ELECTRIFICATION OF ROAD FREIGHT – WITH DAVID CEBON
ELECTRIFICATION, HEAVY VEHICLES, AND THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE LOGISTICS
Forget cars, what does the transition to electric FREIGHT look like? How capable are HEAVY electric vehicles? What’s the future of charging infrastructure? What about long-haul? What will change for shippers and logistics companies? How should they think and plan?
I travelled to Cambridge University to ask Professor David Cebon, a visionary in the electrification of heavy vehicles.
David is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Director of the Cambridge Vehicle Dynamics Consortium, and -- his principal focus for the past 15 years -- Director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight.
In short, David is THE global guru on the electrification of freight!
MEETING DAVID CEBON
We met on a crisp autumn morning in a building buzzing with students at the Cambridge University Department of Engineering. David had a wonderful sense of humour and spoke with exceptional clarity, patiently building my understanding of electric freight step by step, layer-by-layer, from the vehicles through the increasingly complex considerations around logistics, charging, and infrastructure. And at each step, he backed his arguments with numbers — my kind of guy!
David warned me in advance that there was much to talk about, and we might not get through my list of questions, but in fact we did. Of course, by the end I realised that there were new topics I wanted to discuss, such as what the future looks like where trucks intersect with railways and ports, and what the rail/road balance might look like, but those will just have to wait for another time!
Overall, our discussion took a number of fascinating and unexpected turns, and gave me a MUCH stronger understanding of how electric long-haul might play out over the next 10 – 20 years.
And the opportunities are HUGE.
Click below to hear David’s exceptional insights, not only on the future of electric freight, but on the calculations and compromises all organisations will need to consider to get there. It’s mind-expanding: when you understand the electric future of garbage trucks, buses, and long-haul big rigs, you can’t help but think bigger about electrification opportunities in ALL contexts.
And scroll further for my key takeaways, as well as a full transcript of our conversation. You might also consider subscribing to “FutureBites with Dr Bruce McCabe” on Spotify or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Enjoy!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Urban freight: BIG ADDITIONAL opportunities in top-up charging
Urban freight is a completely different beast to long-haul freight. Different applications with different problems and different solutions. Urban freight is a no-brainer. All heavy vehicles in cities – all garbage trucks, buses, and delivery vehicles – will be electrified. The process is well underway in cities all over the world. It’s cleaner, quieter and most importantly from a total cost of ownership point of view, cheaper.
A key insight from David, however, was that city governments are largely missing how much more is on the table via some simple tweaking of the charging.
Allowing heavy vehicles to ‘sip’ charge during their operations for short periods (such as the 10 minutes at the of a bus route) unlocks cascading benefits: batteries can be a lot smaller (makes vehicles cheaper and lighter), depot chargers can be smaller, charging is distributed across the day and across more locations (time & place optimisation), chargers can be shared across multiple types of heavy municipal vehicles, heavy vehicles can carry more because they are lighter, they use less overall electricity to move around. An an intelligent charging system within the city adds up to a BIG win.
Electric trucks are ‘good enough’ for 80% of journeys
Trans-continental routes across deserts containing no infrastructure, even in the long term future, will likely still be populated by hybrid vehicles running on biodiesel when no charging infrastructure is on offer, and on electricity when infrastructure is available in cities.
For the rest, an 80-20 rule applies, i.e. 80% of truck journeys are already, or will very soon be, candidates for electrification.
The trucks are already ‘good enough.’
This happened FAST!. The technology (in particular batteries) is improving at lightning speed! No one, not even David, would have said electric long-haul was imminent 5 years ago. This year we’ve seen new vehicle announcements from Volvo, Scania and other major manufacturers. David notes that the 2024 technology -- 300 kms+ on a charge and a recharge time of a little more than 45 minutes just about lines up with the mandatory rest breaks for drivers in the UK (45 minutes every four and a half hours).
A separate 2024 data point (not from my conversation with David) comes from the journey of Louise Törnsten and four other female drivers working for Scania a couple of months ago as they drove one of their heavy vehicles 4,440 kms from Sweden to Istanbul. Their average range per charge was 400km, with variances of up to 50km depending on topography. The truck was trouble free, and their only challenges related to locating chargers (as you would expect, given it is early days) as well as lack of consistency in charger apps, payment methods, kW delivery and so on.
We know the improvements will continue because of how much ‘headroom’ remains to increase battery energy densities. See for example my conversation with George Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory.
Compromises For Weight-Limited Loads
In 2024, however, all this is new. Heavy trucks are only just starting to be delivered. We are right at the cutting edge. Which means that are important compromises and caveats to be considered for early adopters.
David explained that volume-limited trucks (volume-limited = carry a load that fills the container without getting near maximum allowed weight) don't have a problem with battery electric operations, and 2024 electric vehicles can be considered close to a drop-in replacement. In the UK, two thirds of trucks carry volume-limited loads.
But the one-third of trucks that carry weight-limited loads are compromised because of battery weight.
