🔌 🚛 Charging sounds simple. Plug in, wait, drive off. Until you talk to logistics operators. Then a few kilowatts suddenly become a question of survival.
🔌 Charging is a physical process. That sounds obvious, but it has a consequence that shapes the entire industry. A truck needs a parking spot and time. Every optimization of these two dimensions costs money. Optimize one point and you inevitably shift the other two. That is the triangle behind every charging decision.
🚛 Martin Lörtscher, CEO of Hugelshofer Gruppe, put it well in an SRF interview: „We cannot optimize to infinity. Above everything stands the service to our customers.“ His charging park for 30 trucks simultaneously cost 7 million Swiss francs. That is the triangle in numbers. Hugelshofer can handle that. Many smaller companies cannot.
💰 And here begins the problem logistics operators describe to me again and again. An electric truck costs significantly more than its diesel equivalent. Invest in vehicles and you often have no capital left for infrastructure. Build the charging park first and you still need the trucks to justify it. The classic chicken-and-egg problem. And even when both are in place, an adequate grid connection is far from guaranteed. Anyone who thinks operators can simply compensate with public charging parks does not understand the business model. Mike Ritter of Käppeli Logistik Sargans confirmed exactly that.
🔋 Then comes the next reality. An electric truck draws serious charging power, simply because of battery size. And I am not even talking about megawatt charging here, but the widely used CCS models with 250 to 400 kW. The demand charge from the grid operator adds up fast. The grid connection too. Five trucks at the same time? The existing connection almost never holds.
💸 So you need a battery storage system, an energy management system that spreads the load across the night, and while you are at it a solar installation as well. Investment on top of investment, before the first truck ever rolls. But roll it must, because that is the whole point.
And if the trucks are still not fully charged in the morning? You do not just drive to the nearest fast charger. You risk contractual penalties for missing your delivery window.
🚛 The logistics operator wants to drive, not study energy economics. He wants reliability at a price he knows, not infrastructure he does not understand. It is time for providers to start speaking their language instead of teaching them theirs.
I am at the beginning of this journey into the world of electric heavy-duty transport. My goal: helping providers understand this segment from the operator’s perspective. That is why I talk to the industry at eye level. If you want to exchange thoughts: I am listening.
