🛢️ In Switzerland, no logistics operator drills for oil in their own yard. And nobody builds a little refinery next to the truck garage. Yet that’s exactly what independence would look like. 🇨🇭
⛽ Sounds absurd, and it was for many decades. Because with diesel, the operator has always been a consumer. They buy what others extract, process, and distribute. With all the margins, all the price risks, all the geopolitical swings that come with it. With their trucks, they’re simply at the end of the food chain.
🛣️ And because that’s always been the norm, hardly anyone really thinks about it anymore. But this is exactly the moment worth thinking about, especially if you let your view drift beyond the usual horizon and discover electric mobility.
🔌 With electricity, suddenly it’s different. I can produce part of my own fuel. Either on my own roof, or on my neighbour’s roof when he doesn’t need the power or has too much of it. Directly available for the hungry trucks that are sitting in the yard at night anyway.
☀️ What we’re seeing here isn’t a side effect of electrification. It’s a fundamentally different role in the value chain. Because suddenly I’m not entirely at the mercy of those at the other end. In the industry we talk about range, charging duration, grid connection, investment cost. All valid, all important. But we’re hiding the actually disruptive part: the logistics operator shifts from buyer to producer.
💪 Sure, this doesn’t happen magically overnight. It takes PV surface, a battery storage system that shifts the energy into the evening hours and smooths the peaks, and even more than that it takes investment and the courage to move from diesel consumer to electricity producer of your own fleet.
💁 Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. We’re working it out right now, truck by truck, yard by yard. More on that in the coming weeks.