This readily translates into some useful comparative operational numbers:
In the UK the max-weight for tractor semi-trailers is 44 tons and the diesel versions can carry 29 tons payload. For 2024 battery electric options the total payload is about 22 tons.
A difference of 7 tons, or approx 25% less payload thus applies to weight-limited truck operations.
Which means 25% more electric truck journeys are needed to carry the same total amount (eg sand to building sites etc)
Charging at truck stops is NOT the future
Furthermore, even as the trucks get better, we’ll still need to think VERY differently about logistics within the constraints of EVs, when and where truck charging takes place, and what the charging infrastructure looks like.
The idea of charging at base only is a non starter, because in practice only a tiny number of commercial journeys are ‘there and back’ to a destination at half the range of the vehicle or less.
Static charging at truck stops (how most people are thinking today, including most policymakers) is emphatically not the future. The charge-time parameters discussed above tell us that 25% of national trucking fleets will be stopped and charging at any given time. In the UK, with 200,000 trucks on the road, this translates to 50,000 stopped at any given point in time. There isn’t the real-estate.
Worse, trucks stopped to charge at truck stops can’t do anything else. It’s dead time. This is TERRIBLE logistically and commercially.
Static Charging at Warehouses and Factories a BIG part of the future
For static charging, the most desirable future by far is to do most of the charging at the warehouses and factories – what I’m henceforth calling “the nodes” – simultaneously with loading and unloading. And since most truck journeys in the UK are less than 4 hours long, drivers can also coincide their rest breaks more or less simultaneously. Three wins in one. FAR better commercially!
The Biggest Bottleneck in the rollout of electric freight is Cabling
But static charging at warehouses and factories brings big new challenges …
Fat new electricity connections are required for truck chargers, which means they are expensive — multiple millions of pounds per node (David again: “In many cases it's likely to be cheaper to move the warehouse to the electricity than moving the electricity to the warehouse”).
Because shippers and logistics providers are different companies, and the logistics companies operate on wafer thin margins, there are challenges in deciding who pays for the installations.
Adding up all the warehouses and factories in the UK gets you to 30,000 electricity connections to the grid needed.
In the UK, current wait time for those grid connections is 5 - 15 years, depending on which part of the country you are in.
We just found our biggest bottleneck in the rollout of electric freight!
This is not to say that static charging at the nodes is not a substantial part of our future. It is (scroll down for the discussion of the dynamic charging part). So the takeaways are: (1) cabling up static chargers will be a key inhibiting factor in overall pace of transition, and (2) transitioning to electric freight for most organisations will require complex optimisation exercises across logistics, EV operations and charge infrastructure.
Indeed, these problems are where David and his colleagues spend much of their time with industry. The program he mentioned – partnering with Volvo, Scania, DAF, Mercedes, various charger manufacturers and a dozen logistics companies – is called the Joint Operators Logistics Trial or JOLT. If you need to optimize your transition to electric freight, reach out.
Swappable batteries: a small part of the future
Solving the bottleneck with swappable batteries distributes charging in time and place, resolving some of the challenges above.
But it introduces two new challenges:
You need more batteries – something like 1.3 to 1.5 batteries per truck – plus a separate logistics system for moving them around, which adds significantly to cost.
To be attractive economically, batteries must be shared across companies, which means standardizing not only battery packaging, but also internal cooling, battery management and communication systems – what David calls the ‘secret sauce.’ David tells me OEMs do not want to share their proprietary recipes for optimizing battery performance. He further notes that while there is a big trial underway in China, this is a closed system without inter-OEM swapping.
David’s conclusion: a plausible but less likely part of our future.
Dynamic charging: a BIG part of our future
David called dynamic charging (aka “charging on the move,” or in his words “take the electrons to the vehicle rather than putting them in a box and trying to carry them around with you”) the great hope.
We discussed two versions.
Conductive charging from overhead contact lines via retractable pantographs (think: electric trains and trolleys)
Conductive charging from roads (think: scalextrics).
Both allow truck-charging at highway speeds. Both allow trucks to charge while using the highway, then to take the off-ramp and drive ‘disconnected’ to and from destination warehouses and factories. Both are well understood. Both are relatively cheap to install.
And from there, the benefits keep coming:
No “dead-time” stops (logistics time constraint disappears)
Battery is small and you can carry a full load (logistics weight constraint disappears)
More electrically efficient, because when you're driving on the highway you don't have to charge/discharge the battery, you can use the electricity directly.
Fewer grid connectors (David calculates about 100 big connections to the electric road system and less than 10,000 warehouse connections for the UK would be needed -- compared to the 30,000 warehouse connections under static charging we discussed earlier)
As David summarized: “you have the lowest total cost of ownership, you have the lowest weight, you have the lowest energy consumption, you have the lowest carbon emissions and you don't have any additional cost due to the logistics delays. So THIS is the solution.”
