Matthias Speicher
⚡ Beautiful charging park. The power output checks out too. Now just pull in enough 🚚 trucks, because that is what fills it. But nobody shows up.
Let’s start at the front, literally. A truck has different needs than a car. Some SUVs stretch past five metres and look like battleships on the road, sure. But a tractor-trailer is more than three times that length, doesn’t just drop its trailer on a whim, and doesn’t nose straight up to a charge point the way a Škoda Elroq pulls into a stall.
The driver also has no appetite for the guessing game: Is there room? Does the turning radius work? Is the canopy high enough? Can I pull through, or do I have to reverse in?
Sounds trivial? It is, right up until you’re standing out there looking at real charging parks. There’s a reason platforms like eTrucker from Tobias Wagner and Michael Clarke list exactly the sites that actually work.
☕ Even if the approach to the charge point works, it doesn’t end there. The opposite, that’s where it starts. The driver takes a break. 45 minutes after four and a half hours of driving, required by law. His break sets the charging time, not the charging speed of the park. And he wants to spend that break on something worthwhile.
🚻 Make sure he can at least use the toilet. Better: a shower, something to eat, something to drink. Yes, he’s charging his truck. But in those 45 minutes he wants to recharge himself too.
🅿️ MCS is brilliant, no question. But it sharpens a future problem. If the truck has taken on enough charge after 30 minutes, the driver is stuck: clear the charge point or pay an idle fee. And the moment the truck moves, the tachograph flips back to driving time.
The break is gone. It starts over.
This is exactly where the lever sits, and a lot of people miss it. Milence understood it early and built their identity around it. But far from every CPO thinks this way. Many build power and then wonder why utilisation never comes.
The maths is simple. Take the break seriously and you get utilisation that doesn’t hang on charging contracts alone. The drivers come back, because it works. And taking the break seriously builds a multi-revenue model on the side. Electricity is a commodity. Service is not. Service is what carries the margin.
💡 Sell only electricity and you compete on price. Understand the stop and you compete on something far harder to copy.
P.S.: Same goes for cars, fat SUVs included. Shape the break and you offer something extra. Raw charging power stopped being enough here a long time ago.