Let’s talk about truck stops…

Special thanks to Chris Bird, from CJ Bird Transport for giving us the spark for this week’s commentary. He left a comment on one of our web articles last week. The story was about a Chinese truck start up Windrose completing a set of long-range trials with its new battery electric truck. Impressive as the story was, Chris was highlighting the profound change the industry, and society, is going to have to undergo if wide scale battery electric long-haul transportation is to be the future, most specifically around infrastructure and truck parking.

It’s clear the truck manufacturers have risen to the challenge, developing the necessary vehicle hardware for zero emissions, and we’ve banged on at length, in past commentaries, about infrastructure concerns, so our attention turns this week to truck parking.

The UK Government, last week, announced a £16 million investment to upgrade the facilities at 38 trucks stops nationwide – although the cash-strapped government is only actually putting in £6m – which has to be welcomed and is an important first step to developing a set of facilities which are fit for purpose for an industry which is the life blood of the economy. That £16m spread across 38 trucks stops equates to a little over £420,000 per site, though, so this is a baby step in the right direction, rather than the giant leap that’s going to be required.

As the long-haul sector moves toward a zero emission (at the tailpipe) future, publicly accessible truck parking, complete with fully operational charging facilities will have to be the norm. That’s going to require a lot of energy and a lot of space. Take a look along any of the major trunk routes and carriageways of an evening and you’ll see the laybys packed full of trucks parked up for the night. Come the great battery electric revolution those trucks will need to be tethered to an overnight charger and that should be happening at a truck stop where both vehicle and driver are secure, and the issue of truck driver welfare is finally dealt with through proper facilities.

There is a cursory mention in the “Better kips for better trips” DfT news announcement on the truck stop funding for some of the money to be used “installing new chargepoints to power electric HGVs and solar panels on lorry driver facilities to make them as sustainable as possible”, which is at least a nod to the future requirements, though not much more. The future public charging requirements for the truck parc needs some serious planning both to prepare for the energy requirements for charging and the space needed to park the trucks while they are charging.

This week Milence (the joint-venture charging company owned by Traton, Daimler and Volvo) announced its third public charging site in Europe, this time in France, which is an indicator of the direction of travel for public charging. Next week, we are joining a roundtable discussion, with the ElectricFreightway project team, led by Gridserve, to explore the topic further and in May we are running a Freight Carbon Zero Think Tank in association with Volvo Trucks to delve deeper into the topic of accessible public charging.

This is another challenge for the industry to overcome on its decarbonisation journey. As an industry of problem solvers, we’ve no doubt it will pick a way through, but the scale and magnitude, nor the required investment should be ignored.