europe, sales are concentrated in a handful of countries, while the US market shows only limited market growth,” found BloombergNEF.
Its report showed that the zero-emission truck market in Europe grew 2.5 times from 2022 to 2023, but that growth had since slowed to 30 per cent in the first half of 2024, with adoption at between 2.1 and 2.3 per cent of total sales for the last four quarters until Q2 this year.
In the UK, zero-emission vehicles are said to account for around 2.5 per cent of sales – relatively high compared to the likes of France, Spain, Belgium and Austria, but significantly lower than a number of other nations, ranging from Germany with around 3.5 per cent of sales, to over 10 per cent in Norway.
“For many countries, sales remain very low,” the report found, however. “In Poland, which has the largest truck fleet in the [European] Union, e-truck sales were just a few tens of units in [the first half] of 2024.
“Early adopters and companies with green obligations, such as decarbonisation targets or zero-emission terms in contract bidding, mostly support the market, with operations in urban distribution, municipal services and construction.”
On charging, said the report, Europe added 146,000 new connectors in the first half of 2024: “with growth mainly in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. This was twice as many connectors as installed in all other European countries combined.”
It added: “In Europe, public ultra-fast chargers (100 kilowatts or faster) have grown more than seven times since 2021, and deployment has been accelerating, with 89,000 such chargers in place by June 2024.”
The report said that while capital cost and refuelling challenges remained barriers to zero-emission vehicle uptake, new business models and financing structures were emerging to combat this.
“These include partnerships between fleet owners and operators to co-develop refuelling stations, raising financing supported by fleet utilisation agreements, and extending the revenue potential of vehicle batteries by reusing them in stationary energy storage applications,” it said.
“Fleet owners and investors that grab the early opportunities help create the necessary scale for themselves and the market to sustain further growth.”
