256 - The Fleet Episode

Gary:

Hi I'm Gary and this is episode 256 of EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today we'll be looking at electric fleets. Then you've also got these some of the even some of the mega fleets that are out there that actually don't own a depot and the drivers that take the vehicles home but they don't park them on their drive they park them on the road down or down the road from from their their home and they're completely dependent on the public charging network.

I'll make topic of discussion today's fleets. We spoke before on the podcast about electric vans and how we need to get more of them on the road. Paul Kirby, the van man, came onto the show at that point to talk eloquently about the vehicles that are out there and the sort of issues surrounding them.

He also spoke with Lorna McAteer, head of fleet for National Grid, about some of the challenges in electrifying the fleet she has. But today I want to talk a little bit more generically about electrification of fleets and what the issues and challenges are. So let's start by defining our terms.

A fleet is a set of vehicles nominally owned or operated by a single company that are defined as work vehicles and can be driven by multiple drivers. When we think about fleets we generally look at companies such as Amazon and DPD, British Gas or Centrica as it is now, BT Openreach and other companies that have recognisable vans plying their trade across the streets of Britain. But there are other fleets.

Consider the local council. They have a fleet of vehicles that perform council work. Some of them are plainly noticeable.

We all recognise the bin men or the garbage or refuse truck to my foreign listeners. But we often ignore things like the folks who work for the health inspectors or the ones who travel around doing surveys. A lot of these vehicles are council owned, council operated and for the most part they're currently petrol or diesel.

We also have the bigger fleets. And by bigger I don't mean in terms of numbers of vehicles, I mean in terms of the size of vehicles. Freight haulage companies such as Wing Canton or Eddie Stobart all run lots and lots of large vehicles across the UK.

Supermarkets such as Tesco and Morrisons that do home deliveries also run lots of refrigerated vans that are classed as fleet. In a fun little anecdote that links these last two together, some listeners will know that during Covid I delivered groceries for Morrisons. I had a diesel sprinter van with the refrigerated box on the back.

Part of my delivery route took me past the Bombay Sapphire gin distillery in Whitchurch in Hampshire. To my surprise I found that I was often delivering Bombay Sapphire gin to folks who lived in Whitchurch and this plainly seemed to be ridiculous. But then I learned that Bombay Sapphire don't have a publicly accessible shop at the distillery.

You can take a paid tour of the site and pick up gin at the gift shop when exiting, but you can't walk in off the street and buy a bottle. Which led to the crazy situation where Bombay Sapphire would ship bottles to the Morrisons central warehouse in Kent from where it would be put onto a lorry taking it to the Morrisons store in Basingstoke where it would be loaded onto the back of my diesel Mercedes where I would take it back to Whitchurch and deliver it to the house down the road from where it had originally been distilled. A journey of 250 miles, which the average tailpipe emissions of a Volvo truck running on diesel, would be around 155 kilograms of CO2.

At the basic level the question is pretty simple, why don't fleet companies transfer everything over to electric? Well to answer that question and others let's bring in a specialist.

Russ:

I'm Russ Boulton, I'm head of innovation and data at Ayvens and Ayvens is a newer brand but it's the coming together of both ALD, Automotive and Leaseplan.

Gary:

And you have a specific sort of function in relation to fleets, is that right?

Russ:

I do, yeah. The role is very much a fleet consultancy role so it's innovation, so it's looking at things that are coming and that's new and then we've also got the data which is actually looking at the analysis, potentially looking at fleet data, historic data and then making evidence-based decision making for fleets to make better decisions either with vehicle choice or policy choice as well.

So yeah, very fleet focused.

Gary:

Are you able to say which particular fleets you're working with?

Russ:

I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, so if we keep the fleet names out of it, then I can talk a bit more openly about some of the challenges that they're facing as well.

Gary:

All right, well without giving names, talk to me a little bit about the nature of the fleets. Are these small medium enterprise fleets? Are these nationwide fleets? Are these a combination?

Russ:

It's a huge, yeah, a huge expanse. We've got an SME business, so direct to small medium enterprises. Then we've also got the medium-sized fleets and then we've got some huge, some of the biggest fleets in the UK that we're working with. It's in fact a number of the big mega fleets that people will be very, very familiar with from, again, parcel delivery to utilities and all sorts, everything in between. We do the cars and we do the vans and then we also do salary sacrifice as well, which is a massive part of EV, especially with the EV uptake on there as well.

Gary:

Now, I know from discussions and research that the vehicle aspect of the fleet is not necessarily the one that causes the most concern for people who are trying to electrify their fleet because at the end of the day, there are electrified versions of quite a lot of the vehicles out there, although it's not quite on a one-for-one basis. My understanding is that it's the charging aspect that is the nail in the shoe for a lot of the fleets. It breaks down basically into depot-based versus home-based from a charging point of view.

