Gary C 0:00

Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode 193 vv 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 trucks and how to electrify logistics.

Gary C 0:26

This season of the podcast is sponsored by zap map the free to download app that helps EV drivers search plan and pay for their charging. Before we start, I want you to say if you're new here, welcome. On this podcast we talk about renewables, electric vehicles, things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners and there's almost 200 episodes in the back catalogue, covering topics such as charging, buying a new or used Eevee, electric planes, electric boats, personal electric vehicles, such as E bikes, e scooters, on one wheels, we've got discussions with a national grid, the AAA the heads of the main charge point operators key players in the motoring world such as Quinn Wilson, there's also episodes talking about EB insurance your first day with an EV running your car in cold weather, charge your age, and we've got reviews of pretty much all the electric cars on sale from people who own and have run them for the last six months. So check out the back catalogue, I'm sure you'll find something of interest or a topic of discussion today's trucks and fleets. More specifically, I'm talking logistics and electrifying that aspect of transportation. There is a saying which goes something along the lines of everything you can see, touch or eat has been on the back of a truck at some point. Trucks or lorries, as we call them in the UK are an integral part of the logistics network. They transport everything from live cattle and wind turbine blades to containers full of Chinese tablets come across on a ship from the Far East. And it's a huge business. But we'll get to that in a short while. Back in the mists of time I did some work at the headquarters of a major shipping company which handle some of the shipping containers. And it's a pretty much 24 hour operation. Getting these containers off trucks and onto the ship bar off the ship then onto trucks. And depending on the cargo and the destination, there's a whole range of trucks that can be used for this 10 tonne trucks 20 tonne trucks 40 tonne articulated lorries, some are panel sided, some are open sided, some are refrigerated, and the one thing they all have in common at the moment is that they generally

Unknown Speaker 2:36

all run on diesel. And diesel has a number

Gary C 2:41

of advantages. It's easily obtainable. It's reasonably efficient in terms of the distance a lorry can go and a gallon diesel. And you can find these pretty much every petrol station around the country. As a result, there's a huge ecosystem that's grown up around diesel diesel refuelling, and the whole transportation or logistics industry in general. And in this episode, we're going to be looking at this aspect of transportation. And considering some of the challenges and solutions to getting dirty diesel off our roads, and replaced it with something that's more eco friendly and much lower pollution. We're going to be looking at scale of the issue and the potential solutions that are out there. We'll also look at the challenges around implementing these solutions, and where we are along the timeline of implementation. Now this podcast is done over 190 episodes so far. And during those 190 episodes, we've covered many, many aspects of the electric vehicle revolution. We've looked at myths and legends, we've looked at specific electric cars, we've spoken to thought leaders, CPO executives, charger manufacturers breakdown service operators, we've looked at running electric vans, electric planes, electric boats, Hell, we even did an episode on electric flying cars, as someone listened to these episodes could come away with a feeling that for the most part, it's fairly quick and easy to electrify something to create an electric version of a car such as to Jack your eye pace, De Niro, a VW ID model or Nissan LEAF, you throw up some charges. And that's pretty much the bulk of the work done. Sure, there's going to be teething troubles when it comes to things such as the right number of charges in the right place, cost vehicles, getting the public to understand that this isn't a passing fad that will be replaced with something else in a few years, all that sort of stuff. And that's the hearts and minds thing which will sort itself out in the end. After all, it's your car, your drive your charger your money. You work with a solution that fits the best for you and look to the government to incentivize what needs to be done at a national scale. But when you move the focus from personal transportation such as cars, bikes and scooters, and refocus it to cargo, transportation issues changed dramatically.

Gary C 4:53

Whereas the earlier issue with personal transport was how much do I pay to get an EV in a charger when it comes to cargo and logistics, the questions are a lot different. Businesses are obviously driven by cost, but they're also driven by lots of other factors that private car owners don't really need to take care of or be concerned about. We spoke with Lorna McAtear, head of fleet at National Grid last season. In that discussion, she told me about some of the issues she has to deal with when it comes to running a fleet of vans, cars and four by fours. And whether it was just a case of throwing a few charges in a depo.

