Charge, Another Charge! European Truck Novelties at the IAA in Hanover

The German city of Hanover hosted the world’s largest commercial vehicle show, IAA Transportation 2024. The halls were overflowing with electric and hydrogen models. Yet against the backdrop of a shrinking European market, the industry and its electric vehicles look rather like a doctor leaning over a patient with a defibrillator: “Clear! Again!”

The Numbers Behind the Slogans

The vast Hanover exhibition grounds, about the size of Moscow’s VDNKh, were full of spotless vehicles and bold declarations. So what if an electric truck costs two — no, three — times as much as a diesel one? It is wonderfully clean and needs no diesel. MAN intends half its trucks to have electric drive by 2030; Volvo Trucks aims for 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2040. ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, forecasts 230,000 electric trucks on European roads by 2030. Elektrifizierung, Dekarbonisierung und Digitalisierung! (Electrification, decarbonization, and digitalization!)

Truck Sales Are Falling

Now look at the statistics. Manufacturers announced a significant drop in truck sales overall, not merely electric ones. Mercedes was down 15% in the first half of the year, and 22% in the second quarter alone. MAN was down 12%, with order intake down 26%. And do you know by how much the heavy-duty truck market fell in August against the same month of 2023? By 63%. The reason is falling demand across the European Union.

So Are Passenger Cars

Passenger car sales are falling as well. August registrations were down 18% year on year, and by nearly 28% in Germany. For electric passenger cars the drop is steeper still: sales fell by almost 44%, and only 16% of current EV owners want their next car to be battery-powered. There is also a critical shortage of charging points — by 2030 eight times as many will be needed.

Where Are the Chargers?

“Passenger car owners are short on chargers? Hold my beer,” sighs the truck industry. Because at present there are only about 600 charging stations in the whole of Europe designed for large trucks. Although by that same 2030 there should be — well. Not long ago the figure quoted was 50,000; last summer Scania said 40,000; now the manufacturers have lowered the bar to 35,000. Is even that realistic?

The trouble is that the charging points that do exist are ill-suited to trucks. At a passenger car charger a tractor-trailer has to be uncoupled, because the tractor unit will not otherwise fit the bay. The truck-specific chargers tend to sit a long way from anything a driver needs, such as a cafe or a toilet. And recharging from 20% to 80%, even on the most powerful 400 kW CCS2 connectors, takes half an hour — time the European driving and rest rules account for very strictly. In one of Mercedes’s own promotional photographs the charger is delivering less than 100 kW; the process has been running four and a half hours with 146 minutes still to go. In another seven short hours the tractor unit will be ready to leave.

Megawatt Charging

The proposed answer is megawatt charging — the MCS standard, at 1 MW and upwards. Prototypes exist already, from ABB, Siemens and Kempower, but who will actually build networks of such stations along the motorways is still unclear. The undertaking is enormously expensive, demands massive upgrades to the power grid, and needs land of its own.

Under Two Percent of the Market

Meanwhile, only 3,500 electric trucks were sold in the EU in the first half of the year, half of them heavy-duty — 1.9% of the total. Less than two percent. Slightly more, around 4,000 units, ran on other alternative energy, mostly natural gas. And exactly 53 diesel-electric hybrid trucks were sold in the whole of Europe: individual units, not thousands.

Whatever Happened to the eHighway?

A few years ago the Germans thought eHighway trucks — long-haul tractors drawing power from overhead wires — might be the solution, and they built a stretch of catenary on an autobahn near Frankfurt am Main. Then it turned out that a trans-European network with its substations would take gigantic investment to build and to maintain. The trolley trucks can only run 5–10 km off the wires on their batteries, and the wires could get in the way of a rescue helicopter landing on the autobahn after a crash. The last update on the project’s page is dated November 2021.

The industry, pushed along by politicians, still hopes that a clean freight future in one form or another is around the corner. Asked to summarise this year’s IAA, we would say: explosive growth in the number of electric models, hope invested in hydrogen for the longer term, and very active promotion of Chinese products. Start with Europe’s big seven manufacturers — or rather the big six, since the Renault Trucks commercial vehicle division was not there.

Current or Diesel?

Mercedes: Actros L and eActros 600

The main European novelty is the Mercedes Actros with a blanked-off front grille, reminiscent of — yes — the Chinese Dongfeng. Striking as it looks, this is only a facelift; the genuinely new Actros, whatever that turns out to be, is promised in a couple of years. The facelifted diesel series is called the Actros L, the traditional Actros staying in production alongside it, and it is claimed to be 3% more economical thanks to improved aerodynamics.