Do you want to talk to me a little bit about the differences between those two and how it applies to some of the fleets you're working with, please?

Russ:

Yeah, without a doubt. And I think it probably needs to break down a little bit further into the vehicles for cars and for vans as well. And from a fleet point of view, company cars have a larger, a lot longer dwell time. So a lot of office-based charging or depot charging is quite popular there. I know that I'm one of those that will drive into the office and be quite happy to charge all day, but it's a little bit more challenging when it comes to operational vehicles like commercial vans that you've got the home charging, but the demographic is usually a lot lower that can actually have home charging.Sometimes we have fleets that are a little bit reluctant to put the cost of a home charger onto somebody else's wall because they're thinking, worried about staff retention. But we do have a number of calculations that can actually show, calculate what the return on investment will be for a home charger versus using the public charging network. And it usually, especially with vans, quite energy inefficient, they use quite, quite high consumption. You can get quite quick returns sometimes within like two or three months on that home charger there as well. So we've got all the calculations to do that support. So, but it is 100% a challenge. One of the other sides of it is reimbursement. So even if you can get full home charging, how would you actually do the reimbursement? Do AER rates match what the actual cost is for the driver? Do we use fuel cards? And again, we do loads of different analysis and it's unique to each customer, don't get me wrong, and each fleet, and we have to treat each fleet individually. But yeah, we have to look at so many different alternatives and especially utilizing the public charging network as well. How do you reimburse for that and deal with the massive delta that can be from OVO anytime or Octopus or whatever it might be. It's like say seven pence per kilowatt hour versus 80, 90 pence on the public charging network. That's a factor because we really need to make sure that we could drive the right behaviors of the drivers to make sure that they are ideally charging at home and there's an advantage for them to charge at home as well. So yeah, there's a lot in it that the charging side of it, a fleet is definitely complex. If we focus on the LCV, the van side rather than the cars, what percentage of the fleets that you're working with can perform depot-based charging? I'll give you two examples.

There's certain fleets that will... the whole model is returned to base. So everything returns to base at night and they've got no problems in terms of infrastructure upgrades and they've got the charging and they can do slow charging and that works and that's absolutely brilliant.

Then you've also got these, some of the, even some of the mega fleets that are out there that actually don't own a depot and the drivers take the vehicles home but they don't park them on their drive, they park them down the road from their home and they're completely dependent on the public charging network because they, and they can't actually install. So they're maybe looking at partnerships with other organizations to be able to access effectively other people's depot charging at different times to when the partner isn't using it. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation that's going on around that, but yeah, it is a difficult one.

So it is challenging, but then you've got these depots that are able to, we've got some customers that are able to do depot charging but then they're also facing some significant upgrade costs for just to get the power into those depots as well. But we are seeing some really interesting innovation with the likes of Tuul and Felton who are, Felton's really interesting because they're using recycled Tesla batteries or any manufacturer battery and actually almost creating this buffer and that's just plugged into three phase. So there's, I think that the interesting bit and that what I find really interesting with fleet is I came into fleet and everything was combustion and that's effectively what we do is we say, right, which vehicle do you want? That one or that one. But now we're now talking about, right, how do you operate? Let's have a look at your telematics. Let's have a look at where your drivers are based. Let's do a driver survey. Let's try and understand where we can get the energy. Where's the most effective place. Okay, now the ideal place is to take all your energy from this location. Can you get the grid capacity into that location?

No, okay, let's look at an alternative. So fleet has suddenly changed and fleet managers are now having conversations with so many different individuals and stakeholders that they never would have had to deal with in the past. But it does mean that it is a far more interesting place to work, I think, as we transition to electric.

Gary:

And are you having conversations with fleet managers along the lines of you need to be looking at setting up your route so that a driver can do a 15 or 20 minute rapid charge in the middle to be able to complete it or the alternative of not necessarily return to base, but this particular or your particular company would work better with overnight charging on a seven or 11 kilowatt charger. Are you having those kinds of conversations to differentiate between the AC and the DC aspect?

Russ: We do. And I think, again, it's unique to every single fleet. A lot of fleets at the moment try to identify the daily mileage. So some of the analysis that we do, we'll look at journey mileage and then turn it into daily mileage. And then we'll look at the exceptions. I always use myself as an example. I might do 500 miles on a Wednesday, say, but if you look to my weekly mileage, you say, oh, Russ does 100 miles a day, but that's not actually accurate at all. And we'd need to look at that Wednesday that he does that 500 miles because his needs are gonna be quite different. And we do that for fleets and then bring that back in and say, okay, which pockets of your fleet are your low-hanging fruit as such? And then it's at that point that what we seem to be doing at the moment, most fleets are going, right, I just want to find a vehicle that can charge, do the relative, the necessary mileage for that day, and then get home and we'll deal with the charging theoretically outside of the working day.

