The times they are a charging…

This week, we’ve been musing on the matter of a public charging network for trucks. Over the past few weeks, we’ve started to see some notable movements in this area which is great to see. Moto Hospitality has recently submitted planning permission for a new truck charging and parking site at Wetherby Services, Milence is about to launch the first of its Europe-wide network of charging sites in the Netherlands and, of course, the Government’s £200m ZEHID project will facilitate 60-odd new public truck charging sites. It’s a fraction of what will be required to charge the whole of the UK truck parc, but it is a significant start, and we know there are plenty more in the planning stages.

And it’s at this stage, we’d like to offer a few suggestions to ensure the public truck charging sites are fit for purpose. We know this is stating the bleeding obvious, but trucks aren’t big cars and the layout of the new public charging sites needs better thought and traffic management than just plonking a truck park in a field and putting the charging points around the outside. We’re going to need space, and lots of it.

Assuming we will be, for the foreseeable future, relying on connecting the truck to the charger by a cable, then our first suggestion will be to ensure a significant portion of charging points are drive-through design – particularly the rapid chargers. There may be a requirement for overnight trickle charging hook-up, but we’d suggest putting the focus on traffic management for drive through charging. Reversing in, or out, of a parking bay, when there’s an expensive (and high voltage) charger in the vicinity is a recipe for accidents and damage.

Next, we need to start thinking about protocols for the physical location of the chargers on-site and the hook-up point on the truck. Are we expecting the charge points to be tethered (i.e. with a cable) or will the truck need to have its cable with it? We’d suggest the former – if left with the truck, the cables will go “missing” or get damaged within a few weeks of service. We’d also suggest the truck manufacturers put a plug point on both sides of the truck, for ease of access.

We came across an issue with car charging at the bp pulse site on the A45 at Warwick the other week. Two charging bays for a tethered charger and no matter which way we put the car on the empty bay, the cable wouldn’t reach to the socket. So, we had to wait for the car on the other bay to complete its charge. An extra metre of cable or a charge point on the offside would have sorted it on this occasion, but hopefully, you get the point…knowing these issues from the car sector, should mean we can avoid the same basic errors.

While we’re looking at public charging, we’ll have to do something about the public tariffs. We know filling up with diesel at a motorway services is for emergencies only, given the eyewatering prices, but public EV charging prices which are, at least, three times higher than the charge at home option, is daylight robbery! We can’t sleepwalk into this pricing model, the whole TCO benefit of electric trucks (so we’re told) is premised on cheap electric.

Finally, let’s take this opportunity to re-think the truck parking set-up and driver welfare conditions. electric truck charging won’t be a “splash and dash” affair, the trucks will be on the charge point for what’s likely to be the equivalent of a decent rest break (we’re assuming this will be classed as rest from a drivers’ hours point of view, won’t it?), so let’s make sure the facilities are there for the drivers to re-charge as well.