Commercial electric truck demand far outstrips charging infrastructure

LAS VEGAS — Electric truck builders are sounding the alarm on the lack of charging infrastructure and the time it takes to build as the freight and logistics industry transitions to zero-emission transport.

Daimler Truck North America CEO John O’Leary told Automotive News his company has both the manufacturing capacity and customer interest to sell 2,000 Freightliner eCascadia electric trucks this year, but there is a lack of chargers to support them.

“Our customers need to be able to charge any of their trucks anywhere they are,” O’Leary said as Daimler prepared to unveil the SuperTruck II, an extra-efficient concept model of its diesel Freightliner, on Wednesday at the Manifest freight and logistics conference here.

There is almost no public infrastructure to power large electric trucks. The charging systems going into distribution centers and other facilities are only trickling forward, hindered by long delays from utilities and the local government permitting process.

Charging is the single largest barrier to electric truck deployment, said Mike Roeth, executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency.

That has created a vast mismatch between customer interest and charger access.

“There is not going to be enough, fast enough” to satisfy demand, O’Leary said.

Buying more time

Daimler owns the Freightliner and Western Star brands and has delivered about 100 electric eCascadias to date. O’Leary said he has customers asking for several hundred at a time. He said he responds by offering 25 and asking clients to push out their orders to allow more time for infrastructure development.

“It’s great that the acceptance has been so strong. The people that have them love them, but they need to figure out how to charge them,” he said.

Others are echoing O’Leary’s assessment.

“We’ve seen huge variability on what’s available from the grid depending on where you are,” said Adam Buttgenbach, director of fleet engineering and sustainability at PepsiCo, which is testing electric trucks.

“We would go to the utility and say we need this much power, and they would say, ‘Great, come back in two years,’ ” Buttgenbach said.

Peter Voorhoeve, president of Volvo Trucks North America, said companies need to plan to build charging infrastructure about a year ahead of when they plan to deploy electric trucks.

Volvo Trucks works with its customers to install home base charging stations for those that travel routes in which they return to base at the end of each shift. It also is working with its California dealers to install chargers that can create a corridor on the major Interstate 5 trucking route. It expects to have five stations operational by the end of this year.

UPS is taking delivery of its first 10 eCascadias, part of a go-slow approach even though it will eventually need tens of thousands of zero-emission trucks of varying sizes to meet increasingly stringent environmental regulations.

“I think everybody wants to know what true infrastructure looks like long term. So for us at UPS, we are going small scale,” said Anthony Marshall, vice president of maintenance and engineering, transportation fleet at UPS. “We’re playing with these electric trucks and just making sure charging and everything else goes fine.”

Disparate organizations

Part of the problem is that the transition to electric trucking requires disparate organizations to work together, something they haven’t done before, said Rakesh Aneja, chief of eMobility at Daimler Truck North America.

There’s the truck manufacturer, such as Daimler, and then the charger provider, the customer, the utility company and the construction company that will build out the high-voltage system, he said.

“Just for everyone to figure out their multistakeholder timeline with the critical path, that’s been a challenge,” Aneja said.

Another hurdle is the typical timeline of the utilities providing the power.

“They don’t start their activity until they get a firm order commitment from the customer. And by the time that firm order comes in, it’s just too late from a timeline and a process perspective,” Aneja said.

All of this will sort out, but it will take time, said Henrik Holland, global head of mobility at Prologis, a large warehouse and distribution company working with fleets and manufacturers on advanced transportation systems that include both electric and autonomous trucks.

“As more electric vehicles and trucks take to the road, the public and private sectors need to work together to ensure we’re investing in the needed infrastructure,” Holland said. “We will see new and innovative solutions emerge that will help expand our energy options — including increased solar production, energy storage and fuel cell technologies — as the nation moves to an electrified transportation system that will help reduce emissions.”