“Biggest technology leap in history:” Australia missing out on electric truck revolution

“This is the biggest transition we have ever seen.” It’s a phrase that we have heard often enough in the last few years as the world charges towards a green energy future.

But this quote was not about the switch from coal to renewables, or gas peakers to batteries, or from petrol cars to electric. This came from the CEO of Scania trucks, and it was about the transition in the trucking industry. And it is huge.

The IAA Transportation Hub is the biggest trucking show in the world. And because trucks are, well, big, it covers a massive area that needs shuttles to get from one side of the week-long show to the other.

The last time the show was held, in 2019, it was all about horsepower and just a little about alternative fuels. This year though, so much has changed, and it was hard to spot a diesel burner anyway in the show.

It was almost all electric – and this from the trucking industry, which we should remind ourselves is the sector that is supposed to be slowest and the most difficult to electrify.

Legacy truck makers are leading the charge to electric

The scale of what is being contemplated here is enormous, and it is being led by the biggest trucking companies themselves. That in itself marks a huge change from other industries that have been upturned by the pace of the transition.

In the utility sector and in the EV space, the legacy companies have held out till the last possible moment, or sometimes until it is too late.

In the trucking industry, mindful of the impact Tesla has had on the passenger car market. Tesla did not display at the show, but the ghost of the Tesla Semi had an impact, and it is clear that it fired the legacy companies into action. And they need to because they are being chased by a variety of new players, and not just Tesla.

At the opening day of the Hanover show,  the CEO of Man Trucks, another trucking giant, echoed the sentiment of Scania, and described the embrace of electric as the trucking industry’s “greatest technology leap in history.” He said the transition is happening at  “enormous speed.”

Roger Alms, the head of Volvo Trucks, said: “This shift to electric is happening a lot faster than people think.” Alms predicts 70 per cent of his company’s truck sales in Europe will be full battery electric by 2030. It could be more. Volvo Electric is so confident in the electric future that it didn’t bother bringing a single fossil fuel vehicle to Hanover.

And in Australia – where the population is still processing the mind-numbing stupidity of the Coalition’s attack on electric vehicles – there is barely any comprehension of what is going on. And there is certainly no idea about the speed at which diesel options will be replaced by battery electric trucks, and – if it can compete with battery electric on costs – hydrogen fuel cells.

Australia is missing out

“It’s a thing, we’re nowhere on this,” the head of the Australian subsidiary of one major trucking supplier told me after a morning at the Hanover show.

“It blows my mind that Volvo has turned up here without a single diesel truck,” said Stephen Brooks, from Owner Driver, who first attended the show nearly 40 years ago and is considered one of the doyen of trucking writers.

Australia has its own problems, and its own start-ups. Its strict local design rules make it difficult to import electric trucks, or to convert them to electric as some like to do.

The promise lies, however, in the intention of Volvo Trucks to start manufacturing its heavy duty electric trucks in Queensland from 2025 – it has just started the world’s first series production of its heavy duty electrics in its home town of Gothenburg, Sweden – and the efforts of battery swap specialist Janus and the more established SEA Electric.

Many people mock the idea of heavy duty electric trucks. But there are numerous applications where they can operate on a virtual 24/7 business – and nearly half of all goods delivered in Europe are within 300kms.

The Australian industry, where the oldest and most polluting trucks have been identified as those operating within cities ferrying goods to and from ports and distribution centres, is ripe for change. The question is to what extent will the new Labor government intervene to get the dirtiest trucks off the road.

A lot of buzz about the Buzz

One of the big new themes at the Hanover show was the rollout of electric vans – the “last mile” delivery vehicles essential to bring goods to the consumer door.

Any number of trucking companies had some to roll out, but none quite caught the imagination of the VW ID.Buzz, a modern electric incarnation of the original Kombi, now presented in any number of formats from surfing/camping van, to passenger transporter, cargo van, food vendor and evan a tipping option.

But what was also striking about the Hanover fair was the focus on the benefits of electric trucks. There are cost savings, but it has to be recognised that at this stage of the industry, that is only possible with big government subsidies to rebate some of the cost difference between electric and diesel.

There is the emissions factor, and there is also the sounds of silence.

Mercedes installed a “sound box” that illustrated the benefits of electric for drivers inside the cabin and to those living in built up areas and in the countryside. “Discover the silence,” it proclaimed. Volvo estimates that electric trucks cut outside noise by half, the cabin noise by one third.

Most major trucking companies expect their diesel fleets will be banned from inner cities and suburban areas within a matter of years. It’s not just the noise, it’s the pollution, even in a continent with relatively strict pollution standards, compared to the deadly free-for-all allowed in Australia.

One you drive electric, you don’t want to go back to diesel

Gilberto Enkerlin, from an Oslo-based earthmoving company Tom Wilhemsen, has 34 medium and heavy duty tippers operating at building sites in Norway and expects all will be fully electric by 2035.

It’s good for the drivers, and the local community, he says. At one large building site, where the other contractor was using electric excavators, noise complaints from residents was about the nearby kindergarten. It means his trucks can work at night, and can win the inner city tenders that are now heavily weighted towards good environmental outcomes.

And the drivers like it to. Not that they were keen on the idea. Enkerlin’s experience points to the difficulties faced in Australia, where the lack of experience with electric, and the Coalition and Murdoch propaganda, has led to heavy bias against new technologies.

“It was a big struggle in the beginning, I’m not gonna lie,” Enkerlin tells The Driven

“We were having conversations with drivers that have been driving diesel engines for years and years, and were used to that vibration or the engine and the vroom vroom noise that they get in the background.

“To sit to sit on our electric truck seemed for them that it was just like the most ridiculous thing. However, all our drivers that have had the opportunity to sit and test these trucks have said that they wouldn’t go back to driving on a diesel truck.”

No noise, no vibrations, no emissions

Roger Alms, the CEO of Volvo Trucks, says the feedback from his customers is the same. “We have thousands of people visiting us in Gothenburg and the feedback that we are getting is just amazing – the silence, no vibrations, and moving goods with no emissions.

“So the feeling is great. I have heard how drivers saying that once they have been driven an electrical truck they don’t want to go back to diesel trucks again.”

That was the other common theme at Hanover. And at Hanover this year, pretty much all anyone got to drive was electric.

The author travelled to Hanover at the invitation of Volvo Trucks