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Charging, but not yet at turbo speed:
Daimler's electric truck eActros at a charging station
Photo: Marijan Murat / dpa
It is up to 9.6 meters long, tows up to 16 tons of payload, puts up to 544 hp on the road and, according to official information, lasts up to 400 kilometers on one battery charge: Mercedes' electric truck eActros is a big thing in several key data .
At the beginning of October, Daimler Truck started series production of the truck in Wörth, Rhineland-Palatinate.
With such emission-free trucks, the Swabians first want to electrify distribution traffic in cities and their surrounding areas.
For longer distances, an eActros with a range of 500 kilometers is already being planned - which is likely to have competition from a well-known newcomer, among others: Tesla's "Semi" electric semi-trailer is to be delivered for the first time in 2022 - with a battery range of up to 800 kilometers.
In addition, Daimler is working with Volvo Trucks and Renault's truck division to develop a fuel cell drive that will run on hydrogen and will be used for the first time in 2025. The truck manufacturer MAN, which belongs to VW, and its mother company Traton also want to build a hydrogen truck in series and are cooperating with Toyota for this. Hyundai is already mass-producing a heavy-duty truck with fuel cell electric drive. The US start-up Nikola, which has come under fire for making false promises, is teaming up with Iveco from Italy to build a hydrogen truck.
Truck manufacturers invest a lot of money in new drives because they have to to avoid fines: In Germany alone, road freight transport accounts for almost a quarter of all traffic emissions with 41 million tons of CO2 emissions (2019).
According to EU regulations, truck manufacturers must reduce the CO2 emissions of their fleets by 15 percent by 2025 and by 30 percent by 2030.
If they fail to do this, they will have to pay fines.
And that is getting the trucking industry pretty much on its toes when it comes to emission-free commercial vehicles.
Our own high-performance columns for trucks are supposed to solve the chicken-and-egg problem
However, the industry has a glaring problem on the way to electric and hydrogen trucks: So far, there are hardly any charging stations across Europe for electric trucks that are powerful enough to fill up a heavy truck with a longer range within a short period of time.
With the eActros, for example, Mercedes allows a maximum of 160 kW charging power.
In the best case, it takes around 1 hour and 40 minutes for the most powerful version with a 420 kWh battery to be charged from 20 to 80 percent.
That may not play a major role in distribution transport.
On the long haul, where the batteries have to be even bigger and a truck would then hang on the plug for a good three hours.
The solution would be higher charging capacities - and even faster dedicated charging stations for e-trucks, which would then also have to have longer cables and a greater overall height than fast charging stations for electric cars.
The electric car manufacturer Tesla is currently building such a "megacharger" charging facility in the Nevada desert.
There, the semi-trailer trucks should be able to charge a range of up to 640 kilometers in just 30 minutes - with a charging capacity of up to one megawatt, three times the charging capacity of the fastest charging stations for electric cars to date.
And Europe's truck builders are also keeping an eye on the charging problem: Daimler, Volvo and the VW truck division Traton want to have at least 1,700 high-performance charging stations on European highways by 2025.
However, Daimler's truck boss Martin Daum admitted in manager magazin, that would not be enough.
In order to make heavy traffic lower in emissions, a "massive investment in the production of green energy" is needed.
If, for example, several dozen trucks want to draw electricity quickly from a parking lot in the future, you would also need dozens of megawatts of electrical power.
"That is - to put it mildly - a major challenge for the electricity company," said Daum.
Technology for rapid refueling of hydrogen trucks "does not yet exist"
The situation at hydrogen filling stations for trucks is similarly difficult, Iveco CEO Gerrit Marx recently told the Financial Times.
The trucking industry could become climate neutral by 2030 or 2035, according to Marx.
But this prediction is rather theoretical because he is afraid that there will be no functioning network for hydrogen refueling and charging by then.
In order for hydrogen trucks to be charged as quickly as their diesel counterparts, filling stations would have to be able to deliver 70 kilograms of hydrogen within 15 minutes.
This technology "does not yet exist", Marx pointed out.
For comparison: hydrogen fuel pumps for cars currently manage to pump around 5 kilograms into the tank in 5 minutes - with a pressure of up to 700 bar.
In order to sustainably reduce emissions in heavy goods traffic, the trucking industry still has to solve a few technical hurdles when refueling.
It shouldn't be technically unsolvable - but not cheap either.