Lorna McAtear 5:28

I would love for it to be that accurate and that easy. I think if it was then my life would my job would be done. It's never that simple. isn't. It's a real challenge when you come there. And I think a lot of that if we put some context behind commercial vehicles, they've always been the poor relationship in any company. So when I was at Royal Mail with the largest commercial fleet in the UK, it was still not priority compared to the actual post is delivering out there. So vehicles are always down the pecking order in terms of priority.

Gary C 6:01

Now imagine you're running a fleet of hundreds of large trucks that were for example, supplying food to the major supermarket chains, you've got to pick up food at ports or airports, transport it to central warehouses, take it from the central warehouses, and move it out to the individual stores. You've also got to do that safely, efficiently and quickly. Often in vehicles that need to maintain the specific level of chilled or frozen refrigeration. Driver hours have to be monitored and managed downtime has to be minimised. Trucks sometimes run 24/7 Without the ability to charge a depot overnight. And there are all sorts of regulations around maximum vehicle weights which be affected by needing to include huge heavy batteries as part of a new vehicle. So the freight and logistics sector has a huge number of challenges that private cars don't have.

Unknown Speaker 6:49

Let's look at some statistics here. For 2020, which is last year complete stats were available, the UK logistics industry was worth 161 billion pounds. warehousing and support activities were worth 66 point 6 billion pounds, and road freight transport and removal services were worth 31 point 7 billion pounds. In that same year. 144 billion million tonne kilometres were transported by road in the UK alone. heavy goods vehicles HGVs is a term used to describe all lorries with a gross weight more than three and a half tonnes. Vehicle specifications vary by size and payload. But for most holy as the predominant HGV class is articulated, known as Artix, with a maximum gross weight of 40 tonnes.

Gary C 7:43

While transport is the UK's largest emitting sector of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 24% of total emissions in 2020. It's actually HGVs that carry a disproportionately large amount of that. Car, for example, clocked up 244 billion miles and accounted for 60% of transport emissions, while HGVs clocked up just 17.4 billion miles but were responsible for 19% of emissions. Over three times as much emissions with barely 10% of the miles driven. If the 400,000 HGVs on the UK roads today were switched to electric the potential savings is 18.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the same as powering 2 million homes for a year. Now, I've said it before on this podcast and I'll say it again. Everything you have around you at the moment - all your furniture, your houses, building materials, your food, clothes, those decorations you have on the sideboard, even the device you're listening to this podcast on have all been transported at some point on the back of a lorry. The number of items in a modern first world environment that haven't been touched by road freight transportation is miniscule.

Gary C 9:00

And a lot of this is a result of the hub and spoke aspect of deliveries. If you've ever ordered a parcel and they've sent you a tracking link for it, you'll often see that your delivery starts at a factory or a shop, it gets shipped to some large central warehouse somewhere, then overnight to the nearest local depot loaded onto a van or in some cases a cargo bike and delivered to your house. When I worked deliveries for Morrison's during lockdown, I knew that all of their goods would have to transit through a single huge warehouse in Kent, from where they be loaded onto a truck and shipped off to be delivered to individual stores. And at the moment pretty much all of this is done by diesel trucks. Time for a quick sidebar. I used to deliver Bombay Sapphire gin to houses in Overton Hampshire, from the Basingstoke Morrison side. Overton is the home of Bombay Sapphire gin and their factories located there. So a bottle of their gin would have to go from Overton To the nearest delivery logistics warehouse to the central Morrison's warehouse in Kent, back to Basingstoke to be stuck on the back of my van, which will deliver it to the house two miles from where it was, it was originally bottled. And that's logistics for you. That's those of you thinking it will be cheaper just to walk to the distillery and buy it. hard luck. You can only access the shop after taking a paid tour starting at 20 pounds. And whilst you can buy online shipping is only included for baskets of 60 pounds or higher. Now back to the show. The overall freight market

is expected to have two and a half percent growth between 2021 and 2026. Now it's not a lot in percentage terms, but in terms of miles driven and greenhouse gas emissions. It's huge. So if we want to get rid of diesel and replace everything with zero emission vehicles,