Because what we've, we have the additional factor with commercial vehicles is that downtime is a massive factor. So maintenance downtime has always been the big concern, but now we have with EVs that this additional downtime that's potentially exposed or the business is exposed to if the driver suddenly has to charge in the working day. What we've also seen, where this is an interesting quirk that's different to cars, when you've got with a lot more of the vans that are going electric, it's not necessarily the driver's choice, whereas there's a real benefit and kind incentive for a lot of commercial car drivers to say, I'll go electric, I'll make it work because I can see where the financial incentive is. But there's a lot of van drivers that receive the vehicle and are like, I don't want this. This isn't what I asked for. I just want to stick with my diesel. And then what they, some of the feedback that we get from those drivers is that we're not, you've got to pay us, we're not going to charge. And the unions have got involved in some situations and said, our drivers aren't going to charge on their lunch break. So what they do is they take the lunch break and then they plug in.

And that's predominantly because you've got this reluctance from the driver or, you know, and it's more, that's not necessarily about EV. That's more about how a company or it operates as a whole. And maybe a bit of a perception that, you know, this is a job to do, to charge this vehicle whilst I'm only sitting in my cab and just like enjoying myself just the way I would be on my lunch. But yeah, that's a challenge that we're definitely seeing. And unfortunately, the more that that's kind of got out, the more that we're seeing it come through with other fleets as well. So this is when we're doing the analysis, we're really trying to make sure that we almost choose the low hanging fruit, but then we also find the right drivers that are going to have a real positive message about EV. Cause we find that when we get the right driver behind the wheel and they can see the benefits, they'll rave about it. But if you shoehorn a vehicle into the wrong driver profile, and then ask them to, you know, to charge it during the working day and then be theoretically inconvenienced, that's the fleet's fault for pushing the electric vehicle into the wrong driver profile. And unfortunately you just get nothing but noise. And then we end up having to have a little bit of a, bit more of an uphill battle to try and get the rest of the fleet. Whereas you go the opposite way, you find the right driver, you find the right driver profile. You tend to find that it's nothing but positivity really about transitioning to electric.

Gary:

And of course that speaks very, very closely to the big topic that I always like to talk about on the podcast, which is education. Because if you've got somebody who's positive towards electric vehicles, it's a lot easier to get them on board in terms of education. But that same education also has to go to the other drivers. And again, it's a whole level of education to get the drivers up to speed with how to best make an electric van work for them. Are you, as an organization, having those conversations with the drivers or is that being not necessarily ignored but devolved to a third party?

Russ:

It's a mix. Well, it's a mix, but it's not ignoring. I think that's probably the biggest thing. So sometimes we put content together to be able to educate drivers as well. There are certain fleets that will have a third party already because again, this is kind of a bit of an LCV specific piece, but because luckily it's quite a structured or it should be that some of the bigger fleets are quite structured in how they run their fleets. There's a driver education bit. Risk is a massive issue as well for a lot of these big fleets because you've got drivers out there just in the vehicles a lot. What we've probably got the biggest challenge is when we've got fleets that aren't necessarily working with the third party that does driver education, then we need to try to either introduce them or deliver content for them to be able to make it work themselves. We've seen some massive success when we've done trials where we've just set up WhatsApp groups. So say we've done a trial for 20 vehicles into, this was a fleet that took a load of 20 ID bus and we just set up a WhatsApp group and the noise was, there was a lot of chat back and forth like, oh, how do I do this? How do I do that? How do I do that? Because we all met in one location, had a bit of a conversation. We all drove off and they had to charge on the way back and that was okay. But the WhatsApp group really faded out in terms of noise because it was just like, they got over it. But it was just that interaction and they just needed a few people and maybe someone at the end of the phone to say, this isn't working, what do I do?

We're really conscious of that education. And whilst we're doing that about the EV, also talking about the safety and actually driving sensibly and actually making sure that you're not putting other people at risk and so on then. And that's a good opportunity. It shouldn't be seen, I don't think, as a massive negative. It's a really good opportunity to start interacting with your drivers and making sure that they're driving around in your assets that have got your livery on and they're representing your brand in the right way.

Gary:

Something you touched on a few moments ago which is paying for charging. Now in my mind there are a couple of different ways of doing this and how that gets implemented there's different ways on that and one is you provide the driver with a card like an all-star card or a power card or whatever and then that all gets dealt with separately or they pay out of their own money and then using their own cards and then gets reimbursed. How do those kind of conversations go when you're speaking with a company that wants to go electric with their fleet?