Of the two versions, David favours overhead contact lines as ‘most likely’, but he’s got an open mind on electric roads, which he insists may be even cheaper to install. Information on the Swedish project he mentioned can be found on the official website and here and here. Important data points to watch for will be installation cost, reliability in all weathers and under highway-punishing traffic conditions, and overall maintenance cost.
Personally, I LOVE the overhead contact line solution. We have vast experience with this technology and a pantograph + small battery can even be retrofitted to existing trucks. It first came to my attention with a trial in northern Germany approximately 5 years ago (the results were reviewed here) after which I included it in keynotes covering the future of transportation. Funny thing, the stunning progress in batteries convinced me it might no longer be as relevant, so recently I took it out. Thanks to David, I now know this was a bad call. Back it goes!!
What we didn’t talk about
Hydrogen. Because hydrogen has been demolished as playing ANY meaningful role in the future of heavy freight, or indeed any ground transportation, by my own calculations, and by other scientists & engineers I’ve interviewed, such as George Crabtree and Michael Barnard. Using electricity to make H2 to be burned and turned back into electricity cannot hope to compete with using that electricity directly in an electric vehicle. In every case pure electric wins, and by a LOT. David is of the same view, so we didn’t waste any time on it.
The opportunity is BIG
Well that’s about it. What a great conversation to get us all thinking BIGGER about not only the electrification if heavy vehicles, but the opportunities in ALL kinds of electrification!
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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Please note, my transcripts are AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity and will contain minor errors. The true record of the interview is always the audio version.
BRUCE MCCABE: Hello again and welcome to FutureBites, where we explore pathways to a better future. I'm Bruce McCabe and with me today at Cambridge University is Professor David Cebon. Welcome, David. Thanks so much for making time.
DAVID CEBON: Hi. My pleasure.
BRUCE MCCABE: We wanted to talk today about sustainable road freight and electrification of the heavier vehicles, because no one really is paying nearly as much attention to that as they are passenger vehicles. And I particularly wanted to talk to you because I know you're knee-deep in research in that field. If I look at your credentials, you're a Professor of Mechanical Engineering here at Cambridge, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. You have a couple of hats -- Director of the Cambridge Vehicle Dynamics Consortium, but, more importantly for this conversation, you're the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight. Do I have all that right?
DAVID CEBON: Yeah, all exactly right.
The Vehicle Dynamics Consortium is concerned with heavy vehicle safety and productivity, things like rollover and steering and braking and stuff like that, and I've been doing that for decades actually, that kind of work. And the last 15 years I've been working on decarbonisation and energy consumption, and so all of that other stuff is still relevant of course. If we're going to have electric heavy vehicles, they've got to be safe and got to be able to turn and brake and all that stuff. But there's an additional emphasis on decarbonisation and energy, and so that's the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight.
BRUCE MCCABE: Fantastic. Well, look, the last couple of years seem to me, as a non-expert in your field, to be a hive of activity. There's been a lot of launches of heavier electric vehicles. We've seen activity out of Scania and Volvo recently and I thought we'd just kick in with: Where are we at? What do the current species of electric heavy vehicles look like? And perhaps we can explore what we still need? Or maybe they're already really, really capable? But I'd love to just tease out where we're at a little bit.
DAVID CEBON: I like to divide heavy vehicles into really two applications, which is urban and long haul freight. So urban, we've got electric delivery vans, parcels and food, and you know your supermarket van is just as likely to be electric as as as diesel. There are electric rubbish trucks, electric buses. There are electric vehicles which do deliveries to what we call convenience stores. Here they tend to be like the little corner supermarket, maybe owned by the big brand, but a corner shop sort of thing. So all of those delivery vehicles exist in cities and in buses and so on. So heavy vehicles in cities are becoming electrified and we'll look back in 10 years time and we'll say why did we ever have those smelly diesels in our cities? All electric, nice and clean, quiet, no particulate emissions or NOX emissions, no, noise.
BRUCE MCCABE: And the business case is a no-brainer already, really, isn't it?
DAVID CEBON: It is, but the main thing is, that it's an easy operation for an electric vehicle. They can charge up at their depot overnight and they can run all day a couple of hundred kilometres maybe, stopping and starting doing their deliveries, end up back at the depot and charge overnight. Or a rubbish truck equivalent or a bus equivalent. So it's relatively straightforward for them to do, and so that's happening.
There is one little gap there, in my opinion, which is that all of those vehicles, particularly the bigger ones, the rubbish trucks, the buses and so on, would benefit a lot from being able to charge during their operational day for short periods of time.
So, for example, you've got buses going backwards and forwards from between two points along the line, you know, 10 kilometres apart or something or other. They typically stop for 10 minutes at each end of the line to regularize the timetable. If they charge during that 10 minutes, just have a sip of charge, what it means is that their batteries can be surprisingly smaller. You can have a much smaller battery, and that gives you a whole set of advantages.
