Electric long haul trucking no time soon: Volvo

To put a local lens on the viability of that scenario we must consider our vast nation that relies on the trucking and logistics industry for day-to-day operations. Our busiest trucking corridor from Melbourne to Sydney is just under 900km and the route from Melbourne to Perth is around 3500km with limited (if any) charging infrastructure to speak of for a good portion of that route.

Sentiment among the major trucking manufacturers follows that which we’ve heard time and again in the consumer passenger car market… that if battery-electric-vehicles are not fit for purpose, they simply won’t work. The same applies in the long-haul trucking sector.

“What needs to be really clearly stated, and we say this all the time, is that we’re not saying that electric is going to take over everything… we’ve got a multi-pronged approach to decarbonisation and EVs is just one of them,” said Matt Wood from Volvo Trucks Australia.

Even though for every diesel truck that Volvo has - from a medium-duty truck that carries around 16.5-tonne, right up to 44-tonne semi-trailers – they have an electric equivalent, but that doesn’t mean battery electric power is the end game.

“Our heavy-duty electric prime mover has an electric range of up to 300km – it’s a long way from Brisbane to Melbourne, and that’s a lot of charges,” said Wood.

“The future for us looks like a mix of urban and regional roles with electric and potentially hydrogen for longer distances and or internal combustion engines running on a renewable fuel.”

When asked about the potential to move to a battery-swapping model which we’ve seen in overseas markets, Wood says no.

“There’s a couple of reasons for that. At the moment, our system is a 600-volt system, and I would suggest that like any other electrification application, that’s going to increase not decrease. These trucks work in the industrial environment so safety is a core value at Volvo, so the idea of a high voltage connection that gets plugged and unplugged in a dirty environment day after day is not really ideal.

The other thing is that when the battery is a part of the vehicle you actually can have a thermal management system around it. You walk past a Tesla on a hot day, and you’ll hear it humming away keeping its batteries at the right level. You can’t do that with a battery swap scenario. You can only have sort of, fans around it.”

Similarly, on the topic of infrastructure and the ability to charge a truck mid-journey, Wood says a product must be fit-for-purpose.

“The biggest challenge, and I know I found on my road trip to Canberra, is trying to squeeze a semi [trailer] into a place designed for light vehicles causes a bit of mayhem. So, what we’re finding from a charging perspective is that the trucks we’re delivering are generally on a back-to-base application. [They’re] Not driving a long distance and having to charge multiple times. The customers are putting charging infrastructure in their depots.”

And in the context of applying this notion of charging to long-haul and logistics companies, think again.

“They won’t need to because they won’t be using EVs for that role. We’re very, very clear that we are not talking about putting an electric prime mover on the Newell Highway to drive to Melbourne.

“Those heavy haul long-distance roles will either involve alternative fuels – green or hydrogen. There are a lot of possibilities there but the idea that we’re going to be dragging road trains through the desert with EVs is probably not going to happen in this country. It’s usually what the social media commentary talks about – ‘Oh you can’t drive that to Darwin…’ - well, we’re not trying to get anyone to drive that to Darwin.? We’re trying to make sure that the cleanest, safest trucks on the road, are the ones that are delivering the milk to the local primary school, not a fifty-year-old diesel-belching truck. Clean up the urban environment first, right.”

“We need to be really clear, that we’re electrifying what we can now and as it gets better, we’ll continue to electrify that. But some of the really severe-duty, long-haul heavy-haul solutions… EV probably won’t be suitable.”

Wood spoke further about Volvo’s electrification strategy, fit-for-purpose products and why battery swapping won’t work on carsales' electric car podcast, Watts Under the Bonnet.? Tune into Episode 7 to hear the full interview.

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