how do we do that? Well,

it's not as easy as you might imagine. One issue we have at the moment is the batteries themselves. Now I can drive my Volkswagen ID three on a run in summer and get anything up to four and a half or even five miles per kilowatt hour efficiency on the run. That's because it's a smallish, fairly streamlined card that doesn't weigh a great deal in the big scheme of things. It's certainly lighter than the two Volkswagen SUVs my neighbours have got. But if you'd end up scale up to the size of a 40 tonne truck, complete the trailer on the back full of your favourite Morrison's foodstuffs. The amount of energy needed to push that vehicle forward on its trip from the warehouse in Kent. To a store in, say, Newcastle is quite large. In fact, it's measured in kilowatt hours per mile. Famously Elon Musk's Tesla semi one of the first fully electric artics to be launched and which is currently in service with Frito Lay/ Pepsi Cola in the US will need two kilowatt hours of energy to move a vehicle one mile along the road. On average, my ID.3 will do eight to 10 miles on that same two kilowatt hours of energy.

However, data coming out from the US indicate that the Tesla semi trucks are performing as well as expected, with one in particular, transporting cans from the Pepsi range, drove 1500 miles over two days. The stats for this are available online, and it appears that the vehicle stopped after 12 hours for a three hour charge, which tops it up to 100% from around 20% state of charge. It also did a couple of shorter stops to extend the range slightly. In a continuous run it covered around 400 miles on the little over 80% of the battery. Now given the huge payload it was carrying, that's not too shabby. What this shows, however, is it for any appreciable distance in an electric truck, you'll need huge batteries. If you've got a truck that does a specific route most days or have the ability to stop fairly regularly, you're going to be able to handle batteries with good charge speed.

So what's out there at the moment? Well,

the Mercedes Benz eActos 600e truck recently did a 600 mile journey through the Alps with a 40 tonne load in a single day. That easily covers Kent to, say, Newcastle with range to spare. Engineers have designed the eActos 600 to deliver 1.2 million kilometres on the road over 10 years. Other manufacturers such as Volvo are also getting into the electric trucking business.

So the rolling stock is getting there. The issue as always, is the charging infrastructure.

To manage the sort of charging needed to keep a fleet of eActos trucks on the road you need lots of infrastructure designed to handle the specific needs of trucks and this means long charging bays with side mounted chargers. This also means very fast charging. The standard is referred to as MCS - megawatt charging system. This means good, well designed hubs that can handle lots of trucks, lots of drivers, and provide the facilities they need with charging at the speed they need. Now I spoke to CPOs on this programme and asked several of them about charging for trucks. None of them have a comprehensive solution for this. Although both Osprey charging and Gridserve charging can handle long vehicles at several of their locations, but nobody has MCS charging at the moment. However Gridserve did announce recently that they were leading a consortium dedicated to designing and implementing what they're calling the Electric Freeway. Within the first two years of this seven year project Gridserve's committed to installing over 200 high powered chargers across key motorway service areas and more than 10 commercial depot charging locations. Within this they'll also be deployed at least one megawatt capacity high power chargers. This means that batteries don't need to be as big as some of those already designed because on the EU laws, HGV drivers must stop every four and a half hours for 45 minutes. The hope is to better use that 45 minutes to recharge and get the driver on his or her way. Again, with a full battery. That will best of luck to that project. We'll keep an eye out on it.

But let's talk about alternate fuels. That current diesel trucks can cover anything up to and even beyond 1000 kilometres on a full tank fuel. Which means that we can do one of two things assuming we don't want trucks charging every time a driver takes a break. We can wait until batteries have have higher energy density and cover more miles on a given battery size. Or we can investigate alternate fuels. And there are several of them at the time of writing. The bridging fuel that everyone likes to talk about is H V O. Now that stands for Hydrotreated vegetable oil. Basically, it's chip fat mixed with some hydrogen and paraffin to create a drop in replacement, for diesel. Pretty much any engine that can run diesel can run HVO. It's no more expensive, it runs cleaner, and it kicks out fewer nasty things at the back end. But it is still a fossil fuel, it does still burn things. And while emissions are considerably reduced,

they aren't zero. Now I posted on the platform that used to be called Twitter

recently, that this is the equivalent of being run over in a stampede by 1000 smaller people, rather than 100 larger people or being bitten by lots of little venomous snakes rather than one huge one. It's probably less painful at the time, but the end result is the same.