The first one is, if you've got a smaller battery, you don't need nearly as big a charger in the depot, because instead of having a, you know, 600 kilowatt hour battery, a great big one, you can have a 200 kilowatt hour battery, and that means if you've got a whole depot full of buses, you don't have to put nearly as much electricity into them in the time that they are parked up between, you know 10 pm when they get get in and 6 am when they go out. So your charging job in the depot is much smaller. The second thing is that you then you distribute the charging in time so you can use charge during the day, not just all at night, and that can be an advantage, and you also distribute it in space. So you need a smaller charger in the depot, a couple of smaller chargers in other places and of course, those chargers for buses could easily -- or the infrastructure for them, substations and stuff -- could easily be used to charge rubbish trucks when they're going past, or other heavy vehicles.
DAVID CEBON: And so that idea of having a carefully designed charging system for heavy vehicles in cities, that's something which hasn't really been explored. It's a bit difficult because the local councils that do that and should be responsible for that job don't really understand what needs to be done.
BRUCE MCCABE: Sure, and it requires some collaboration across enterprises.
DAVID CEBON: Exactly.
BRUCE MCCABE: but the rising tide lifts all boats. If we could do that, it would have quite very significant economic gains for all the players concerned.
DAVID CEBON: Well, that reduction in battery size makes the bus cheaper. It means it can carry more people or the rubbish truck cheaper and lighter, we can carry more people, uses less electricity, lower carbon emissions. Everything wins and the cost is significantly reduced If you look at the total cost of ownership.
So the challenges there are, typically the city council is going to own the infrastructure rather than the bus company for example, and here bus companies have a sort of a contract for some number of years -- five years or something like that -- which they win from the local council, and the bus company changes periodically. That means that the company that's using the charges changes. So there's a bunch of kind of funny contractual things that make it a bit more challenging, but the basic principle that if you can have an intelligent charging system within the city it's a huge win, that's something that, well, I hope your listeners will take that away.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, and I really love the systems thinking. There's so much of that also in automation. I remember I looked at a demo at MIT -- I'm just trying to think of who put it together -- but it was just conceptually looking at data on passenger vehicles. So, yellow cabs in Manhattan, if you could just apply at a systems level some automation of the distribution of those yellow cabs, you didn't have to take the driver out or anything, you could actually accomplish the same service levels with, instead of 14,000 vehicles, 3,000 vehicles.
DAVID CEBON: There you go. Yeah, Well, that's right.
BRUCE MCCABE: That was Professor Daniela Rus at MIT. But what a great metaphor for how much upside potential there is. And the same holds here. It's a systemic view of the charging network. If we have that shared service, that would be amazing … So can we jump into long haul, because this is the harder problem, isn't it?
DAVID CEBON: Yeah, absolutely.
BRUCE MCCABE: Where are we at? Because there's a lot of buzz. I certainly am very excited about the potential. And it seems maybe the same things apply about shared charging infrastructure across major arteries, transport arteries.
DAVID CEBON: Well, I think the situation in the long haul is that the vehicles are now available, which itself is remarkable, because five years ago I wouldn't have been able to say we're going to be running on electric trucks in five years.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's happened quickly.
DAVID CEBON: The technology it has happened incredibly fast, incredibly fast, and the chargers are pretty much there. There are, you know, megawatt charges around the corner. You can do 350 kilowatts an hour, which is pretty good. I mean 350 kilowatts, to put it in perspective, will charge your 600 kilowatt hour -- the biggest battery that you can get in most long-haul trucks is about 600 kilowatt hours -- and the 350 kilowatt charger will charge that in a couple of hours. You'd really like to be at double that power or a bit more …
BRUCE MCCABE: So you can get it under an hour.
DAVID CEBON: … So you can get it under an hour, yes. And there is one target in UK, which is that drivers have to have a 45 minute break every four and a half hours. So if you could charge in 40 minutes, you can just about do it in the driver's break, just about. So that's a good target. So, but we're very close to that. The megawatt charging standard exists. They haven't been rolled out yet, but they will be within the next year or so, and so I would say that, broadly, the situation is that the technology exists, good enough. It's not perfect. It doesn't replace every single diesel application, it doesn't get you across the Nullarbor.
BRUCE MCCABE: [laughs] For our Australian listeners, that's a long haul!
DAVID CEBON: That's right. It's like a couple of days. It's not going to do that, but it will get you a good … You know we're in the first generation of battery electric trucks. Within 15 years or 25 years to 2050 -- we've seen what's happened over five years -- the development undoubtedly will be spectacular
BRUCE MCCABE: And they'll become more and more functional. And we're hearing so much on the battery front that we can expect a lot more energy density still, on the battery front, which is amazing,
DAVID CEBON: that's all a big advantage. That's all good stuff of. Whats missing in the heavy vehicle area is an understanding of how you do your logistics with the constraints of EVs.
BRUCE MCCABE: Let's dig into that. That's interesting.