Russ:

Fuel cards are quite commonplace in commercial vehicles anyway already so that's kind of a lot of people see that as a bit of a no-brainer. The other side of it is that they depending on the driver profile if they're dependent on the public charging network then the instant assumption is we're going to give them a fuel card and because we know it's more expensive and we're just going to have to swallow it and we'll go down that route. We have had some people that have tried to for commercial vehicles try and play around with AR rates and mileage reimbursement but usually what we tend to see there is that you're either massively overpaying or you're underpaying nobody wins and I think when you actually look at the analysis it just makes sense it's a commercial vehicle it's a company fleet pick up the fuel cost whether it's at home if you can or on the public charging network and actually what you're only ever doing is you're only ever paying for the unit rate at that point in time and you're never overpaying for a unit rate as well or underpaying so it just it's a fairer way that's the cost of the fuel the business picks that cost up. The biggest concern is usually how do we do that repayment at home and what we've seen a lot more with commercial vehicles is people talking about how do we make it so that it's attractive for the driver to make sure that they can charge at home as well so that they're not just going well I'm here I'm having my lunch here and there's a charger there I'll just go and plug in at 80 you know 80 pence per unit rather than taking my vehicle back and paying 7 you know but it's just like because if they're not paying for it they don't see they don't feel that pain and it's more convenient for them theoretically so it's about how do we incentivize it so that we can get that driver to take it home they don't really need to charge on the network and just get it charged at home as well.

Gary:

It is because that also brings up the other question of the price per kilowatt hour because you mentioned 80 pence which there are a number of operators at the moment that charge 80 pence and higher for a kilowatt hour of energy but there are also a number out there that charge less than that and in some cases considerably less than that so is there an incentive to the driver to find a cheaper one to keep costs down for the whole organization or is it just a case of no I'm going to do the one that's most convenient because I've got a car that'll pay for it.

Russ:

I think and that's the risk with a fuel card right and I think that's where the challenges is and there's a lot of fleets tend to just accept that we're going electric with these vehicles and it's a bizarre one because they're just going we can't start saying you need to pay 60 pence per unit you know or because what a massive factor that's actually behind this this is a strange dynamic that we've never really had before if you've got a downtime cost of we'll use for ease of numbers 60 pounds per hour so for every hour that a driver's not active they're losing 60 pounds because they're not doing the jobs that then is another factor in that charging downtime so actually do you pay a higher unit rate for a faster more reliable charger that is convenient and reduce your downtime because if you've got at 60 pounds an hour for every one minute that you're plugged in it's costing you a pound actually probably makes sense to just forget the Delta between a faster or a cheaper charger and just just get the charge in as efficiently as possible and then get on your way but yeah in commercial vehicles the risk is more about the efficiency and the downtime and yes there is potentially a 20 pence Delta between the two prices but let's just get the energy in and get you on your way.

Gary:

That's fascinating I'd never actually considered that as a as an option to my mind the the van companies the operating companies were actually going to look at this purely on a price per unit basis but when you look at it from the point of view of where we've got a downtime aspect to that and one will offset the other so the price per kilowatt hours not necessarily as important as it would be for someone like me who you know being a typical Yorkshireman I'm going to try and get the cheapest one that I can.

Russ:

And this is the interesting bit when it comes to vehicle choice as well so for vans one because we're looking at downtime we are actually looking at the charging speed that all the speed of charge between say 10 and 80 percent as well because the shorter that period of time is the more cost effective that vehicle is so two vehicles might be exactly the same in terms of upfront cost or rentals or whatever similar residual values but if one vehicle charges at say 100 kilowatts and then another vehicle is able to take 240 then suddenly one vehicle is going to be far more operationally effective than another as well so that is a massive factor for commercial vehicles and bizarrely well some of the new OEMs are really starting to understand that and come to market with fast charging but for a long time one of the reasons we've not necessarily seen the adoption of large-scale ELCVs is around the charging speed. I did some analysis over 60,000 miles two vehicles and there was a ten and a half thousand pounds difference between the two vehicles in downtime over that was only over 60,000 miles as well so it's it's a big big difference so yeah that's suddenly a vehicle that might cost five thousand pounds more it doesn't really matter if you've got if you're saving ten and a half thousand pounds over its life and or over only 60,000 miles.

Gary:

Can we talk about the role the government is playing in helping the rollout of electrified fleets?

Russ:

you can drive if passed after: 1997

go Royal Mail currently runs: 6000

Roel:

I'm Roel Vissers I'm the Chief Commercial Officer of Milence. Milence is a joint venture established almost three years ago by Daimler Truck, Volvo Truck and Trayton In the end, that's five brands including Renault and Trayton of GS, MAN and Scania So we have three shareholders established three years ago with the purpose to build a European charging network dedicated for average duty trucks

Gary:

Now I think we're all agreed on the fact that electrification of long distance trucking is something that needs to take place but it's not just as simple as saying right, here's a charging network that the cars could use you know, there's Ionity and Fastnet and things like that Why can't the HGV vehicles use that? So it's not quite as straightforward as that, is it?