The next fuel that always raises its head when discussions such as this are opened is hydrogen. I was in recent trade show in London, and it was eye opening the number of vehicles there that were pushing hydrogen as a solution. Again, as with HVO, hydrogen has a lot of potential to be great fuel for trucking and other logistics, it produces no emissions when processed through a fuel cell, is fairly lightweight, can be carried in bulk with large tanks, and it gives you excellent range. Well, it gives you range. But these are all the pluses that people use when trying to push hydrogen cars and nobody looks at the downsides or the inherent dangers. Again, the issue here is that you need to have a good source of readily available hydrogen to make this happen. Applicants talk about 'electrolyzing Hydrogen using excess renewables'. But this is assuming that a there's going to be excess renewables and b there'll be sufficient to enable widespread electrolysis of hydrogen after everything else has been accounted for. Even if both of these conditions are met, there are other far more important uses of hydrogen than moving cargo around the country. Uses which will have a more positive effect on the environment from a carbon dioxide and particulate point of view. For companies that produce hydrogen on site, and there are several of these, using it as a fuel for long range trucks is okay as long as it's produced using electrolysis. For warehouses that have lots of solar panels on the roof, it might be possible for electrolysis to produce efficient hydrogen to run a fleet of trucks. But for those that don't, this could mean using methane as a hydrogen source. And that's not great. In fact, that's distinctly bad.

Relying on public hydrogen charging for trucks is also fraught with issues. Currently there are, checks notes, eight public hydrogen refuelling stations in the UK, two in Aberdeen, one in Edinburgh, Rotherham, Abergavenny, two in West London, and one in East London. This is down from 12 two years ago. It's not clear how many of these can a accommodate large trucks, and B provide enough hydrogen for large trucks on a large scale. Remember, these stations run out of fuel fairly regularly, because there's more demand that they can cope with. And this is for fuel cell cars or fuel cell vehicles, which out of the 45.1 million vehicles registered in Great Britain at the end of q3 2023, accounted for just 283 vehicles, a number comfortably exceeded by the number of cars running on natural gas 67,939. So if you can't deal with hydrogen in sufficient quantities to run 283 vehicles, what chance do they have of producing enough hydrogen to run the 400,000 HGVs that need it? Which means that relying on public hydrogen infrastructure as it stands for trucks is probably a fool's game.

What's not known, or at least figures are not readily available is how many private hydrogen stations there are. What is known is that public stations cost about a million pounds per site to create hydrogen in situ. So pretty steep investment curve for many companies. I was in a conversation with the guys from Renault trucks at a recent trade event, are sitting in a fully electric skip delivery truck, complete with the Yorkie in hand, And I asked the guy from Renault, what was their strategy moving forward? They were basically very bullish about batteries. But they're not closing the door completely on hydrogen. From their point of view, if there is a business which has a specific case, for a vehicle that can do extremely long distance with minimal fuel stops or relying on public charging, and the company's willing to suffer the increased capex and opex costs of producing hydrogen at their depo. Then Renault's willing to provide a vehicle that will run on hydrogen. Now, I looked at the guy with a little bit of side eye and I said, there's probably not a whole lot of the companies with that particular business case, right. He smiled at me and changed the subject. The one big thing that we haven't discussed yet is costs. And this is fundamentally where business and private buyers will differ greatly. On the like for like basis, very few private buyers would pay double the cost of a car to get an electric version. If you can get a diesel Astra for X 1000 pounds, nobody's going to pay 2x 1000 for the electric version, even if the overall cost of ownership is higher. But for fleet managers, this isn't always the case. Fleet managers will look at the overall cost of ownership for a truck. One reason is because the purchase price of things like trucks can be offset against either tax or depreciation in company accounts. This means that providing they can finance the actual cost within reason, it's not such a huge problem. Although if you look at the difference in cost between a diesel truck, say 200,000 pounds and electric truck 300,000 pounds and a hydrogen truck 500,000 pounds. At some point, this calculation starts to break down. But looking at something like an electric truck versus a diesel truck the two main factors that will play into the costings, are fuel costs, and maintenance costs. Fuel costs will obviously be much lower for the electric version. Even if using public charging the cost per mile on an electric truck will be considerably lower than for a diesel truck.