DAVID CEBON: So that's the problem. So if you've got a vehicle now which will do 200 kilometres maybe 200 miles if you're lucky, but somewhere between 200 and 300 kilometers and you have to charge back at base, then you can really only do one kind of journey, and that is a journey which takes you, you know, 150 kilometers out and comes back again. And that is such a narrow range of what people actually do, it's almost negligible. And we talk to companies and say, okay, we're doing a trial, running a big trial of electric battery, electric trucks, on just exactly this issue. At the moment we talk to companies and say, all right, well, what out of all the stuff that you do -- logistics companies, right, companies that are running trucks -- out of all the stuff you do, which of your journeys could you run this truck on? And they go around and they scratch their heads and they say, oh well, there is one here that we could do. You know, we do this, this journey where we take, you know, stuff from factory to store to warehouse, and it's about 150 kilometres, and we go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards, and that one we could do.
But it's one little journey out of a mass of different stuff which is all much, much more complicated. It involves multi-drops around some obscure part of the country to supermarkets, or it involves tramping around the wilds of Scotland for five days, or a trip to Europe, or all kinds of complicated stuff. And so the question is, how do you do those things? How do you do those things, those much more complicated journeys, within the constraints of the electric truck ecosystem?
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah Right.
DAVID CEBON: And the problem isn't really the truck, the problem is the charging infrastructure. So for example, if you had fast charges distributed at the right places, you could drive in the UK easily enough. Not that many journeys are more than four hours. You could easily enough drive from warehouse to warehouse, charging up on the loading bay, as you you know, when you stop, typically a truck will stop for 30 minutes or an hour loading and unloading and you would charge on the loading bay and drive on to the next location, and that would work perfectly well.
BRUCE MCCABE: The UK is really good because it's smaller geographically to think about.
So what we're talking about there is not what's in my imagination, which was where we used to have truck stops and fuel stops putting chargers there. What we're talking about is source and destination and nodes in the delivery network and having the charges at those nodes, aren't we?
DAVID CEBON: And in, look, even in Australia, there's plenty of trucks that drive up and down the Hume, absolutely right, but there's a hell of a lot of trucks that just drive around Melbourne or Sydney. You know they're driving hundreds of kilometres in a day, but they don't actually ever leave the immediate hinterland of the city and all of those trucks are doing this kind of operation, right? So if you start to think so, here's the thing you could start with Australia and you could say well, you know, we've got A triples that are 55 metres long and 150 tonnes and they've got to drive from Perth to Broome.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's the worst case, isn't? It's the absolute worst case.
DAVID CEBON: It’s the worst case. And you could say well, I can't do that today. So therefore, electric vehicles are no use to me, and it's completely ...
BRUCE MCCABE: Well, it's nonsensical.
DAVID CEBON: It doesn't make sense because we're in a transition process. We know that today we can do 300 kilometers at a time. There are various journeys which we can do like that, tomorrow, next year, five years time that will have expanded to a bigger range of journeys, 10 years time and you know, maybe by 2050 you'll be able to drive across the Nullabor. But I doubt it. I doubt you will ever be able to do that.
The important thing to realise is those trucks in Australia -- and I keep coming back to Australia …
BRUCE MCCABE: Well it is the worst case.
DAVID CEBON: I think it's a really interesting case. It's a tough context. It is the worst case, but they are 10% of Australian trucks which are doing that long long journey, those really big road trains and all that. No more than 10% of Australian trucks. The majority of Australian trucks are travelling around within Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane and maybe going between those places.
BRUCE MCCABE: So globally there's an 80-20 rule here that applies
DAVID CEBON: There absolutely is, and there's an 80-20 rule but there's also this transition going on where the technology is getting better and better really fast, and so where the types of journeys you can do will improve really fast. So where we are just now, we're in a position where electric trucks are a bit expensive. There's actually really rather few of them around. They've only just been rolled out in the last year or so.
BRUCE MCCABE: We're right on the cutting edge of it, aren't we?
DAVID CEBON: We absolutely are. In the UK, you know, one manufacturer, who shall remain nameless, is shipping trucks. The other three that we're working with, they will be shipping 4x2 tractor units in the first quarter of next year. So we're right in the position where it's just at the start, where those manufacturers have spent a lot of money developing their trucks and so naturally those vehicles are expensive. So the business case is a bit questionable at the moment and we're just going through the process of rolling them out, getting them cheaper, expanding the operations and getting the charging infrastructure out. But they are absolutely coming. This is absolutely the future.
BRUCE MCCABE: Even more than passenger vehicles, we really need standardisation, don't we, to make this fly? We don't want a Volvo or a Scania or a Freightliner turning up and requiring a different type of charger at the node. Do we?
DAVID CEBON: No, I think they've agreed the type of charger.
BRUCE MCCABE: So we've done it.
DAVID CEBON: There are other things you can do other than static chargers, but I think just the final thing on static chargers is that the majority of people, including our government here, think that the solution is static chargers in truck stops.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, that was in my head, yeah.
DAVID CEBON: It absolutely isn't [the future]. From all of the work we've done. Simulation work, talking with industry. For a start most trucks don't stop at truck stops. It's a very small proportion and let me just give you a simple statistic here.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, it's fascinating.
