There are logistics companies the market builds electrification solutions for. And then there are the others. Mike Ritter calls them the „wild“ ones. What he told me changed how I see this market.
🚚 Last week I spent 90 minutes with Mike Ritter. Managing Director of Käppeli Logistik AG in Sargans, and operator of Switzerland’s first public e-truck charging hub, opened in November 2023 together with Scania Switzerland.
🛞 Mike has diesel in his blood, a mechanic at heart. But he saw early on that combustion engines have an expiry date for a lot of use cases. In 2019 he even pre-ordered a Tesla Semi. It still hasn’t arrived on his yard. So he started with converted trucks from Designwerk, and today runs Scania, Mercedes and Volvo. The Tesla Semi? He still wants it. The future belongs to those who shape it instead of waiting.
🧠 What’s stayed with me isn’t just the charging hub itself. It’s an observation he made that I hadn’t heard put that way before.
He describes two worlds. One is the world of carriers with fixed, scheduled routes and predictable charging cycles. That’s who the market builds for, and there are already plenty of solutions available.
🏗️ The other world is what he calls the „wild“ operators. Tipper trailer to a construction site in the morning, a flatbed at noon, a few machine parts under tarpaulin in the afternoon, regional or national, always moving. The Truck pulls something different several times a day and needs to top up in between, at the depot or at the destination.
🚧 For exactly these operators, there are few to none suitable solutions today. Because their requirements are individual. And because depot charging for them isn’t a comfort feature, it’s an operational prerequisite. Maximum reliability, guaranteed availability and not just the charging spot, but the charging power.
🔋 One more thing that struck me: large customers and shippers are already demanding electric transport. On the construction site, nobody cares what kind of drivetrain the truck or the excavator has, yet. Two worlds, two speeds.