The same platform produced the eActros 600 electric tractor, the number being its promised range in kilometres on one charge. Worth remembering how modest that used to be: the DAF CF Electric I tested five years ago managed just 100 km, and although the figure grew it did not grow much — the Volvo FH reached 300 km. Lithium iron phosphate batteries have now raised the bar. Testing showed the eActros’s real range on a charge to be not 600 km but 500 — in summer. Mercedes points out, all the same, that 60% of European long-haul routes are no longer than 500 km.

The tractor has a new in-house electric drive axle; the first generation used the ZF AVE 130 axle shared with electric buses. The three battery packs hold 621 kWh between them, come with a six-year warranty and are claimed to last at least 1.2 million km. Europe still does not know how long the batteries will really last, or what to do with them when they are spent.

MAN, DAF and Volvo

What do the rivals offer? The MAN eTGX tractor has a smaller battery, at 534 kWh, and a shorter range. MAN’s people insist the eTGX can cover 600 to 800 km in a day — but it emerges that this requires a midday charging break, the actual range being exactly half that. MAN also showed an extended-range eTGX, good for up to 630 km on 560 kWh of batteries, though the larger packs demand a three-axle 6×2 chassis.

On the shortage of chargers, the manufacturers are trying to start the process themselves. Mercedes announced its TruckCharge programme, under which customers can buy charging columns along with their vehicles. MAN, with the football club FC Bayern, has decided to build an e-parking lot near Munich’s Allianz Arena with 30 columns, able to serve up to 500 trucks and buses a day.

DAF has joined a consortium working on charging infrastructure. Its new-generation electric tractors, like the eActros 600, use LFP batteries and, depending on how many packs are fitted — two to five — can cover up to 500 km without recharging.

Volvo brings the FH Electric tractor, based on the facelifted FH Aero series. As at Mercedes, there is a proprietary electric drive axle at the rear, and the claimed range is 600 km. Sales are to begin in the second half of 2025. Volvo also showed a low-entry cab chassis for refuse trucks, which will be built in electric form only.

Scania’s 728 kWh

Scania’s answer is an electric tractor with a battery capacity that is a European record: 728 kWh. Its central electric motor develops 400 kW, or 536 hp, and drives through a four-speed gearbox. After a charge through a CCS2 connector, a 40-tonne truck-and-trailer combination is promised at least 530 km.

Not Only Tractors

Not everyone is concentrating on tractor units. IVECO showed the heavy electric distribution truck eWay Rigid, which takes a pack of four, five or seven Microvast batteries of 70 kWh each; the densest pack is good for up to 400 km.

The Turkish Ford showed something similar: the headline feature of the electric F-Max is the new ZF CeTrax 2 twin electric motor. The show also saw the debut of the MAN eTGL distribution truck, at 12 tonnes GVW, with 160 kWh of batteries and a 235 km range. Quite why MAN has brought it so late is unclear; Mercedes started building rigid electric trucks back in 2018.

Diesel Is Not Dead

Here is the interesting part. A few years ago the manufacturers were predicting the imminent demise of the internal combustion engine (ICE) in trucks; now they are working hard on making those same engines more efficient. As Winnie-the-Pooh said, “That’s not for nothing!”

At the show Scania was proud of a diesel tractor that had come out of comparative testing as the lightest (7,040 kg), the most economical over a 350 km route (23.6 l/100 km) and the fastest as well, at an average of 79.7 km/h.

MAN, through a string of improvements — the new D30 diesel of up to 560 hp, a 14-speed ZF TraXon automated gearbox in place of the 12-speed, a new hypoid axle and more — is ready to promise diesel savings of up to 7%. In diesel DAF XG tractors the TraXon control units are now calibrated to hold engine speed 7% lower at cruise, 930 rpm against 1030, and the engines have gained optimised turbochargers and EGR systems.

Gas and Biofuel

The Swedes, meanwhile, keep experimenting with other fuels. Volvo is adapting diesel engines to run on bio-diesel (HVO), which can cut CO2 emissions by 30–70%. Scania showed a gas tractor carrying tanks for both liquefied biomethane (LBG), which gives the greater range, and compressed biomethane (CBG), which is more widely available at European filling stations. Fitted with CBG tanks alone, the tractor’s range can reach 1,800 km — something no electric vehicle can even dream of.

Photo: Fedor Lapshin
This is a translation. You can read the original article here: Разряд, еще разряд! Европейские грузовые новинки на выставке IAA в Ганновере