Volvo is going through a process of preparing its truck dealers because it has a launch program for a full electric range. All areas of the business are involved to enable them to start selling these alt-power trucks in 2023. The company is working on the assumption that the regulations will happen to enable customers to use them. At the same time as trying to control expectation as much as it can, it needs to be ready for the green light when it comes.
“We’re getting called to a lot of engagement pieces at the moment around ourselves and Daimler, primarily,” says Paul Ilmer, Vice President Emerging Technology Business development at Volvo. “We speak together as a united front to say: Volvo has got trucks, Daimler’s got trucks. These are here now, we’re not waiting for anything. That message seems to generate a lot of enquiries. It’s an exciting time.
“Operators are setting themselves a 10-year horizon, normally. They’re trying to map it out, within their operation, and a lot of our customers have a mixed fleet of applications. They’re trying to work out, from an electric perspective, what works, what works for hydrogen? A lot of it is the customer trying to understand, within their operation, what energy type is going to work for what application when. We try and lay the roadmap out to 2030. We can say, battery electric is going to be completely suitable here, and you wouldn’t put hydrogen into an application that battery can take care of because you’re adding cost, weight and complexity. So, you let battery take care of that.
“Then for any application that’s long and heavy, we’re saying, you’ll have a switch over into hydrogen in the second half of the decade. For us, hydrogen is in the second half of the decade, but it’s too early to put a year on it. There’s so much R&D and testing and we need to work out what local adaptations we may have to make for our market because it is hot, with high average speeds and poor roads. But the lynchpin with all of this is the regulations.
“As soon as we get a regulation framework that supports zero emission trucks, what we’re hoping for is a lot more competition in the market. Competition builds confidence. Then we can see the development of recharging hubs, from private and government investment, with a growing population of electric trucks along the freight corridors. Then fast charging enabling those common freight corridors to become an EV corridor. But – they won’t invest until there’s confidence around a population of vehicles to take the energy or to take the hydrogen.”
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