Roel:

No, I think what people need to I think need to realize is that one of my favorite sentences is truck charging is not car charging So truck charging is definitely a different animal Customers have different expectations Trucks have different needs Trucks are different vehicles and in the end they are production assets to generate money on behalf of their owners So the logistics industry, the fleet industry heavy duty vehicles they need their own charging networks for their purpose

Gary:

Now I know you're well, I'm assuming you're aware of a German YouTuber who calls himself The Electric Trucker Fantastic channel I'll put a link in the show notes for people who've not seen that but he does a mix of his charging on specific charging hubs that have been set up for truckers but he also does kind of the opposite of what you said there he's quite happy to take the trailer off the back and pull himself up at an Ionity or something like that So talk to me about why you think that's a bad idea

Roel:

No, but the question is, is he really happy? Or I would question that, to be honest But he's happy because he's an innovator he's living an adventure it is his sport to make that electric truck journey from whatever distance A and B and obviously the current car charging network can already be used by trucks sometimes and we've done a big study in the last month and actually there's already hundreds of charge points which are built for cars but which are in some way or form accessible by trucks We will actually publish a white paper on this in the next weeks or months, I believe So there is a network which can already be used today but the question is, is it actually fit for purpose? For a few of them, you indeed need to disconnect your trailer In the end, the logistic industry, the transport industry it's an extremely cost-driven market It's about TCO, it's about Total Cost of Ownership and in the end, it's the cost to rent your truck and to pay your driver and in the end, time is money So to disconnect your trailer is an activity which takes X minutes of time to connect again takes again X minutes of time with every connecting and disconnecting or moving or reversing your truck Your truck, you have the risk of damaging your truck or damaging the trailer. So obviously it works today. And I know that except for this electric trucker, there are a few more. Truck drivers who actually do so to as a, well, as a, as a, as a leader and an innovator in this industry to, to make the electric truck journeys work. But that's not a scalable solution.If we have thousands of electric trucks on the road.

Gary:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit. I want to move on in a second and talk about the actual Milence solution and what you, what you're doing about that. But before we kind of jump off this, is there a fundamental difference between the charger that you will see at an Ionity charger that this guy may be using to charge his truck and the charger that you will be using or that you will be providing a bespoke truck charging stop, or is it the same hardware?

Roel:

Today it's the same hardware. So we, the 17 hubs, which we have built and which are operational as we speak now, they use the same chargers as many other car charging hubs and has built the, the current 17 hubs with the, the Alcatronic 400 kilowatt chargers, which is I think the most sold charger product in Europe today on, on, on fast charging. We have built our first megawatt charger in Antwerp in, in, well, we commissioned we delivered it in January this year. And that's a, a, right. The new charging standards, which has, has been created globally in the last thing, well, three, four or five years, that's a, it's, it's a new standard next to the CCS, this is the MCS. That's a charging standard, which is developed for heavy duty vehicles. That's not only trucks, that's also mining vehicles, potentially agriculture, ferries, small boats. So that's a, that's a different shape block, which can, in the end, the standard allows up to 3.75 megawatt of charging power. So that, that would be almost 10 times the power delivered on the Alpitronic charger. Um, obviously then you also have the other side, right? Which is the battery of the truck or the battery of the vehicle or the ferry, which also needs to be capable to actually receive such power. And, and, and that's where, right. The, the, the, the battery technology is not yet today. I'm very confident that it will be in several years from now. But the, uh, the, the macro charger, which we have built in, in Anfer is a 1. 4 megawatt charger. So that's, that's different, definitely different technology than car charging.

Gary:

I'm, I'm always reminded when people talk about standards for things like charging, that the beauty about standards is there are so many of them.

Roel:

And the, I mean, obviously everybody. Fundamentally, if you speak to people who are in, who are sort of peripherally involved in electric vehicles or, or new to the, the, the market, they always think, well, I need faster charging. It's got to be faster charging. You know, I want 300 kilowatts. I want 400 kilowatts on 500 kilowatts on megawatt charging. But there are fundamental reasons why that doesn't happen. So. At the moment, as I said, you've got a number of locations that are out there that are not using the megawatt charging, and you've got the Antwerp site, which is using the megawatt charging.

Gary:

What's your strategy for either increasing the number of megawatt chargers that are out there or going back and retrofitting existing sites to megawatt charging? And I've got a follow-up question for that as well.