The other key factor is maintenance. Keeping trucks roadworthy and working is a huge overhead for companies. Anything which means a truck is off the road either for repairs or for plan maintenance, is costing the company money. So if an electric truck is going to be more reliable, which it is because there are fewer moving parts to go wrong, it will have a lower downtime, and will thus cost less over the long run. Sidebar number two, I was talking to someone who runs a fleet of 25 Electric vans over the last year, he has lost five days to maintenance for the 25 Vans, another branch of the same company running a similar number of diesel trucks as last 85 days to maintenance. End of the second sidebar. Now what this means is that within reason the current higher purchase price of electric trucks is not as much of an issue as it would be for a member of the public buying an electric car versus a diesel car. Now as with a lot of Eevee related issues, the main underlying cause of hesitancy is the same lack of confidence. The lack of confidence is usually generated by people with vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It's quite easy to sit to say to someone, you can keep your diesel truck and get 1000 kilometres on the tank. I can pay lots more for a battery truck, where you'll only do a few 100 miles before you'll need to stop for hours and charge it. But as with most anti evey propaganda that tends to emit or ignore a few home truths that muddy the narrative. Incidentally that's called faltering and we'll talk about that in more detail in an episode next season. Nobody drives 1000 kilometres and onStop. The overall range of a truck on a single tank is completely irrelevant. is like saying I have something at home that stores 10,000 litres of drinking water and I use it to make sure I can top up the five litres I drink every day. Why have something that stores 10,000 litres if you're only using five litres at a time? Get a tank that stores 100 litres - plenty for what you need.

Secondly, all UK and most foreign truck drivers have mandated rest breaks every four hours also. This allows adequate time for charging as evidenced by both the Tesla semi situation and the Mercedes eActos that we mentioned earlier. Of course, the fly in the ointment that makes this difficult at the moment, as mentioned earlier, is the actual infrastructure. If you're relying on the public infrastructure for your truck charging, especially in the UK in Europe, you probably not be able to run your truck as well as you might want to right now. If you've got local charging and a depot this situation becomes more tenable. The Gridserve Electric freightway project will go some way to alleviating the issues with public charge of large EVs. But as with everything related to the world of electrifying things, it will take time. There's always going to be someone wanting to push back against this on a principle basis - "I'm not going to go electric because someone says I have to" or an ideological basis "EVs are not the right solution will wait for hydrogen", or a vested interest basis, where people who stand to lose out from the electrification of trucking will protest. But that's the price of progress.

When they stopped using whale oil to provide the oils for streetlights. The whaling industry disappeared almost overnight. The replacement was better, cheaper, and easier to get.

Wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happens with trucks. It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing share with the listeners. Stockholm is banning fossil fuel vehicles in the city centre. From early 2025 in area of 180,000 square metres or about 20 blocks that form the Swedish capitals finance the main shopping area will only allow electric cars, some hybrid trucks and fuel cell vehicles. Dementia comes on the back of booths to turn the capital into a walking city or a biking city along the lines at places like Utrecht and Amsterdam. To further reduce all car traffic. Public transport is to be advanced while personal mobility in the city is to be proved for pedestrians and cyclists so that car trips are largely unnecessary. Any goods vehicles may also come as low emission hybrids when entering the new zones. Other exceptions include emergency and health care vehicles, and drivers with a disabled parking. I'd love to see this

And that's the show for today. Hope you enjoyed listening to it.

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Thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know I watched some of his initial videos where he was learning to ride the one-wheel. On the face if it the concept’s easy: one foot either side, clasp the knees together and use your weight to steer, accelerate and stop. I asked him why it took him so long to learn. He told me:

it's never that simple. Is it Gary?

Thanks for listening. Bye