DAVID CEBON: You can drive a truck for four and a half hours nearly. You can't quite actually on current batteries. You can't quite drive for enough hours, but you're pretty close. Let's say you can drive a truck for you know three to four hours. Yeah, you have to stop. You will have to stop for an hour to charge.
BRUCE MCCABE: And the rest break is required as well.
DAVID CEBON: Yeah and rest break. So you can drive a truck for three or four hours, you have to stop for an hour. That means that 25% of all trucks are going to be stopped charging. Okay, so the UK has about 200,000 trucks on the road. So a quarter of them, 50,000 of them, have to be stopped at any one point.
BRUCE MCCABE: God, you wanna use that time sensibly for loading and unloading, don't you?
DAVID CEBON: You do, you do. There are not 50,000 truck stops, there are not 50,000 spaces in truck stops and there probably never will be. So that's a very simple way of thinking about it. To think that truck stops are the solution to the problem is deluded.
Now, when you actually talk to trucking companies about their operations, they absolutely do not want to add additional stops during the day at truck stops. What they want to do is charge up when they're on the dock, right when the driver stopped and the vehicle stopped and the time is already, you know, accounted for. What they don't want to do is add an extra hour in the middle of the day, in the middle of their journey, because they have to pay the driver and they have to pay for the truck and they have to pay the cost of hauling the freight.
BRUCE MCCABE: As soon as you say it, it makes absolute perfect sense. There's no other way to do it.
DAVID CEBON: There's no other way. That's right. So you have to use the times in the day that you have now to charge right, and that's particularly the times when the vehicles on the dock in the warehouse just to a lesser extent the driver breaks. They're the times you've got and the challenge is to work out how to use those times and how to do your logistics. So in the old days you know you fill up with diesel on Monday and it runs till Wednesday or Thursday, and you don't think at all about the issue of the energy for the truck. Now the problem is that you have to fit that charging within the logistics task, within the logistics day. That's the big difference.
BRUCE MCCABE: So it's almost like I'm just imagining the research you're doing here, but I can imagine there's quite a lot of statistical and distribution-based analysis going on. There's a lot to explore there.
DAVID CEBON: There is. But what we do on the whole is try to get from companies that we work with, try to get information about the work that they're actually doing, the logistics work that they're actually doing, and you can get pretty detailed stuff. At least some of them will give it to us.
That can be details of where the truck is, where it stops, what time it got here, what time it got there, how long it had to stop and so on. And what we tend to do is to simulate those journeys and it's actually not necessarily just a journey and you have to be very careful about how you do this, because it's easy enough to look at the statistics and say, well, the average truck journey in the UK is only 200 kilometres, right, so that's all you have to do is, if you can do 200 kilometres, you've solved the problem.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yes, job done.
DAVID CEBON: Job done. Actually, that's not true, because what the truck does, it does 200 kilometres, then it turns around and does another 200 kilometres, then it turns around and does another 200 kilometres, and it does that for 18 hours and that's what you have to do is to manage your charging and whatever throughout the whole of the day in the life of the truck
BRUCE MCCABE: Fascinating.
DAVID CEBON: So we do a lot of that and one of the things we do is look at charging infrastructure and what's needed.
BRUCE MCCABE: So companies, just to take a quick segue, but companies can come to you now if they're interested in doing that kind of analysis with you. You're open to that and looking for those right now.
DAVID CEBON: Absolutely, in fact we've got a big project going on. I'll do a bit of advertising. It's called JOLT. Joint Operators Logistics Trial. And it's a big program. Bunch of partners 12 or 15 logistics partners, four truck makers -- Volvo, Scania, DAF, Mercedes -- a bunch of other partners that provide chargers and so on, and we're digging into these exact issues, all the things that I've talked about, plus other things like, what is the real business case here? Which is a really critical part of it, and how is that business case going to change over time? How can individual companies manage their activities? What charging infrastructure is going to be needed in the country and for individual companies? And some technical stuff like, how fast does the battery degrade and why, and what happens if you fast charge and how does that -- what happens to the battery degradation? How does that affect your business case, and so on.
BRUCE MCCABE: So can I ask a couple of perhaps very naive questions? But it comes up a little bit. Just in terms of battery weight, when we look at the energy density, are we looking at any big compromises there in the current vehicles? Have we got a bit, you know, the packaging of the battery is compromising the load, or, given that they perform so well with torque and all the rest of it …
DAVID CEBON: It's not naive, it's critical. The basic situation in the UK is that two thirds of trucks carry what you'd call a volume limited load. They carry cornflakes right, they're never going to reach the full weight of the truck they fill up the volume.
BRUCE MCCABE: Ah, it's not weight limited, it's volume limited. I see.
DAVID CEBON: Okay, so and there's many things like that. If you carry washing machines and refrigerators, they're actually pretty light, they're full of air, cars, you know. Or cornflakes.
If, on the other hand, you carry cement or sand, or oil or chemicals, you're at the other end.