Roel:

Yeah, well, we will. Megawatt charging is a fundamental technology needed to make long distance electric heavy duty transport work. And that's from two perspectives. That's one charging a truck, which has typically a 700, 800 kilowatt hour battery pack to charge them within the driving resting times of 45 minutes. You need that power to make sure that that truck is within the resting time fully charged and that the driver can drive again for four and a half hours. That means that on the total cost of ownership of a transport company, he doesn't lose time and time is money of the driver and the cost of the vehicle. He can generate a competitive TCO versus diesel. So a megawatt charging is elementary to make that work, but also from a CPO side of view, I often make the joke that the bad thing about trucks is they are so damn big and they have such damn large turning circles. So a charging hub for trucks is quite a sizable plot. And land, well, to be honest, especially UK land is very expensive. So when you have a megawatt charger on the same beam, on the same 100 square meters, on the same footprint of a truck, you simply sell three times the amount of energy on the same plot. So also in the end, the cost price of a charging hub and the cost price of every kilowatt hour sold to a truck is lower with MCI than with CCS. So in the end, and that's a very common misconception in the industry, right? And that's driven by the car charging, which was done five, 10 years ago. That's a higher power charges. You had to pay more. It's actually the opposite. You actually, for higher powers, you should pay, you should pay less because in the end, the cost price per kilowatt hour delivered is also less. And that's because of the economies of scale of, of, of, of the technology.

Gary:

Right. I've got a couple of follow-up questions on that. I want to cover the whole area of the pricing model and how you work with that. But just before we move on to that, if, if megawatt charging is, you know, the solution, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't, why have you waited until now to put that in place? Why have you got however many hubs you've already talked about that are still using CCS? Why not go straight to megawatt charging?

Roel:

Two reasons. Officially the MCS standard has still not fully finalized. So it's, it's still right. The standard consists of, I don't know how many working groups and how many parts of, of that standard. Many, many, many have already been right finalized in the last years, but still a few are still in progress. So very formally the full, full, full standard has not been finalized yet.

That's one. Secondly, today there are no trucks yet who have an MCS, an MCS in that block. So the, the, the, our Antwerp side, and we've also open, or we have already now built the first MCS charger at our new hub in Zwolle in the Netherlands as well. Those, we will build a MCS charger in Landvetter in Sweden as well. But those, those MCS chargers will, at least for the next month, predominantly be used for testing purposes. And, and actually because of R&D trucks, because today you cannot have a duty truck, which has MCS charging capabilities yet.

Gary:

I've kind of got two ways I want to go on this before we move on to the detail about the sites and what you're doing and how you're rolling it out, where you're putting them in that. Talk to me a little bit about the specific charging challenges related to heavy goods vehicles. You've already talked about the fact that they're big, you know, they don't have a, a small turning circle. You need a lot of space. What are the other kinds of issues that you encounter within the charging sphere of heavy goods vehicles?

Roel:

Well, the, I think the challenges would be, the challenges are predominantly related to the customer expectations. So the customers are a transport companies, fleet companies who have needs, they need to run their fleet as efficient as possible, which means that they, right, that they don't like queuing, they don't like waiting for chargers, they want a charger to be available when they need a charger. That's one. And then secondly, when they are charging, they don't like load balancing, right. Reducing power because of grid constraints, which is very common at high power car charging hubs. So the challenge is that, yeah, well, we need to avoid queuing. And once the truck is connected, we need to, to, well, what's what, what would my lens schools, we deliver the maximum power promise. The charging power is, is determined by the vehicle. So that's also with cars and that's what trucks. So actually the truck tells the charger how much power it needs. And we don't want to compromise that. So if a truck asks for 400 kilowatts, it will get 400 kilowatts. When a truck is MCS capable and the truck would ask for 800 kilowatt a megawatt, the truck will get 800 kilowatt or a megawatt because that's the power the transport company is expecting because they have a very tight schedule to make. And they have planned X minutes before a certain charging stop. And we need to deliver that.

Gary:

When I look at this from the, from a car charging point of view, I've heard it said that if you, if you build the network out so that nobody ever has to queue at a charger, you've probably got too many charges in and you've spent too much money putting the hardware in because it's, it's virtually impossible to guarantee that. But am I hearing you saying that you want to create a, an HGV charging network where nobody ever has to charge, has to queue to get a charge?

Roel:

Well, I think that's, that's, that's obviously our, our, our vision. And I think that the, there's some, again, also here, there's some, some very differences, strong differences between car charging and truck charging. We are our, our solution to, well, hopefully solve the majority of this is that we, right, we are creating our own booking platform, which is expected to launch in two or three this year. So our view on the future of truck charging is that the vast majority of all charging sessions will be booked.

