The Battery Freight Truck Debate

There is a fairly detailed report over at the German news magazine....Focus....today, which details out this battle about to start involving the EU, member states, the trucking industry, and freight companies around Europe.

The hot topic?  The EU wants to put up regulation which mandates less CO2 production, and it's going to be aimed at vehicles....not just cars, but freight trucks.

So this discussion is going on....the truck production companies are looking at the regulation and shaking their heads.  Basically, you'd have to go and produce battery-driven freight trucks.  You'd then have to convince freight companies to go and spend literally hundreds of millions to flip over to the new vehicles.

The added weight of the batteries?  You can figure it's a minimum of five tons....maybe even up to seven tons....of batteries on the vehicles.  You can imagine the added weight on roads, and more wear-and-tear for asphalt. 

But then you come to this curious question for the freight companies....charging times, charging stations, and the necessity of additional parking spaces across the country (autobahns and towns).

Frankly, no one has sat and really done a through analysis of how much this would cost and how this would all work.

If you came to a German freight company with 200 trucks/260 drivers, and said here's the new truck....but you have to recharge the battery power every 3.5 hours....where exactly will you recharge?  And once you arrive at a potential charging station on the autobahn....will it be empty and ready for you to charge-up?  Or will there be a line of forty trucks sitting and waiting on one of the eight charging stations to be open?  Could your guy be there at the rest-stop for six hours....just to get a 3.5 hour charge?  And the next charge....will it be just as difficult?  And if you added up the extra hours....extra drivers....giving the bill to the customer....is this a 50-percent increase in freight fees coming up shortly (my number)?

A big mess?  Probably.  And the EU is driving as fast as possible to reach this conclusion.....without a lot of thought process involved.

If you've ever been across Germany and stopped at autobahn rest-stops.....there's typically forty to a hundred parking spots for truckers.  Freight companies have been whining about this for a decade.....that the nation needs to double up on parking spots and offer more accommodations (like showers, coffee shops, etc). 

Recharging stations?  If you drive these days and stop at the autobahn points for rest....I'd say maybe one out of five spots might have a couple of recharging stations for battery cars.  Course, there is chatter about more stations and maybe in five years.....you might see a majority of rest-stops with charging stations for cars.  But for trucks?

I would take a guess that you'd be talking about a minimum of one billion Euro required to put up an adequate number of truck charging stations just in Germany itself, and that only gets you to the first acceptable level.  You could be talking about a hundred billion Euro when talking about all the 28 EU member states and having the right number/quantity of charging stations for freight trucks.  Who will pay for it?  Yeah, that's the real question here.