BRUCE MCCABE: But there's a small percentage, only a small percentage.
DAVID CEBON: It's about a third in the UK. And so it depends on the country. If you go to China you know there's a hell of a lot of construction going on, lots more heavy industry. So they have a different distribution of this stuff. So here, about two thirds of trucks are volume limited and a third are weight limited.
So the ones that are volume limited don't have a problem with battery electric operations. They don't lose any payload.
So the problem with the electric vehicle is it's got a heavy battery and if you've got a heavy payload that can limit how much you can carry, but the volume-limited ones mostly don't hit that limit. So it's kind of a drop-in replacement. You can say I've got one diesel vehicle, I can take the trailer off that, I can put it on the battery electric vehicle. One battery electric vehicle, one diesel vehicle. Drop in replacement near enough, as long as it's not doing more than a certain mileage at the moment or you've got the charging in place.
At the heavy end, that's not the situation at all. If you're carrying steel or one of these heavy, heavy things, then the situation is that -- in the UK our biggest trucks are tractor semi-trailers that weigh 44 tons all up and they can carry up to 29 tonnes of payload. So 29 out of 44, the rest is truck.. So when you do the same calculation with the available battery, electric options, for various reasons they have to run with one less axle because there's not enough space to put the battery in. There's been a little bit of help from the government that allows a couple of extra tons. The upshot of it is their total payload is about 22 tons.
BRUCE MCCABE: I see okay, so now we've gone from 29 to 22.
DAVID CEBON: So we've lost seven tons, we've lost a quarter of the payload. So you need, depending on details, you need more trucks to carry the same amount. If you've got 1,000 tonnes of sand you've got to carry to a building site. You can do it on however many trucks with 29 tonnes at a time and you can do it with 25% more trucks at 22 tonnes at a time. You need more trucks. Each truck costs, you know that's, so it's more cost.
BRUCE MCCABE: The brilliant thing is you have a pretty good handle on what those metrics look like, so we can do the calculations for the case.
DAVID CEBON: Yeah, roughly, depending on how good the statistics are in the country, ok, and the statistics of logistics, which could be better, I'd have to say, in the UK.
BRUCE MCCABE: So well, let's cast our eyes forward a little bit and perhaps start with geographic differences. Do you get a feel for the countries or geographies or trading blocks where you think they'll be the pioneers? The ones pushing already, and that's where the leadership will be? Is Europe ahead? Is China ahead in this domain?
DAVID CEBON: China's ahead.
BRUCE MCCABE: They're certainly ahead in the technology, aren't they?
DAVID CEBON: Yeah, absolutely, BYD's making a lot of electric trucks.
BRUCE MCCABE: And if there's no difference or if you don't have a feel for it that’s fine too …
DAVID CEBON: Well there's a little bit more to it which I haven't said. Okay, so I've painted a fairly rosy picture, but there's some non-rosiness as well.
BRUCE MCCABE: We want to be real.
DAVID CEBON: The non-rosiness comes around the infrastructure. And the particular problem is, I've said you want to charge on the dock and the loading bay. If you count up the number of places like that again in the UK, you get to a number of, and these are warehouses, factories and stores. Often, you know you've got a couple of loading bays in a store. You actually will have to charge your vehicle at many of those because they've got to go on to another drop. You've got mainly the warehouses that typically live on the side of big highways, but you've also got factories. And you know, If you add them all up for the UK, which is only a little place, you get about 30,000. Okay, those 30,000 places need pretty big fat connections to the electricity grid. Each electricity connection is very expensive. In many cases it's likely to be cheaper to move the warehouse to the electricity than moving the electricity to the warehouse.
BRUCE MCCABE: Wow, that expensive!
DAVID CEBON: You're talking millions of pounds like you know, five million pounds or something for a big fat 20 megawatt grid connection.
BRUCE MCCABE: It sounds like we've just found our biggest time factor in the whole rollout.
DAVID CEBON: We have, because the queues at the moment for those grid connections somewhere, depending on what part of country country you're in, 5 to 15 years.
Okay, so there is a huge bottleneck associated with connections to electricity grid, this huge cost associated with connections to electricity grid.
And just to add to that, there's another sort of a challenge, which is that the people who own the warehouses tend to be the companies that we call shippers. Now, a shipper is a company that has some stuff that they've made, typically, which they need to move around. For example, they might be a chocolate manufacturer that needs to move their chocolate, or their bread, or whatever it is, from their factory to a warehouse, to a supermarket's warehouse. So they own the warehouse.
The company that drives the trucks more than likely does not belong to the shipper. It's more likely DHL Or we've got companies that are called third party logistics companies. You see them driving around the motorways. They're companies like in the UK, Eddie Stobart or Turners. In other places they're FedEx or they're TNT. Their job is to move stuff around, and that's a different job to making stuff and selling stuff.