Gary:

So if you have a, right, so if you know that you have a, a calendar of your charging hub, then for everyone who made a booking, if nobody is late and if nobody stays too long, right, or takes too much time on their booking, then, then theoretically you would not have queuing depending on in the end, how many trucks would actually arrive ad hoc without a booking and how many trucks are arriving with a booking. So, but then the, the, obviously the, the, the very often statements in industries are actually that booking will lower the utilization of your charging, charging hub, because you will have trucks not showing up. You will have trucks who are delayed because of traffic jams or, or other reasons, but this will become a very dynamic ecosystem.

Roel:

So we will, and that's definitely not this year, right? But we will have real time data feeds with the trucks. We will know whether they are five minutes late or 10 minutes early. And, and we will, our booking platform is prepared to then optimize the, the, the, the kind of the bookings of all the charging base at our hubs. What is also very important to understand is that car charging has actually a fast charging, but for cars have actually two peak times, which is the, the, the morning peak and evening peak transport is a 24. Five or six industry, right? Very often in many countries on Sundays, it's not allowed to, to, to drive trucks, but it's really a 24 hour industry. So the charging hubs, which we already have in Europe, trucks are fast charging literally every hour of the day, but also at two at night, at three at night, at four at night, at five at night, at six in the morning, so you actually, right? The charging demands from the industry is not compressed in only two peak times, but it's actually a much more spread out demand for our charging hubs. And because it's much more spread out, it's also much more likely that a booking system system will actually work.

Gary:

I like that. I like the sound of a booking system. What sort of specific laws or regulations are in place, which are maybe causing problems for HGV drivers from an electric point of view that, that don't necessarily cause the problems for diesel HGV drivers?

Roel:

, you're only fuel once to do: 2000

Gary:

I want to move on, talk specifically about the rollout that you've, you've done with the hubs across Europe. Talk to me about how you've decided where these particular hubs are going to be. Please.

Roel:

What we, that's what we started three years ago and we are a quite a, quite a data driven company, so we have started with a very, very big analysis on, on, on the industry, on, on the roads. So what we did is in the end, obviously we defined our, our network strategy.Our network strategy is to, to connect all the major industrial and logistic hubs of Europe. So if you, and that means, that means big logistic areas, but that also means port areas, intermodal areas. Because in the, in the end, goods go from, if you look at the transport sector, they bring goods, normally the long distance, they bring goods from one logistic hub to another logistic hub. And that's the, the kind of the spider web for the infrastructure. So then we defined based on data analytics on, on the density, the traffic density of roads and all other public data, which is, which are there stop data of the current diesel trucks. So where do they stop today? We defined a kind of theoretically optimal charging map of Europe. And that in the end generated a few hundred optimal charging publications in Europe, where, where we believe that the industry would need a charging hub to make the logistics. There has also been many universities have also done quite extensive work on this, quite recently, three, four, five months ago, there has been a study released, which made a statement that if, if there would be a thousand charging locations in Europe, 98% of all transport use cases and routes could be electrified. Right. So in the end, and then obviously the second discussion is then capacity. So how many, yeah, right. How many charges do you, do you then need on one location? And can you actually have so many charges on one location? Also with respect to grid capacity, that's then a second optimization, but from a location perspective and how would a future dedicated charging network for heavy duty vehicles in Europe, and that's for me, obviously, including UK, but how, how that would look like is that you need a thousand locations to support, to support industry.

Gary:

Now in the UK, as I do, I would imagine you'd be looking at somewhere because the Immingham is on the East end of the M62 motorway. So you'd probably be looking at a similar one on the West end, which is Liverpool, which is also a big dock. You'd probably be looking at somewhere down near Tilbury, which is also another dock and maybe somewhere down, I don't know, Dover, Folkestone, where the channel tunnel crosses. Are you actively pursuing locations there? Have you identified sites or is it a case of, well, we know where we want these to be.

Roel:

Now we're trying to find out where we can actually put them. No, we, we, we also have, that's for, for all of Europe, but it's also for UK. We have a full portfolio of opportunities and locations where we are either right, which are somewhere in the pipeline, either very close to contract signature or right in the process of, of, of, of the investigation of, of contracting. We have already contracted a second location in UK, which will start construction, I think in the next two months, at least that's the, that's the plan. And indeed, that's very close to one of the locations you just mentioned. So you're pretty, pretty spot on with that analysis, but we have indeed, right? I think the locations you mentioned, we have identified, I think, a few handful of locations where we either are very close to the contract signature or where we, yeah, where we are looking for the right plots to build a charging hub.

Gary:

I want to talk about sort of the elephant in the room when it comes to public charging, which is pricing. Now I, when I go to charging hubs, I always ask people the same two questions. And the first one is, is public rapid charging too expensive? And almost without exception, they all go, yes. And my second question is, well, if it's so expensive, what are you doing to find cheaper options? And they go, well, I don't. Because for car charging, most people, and there are exceptions, charge on convenience. They go for the charger that's closest to where they are, regardless of what price it is. Now, from the discussions that you and I have had today, I'm of the opinion that the truck drivers, the logistics companies, they're going to be a lot more focused on the cost of charging. So what is your pricing model when it comes to how much somebody will pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity at one of your hubs?

Roel:

Very good. It's a very good question. No, but you're fully right. So transport companies are extremely focused on cost. The average profitability of a transport company is only 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%. So they are very, very cost focused. Our pricing in Immingham is 39.9 pence per kilowatt hour, which is a lot cheaper than many of the charging hubs which have already built or many car charging hubs. But we want to set the pricing as close as possible to a price level, which makes a TCO break even situation with diesel. And well, to be very honest, you need even a lower price than 39.9 pence to make that break even. So we are definitely not there yet. That's the reason why we've come with this pricing. In the end, what I already said before, the cost structure of a charging hub is actually quite simple because it's kind of, it's almost, I would say it almost scales linearly with utilization. So the higher the utilization on your hub, the lower the cost price for a kilowatt hour and also about the more competitive sales price you can offer to fleets. So if you look to the transport sector, which is a 24-7 industry, you're actually able to get to achieve, at least that's my strong view, you are able to get much higher utilization on your charging hubs than the car charging hub, than our systems for car charging.

Gary:

Definitely. So the other sort of cost or money issue is how are you funded? Now you said right at the top that you're formed from a number of OEMs in the same way as a company like Ionity has. Are they providing funding and CapEx for you or are you funded externally through venture capital, et cetera?

Roel:

No, no, we have been, we indeed have been funded by our shareholders. So our shareholders have made the commitment three years ago to invest combined jointly they have invested 500 million euro into our company. So that's 167 each, that's Daimler, that's Volvo and that's Trayton. And they've invested 500 million to, well, to kickstart our company and to make it possible for us to build that network. In the end, I think what I already, what I also said a few minutes ago is the truck charging is even more CapEx intensive than car charging. So in the end to, right, to build the network Milence wants to build in the next years that we need, we need more than a billion. So at one point in time, we will need to raise more money. Like all the other secures in that sense are also doing almost nearly. So we will go into that definitely. We have also been very successful in Europe, which was announced in January that we have secured the 111 million euro funding subsidy from the European program, which is the program to support the CapEx and the build out of charging infrastructure next to the main highways in Europe as well.

Gary:

So as you can see, the whole area of fleets is somewhat fraught with potential problems when it comes to electrification, but not always.

If you have depot charging and you size the vans appropriately for the work they're supposed to be doing, it becomes a lot easier to electrify your fleet. With depot charging too, the cost to charge an EV is substantially below the price of public charging, especially if you're doing overnight AC charging, not rapid or ultra rapid DC charging. This makes the accountants happy. There's also the added benefit that the maintenance and issues associated with electric vans are lower than with combustion engine vans. But with e-HGVs, it's a different set of problems again. Depot charging is all well and good, and for some companies with a return to base operation, that's fine. But for the longer HGV runs such as Tilbury to Liverpool or similar, there's a need to provide bespoke electrification for trucks. Luckily, there are answers to these already. We just need to get them implemented.

So where do you lie on the whole fleet electrification process? Let me know. Info@evmusings.com

It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with your listeners. Following on from our topic of today in electrifying fleets and the discussion with Royal Visas, I want to talk about the electric trucker a little more. He's a German guy called Tobias who works for a large German freight organisation and they have hundreds of trucks but their main depot has both renewable energy and on-site charging and they have numerous electric 18-wheel trucks in use.

The YouTuber Electric Trucker posts weekly videos about his life doing long distances and I mean seriously long distances all over Germany, Austria, Holland, Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula in the various electric trucks that the company owns. He's great at showing the day-to-day life of how he charges, where he charges and how he fits charges into his working hours and driving hours. The link in the show notes is to the English version of his channel which is well worth a subscribe if you want to know more about it.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show, it was put together this week with the help of Amy Carter from DAF Trucks, Russ Bolton and Royal Visa. Many thanks to the three of them for their help.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info@EVMusings.com

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I know you’re probably driving or walking or jogging now. But if you can remember- and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. Thanks.

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Why not let me know you've got to this part by messaging me at @evmusings.bsky.social with the words "Fleet of Foot. #ifyouknowyouknow", nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon, you know, he moved away from his electric unicycle recently for a little while and went back to an earlier device he used to use, the one wheel. He had a seat aboard with a wheel in the middle and he leans forward to move forward, backwards to move backwards. He seems to like that and he told me he's just as happy on that as he is on his electric unicycle.

Roel:

No, but the question is, is he really happy? Or I would, I would, I would question that to be honest.

Gary:

Thanks for listening.

Bye.