Those companies that move stuff around, they have typically a profit margin of 2% or 3%. That's a very tight margin there. It's a very tough business, logistics. You'd be better investing in almost anything else than logistics. So they can't afford to spend lots of money on, for example, having 25% more vehicles to do the heavy stuff. You've just increased logistics costs by 25%. The profit margin is 3%. Somebody is going to have to pay for that. That's another story. What I was saying is that it's typically the shippers who own the warehouses. It's the carriers, the TNTs and the FedExes of this world who have to charge their trucks. Now they have to charge in the shippers facility. So the shipper who doesn't drive any trucks, who owns the warehouse, has got to spend $5 million for an electricity connection to charge somebody else's trucks. And there are in the UK probably 5,000 such companies, and in order to make this all work, all those 5,000 companies pretty much have got to independently decide that they need to put electricity connections in their warehouses so that can charge somebody else's trucks, and that is a big, big ask. It doesn't seem to me that that is just going to happen by itself.
BRUCE MCCABE: No, it's going to require some sort of visible hand in the economy to drive policy.
DAVID CEBON: It certainly needs that. So there are other things you can do. There's two other things you can do that are being done in various places right, instead of just static chargers, which is what we've been talking about. The first is what you call battery swapping.
BRUCE MCCABE: Like hot swappable batteries.
DAVID CEBON: Well, warm anyway. I was in China last week. There's a huge amount of interest in battery swapping, and this comes to your question before about standardisation. Battery swapping looks interesting, although it's got some challenges. The first challenge is that every truck needs more than one battery. Exactly how many more depends on the operation, but it's something like 1.3, 1.5 batteries per truck, right, because you've got the battery that you've got now, but also the battery you're going to put in it, you know, when you ... So there's definitely more than one battery per truck.
Now, the battery is the most expensive component on the vehicle. At the moment, it costs half the cost of the truck and it actually costs about as much as a diesel truck, the battery. So now you've got to buy 1.5 of them. That's additional cost. Plus, there's the cost of all that battery swapping infrastructure and an extra company that has to make a profit. A battery swapping company has got to make a profit, right? So it is undoubtedly the case that battery swapping is more expensive than, of course, than just static charging with the one battery. So that's the first thing: it's more expensive.
Second thing is, you probably have to have some system for moving batteries around to balance the network. That's interesting, so that generates some more more logistics.
Third problem is …
BRUCE MCCABE: But you're open to this as a way forward?
DAVID CEBON: I am. I'm interested in it as a way forward. I don't think it will happen, okay, but I'm interested, but it's still open, it's a plausible way forward.
The third thing, though, is the standardisation issue. You could imagine the Chinese have standardised the package. They've got a big rectangular battery which sits behind the cab. It's a great, huge thing and they lift these out and charge them up and swap them over, and that's their standardised system, and you could do that in other places. You may have to increase the length allowance a bit by a meter or one and a half meters, you know, slightly longer trucks. It's plausible.
The problem with it is that you don't just have to standardize the shape and size of the battery. You have to also standardize your secret sauce. Your secret sauce are things like the coolant, the cooling system, which has to be swapped in and out. Okay, there are things like your battery management system, your communication system, the types of cells and their performance. These are all secret things that the OEMs do not want to share and do not want to standardize. Okay, it makes the difference between a Volvo and a Scania.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, I understand.
DAVID CEBON: And so in Europe anyway, speaking to manufacturers, they don't want to do battery swapping. In China there is a big initiative. However, all the projects are currently closed projects. There are no open projects that have two companies sharing batteries between them. Within a closed operation, you can see how it would work, but it's a pretty expensive thing.
BRUCE MCCABE: You said there was another pathway.
DAVID CEBON: There is another pathway and it's the other pathway which I think is the great hope.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, very good, we're getting back to positives! And I'm just going to time check. I'm going to get you out on the hour.
DAVID CEBON: So we've got about 10 minutes.
BRUCE MCCABE: I've got a couple more questions, good.
DAVID CEBON: Right, so yeah, and that's the idea that you take the electrons to the vehicle rather than putting them in a box and trying to carry them around with you. So there are various technologies for that. One is what they call overhead contact lines, like electric trains.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, I've seen this. In Germany they’ve been doing it.
DAVID CEBON: They have. They've been doing it in Germany. They've been doing it in China too. There's the Chinese National Railway Company has a system that they've built.
BRUCE MCCABE: So if we think of trams -- or trolleys for US listeners -- we have the contact with the overhead lines and we're charging on the move.
DAVID CEBON: Yep, charging on the move. Now, the advantage of that is a whole bunch of things. First of all, you can charge the vehicles at the same time as they're driving.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, so there's a time ….
DAVID CEBON: So you don't have to stop to charge. So the vehicles will have a battery in them that is big enough to have a range of 50 or 100 kilometres, something like that, and the pantograph is deployable. You can retract it so that you put your overhead contact lines or your dynamic charging system on the main highways. When you get to the off-ramp, you drop the pantograph, you drive on your batteries, the 10 kilometers to the warehouse.
BRUCE MCCABE: And it’s relatively cheap to install.
DAVID CEBON: It is the cheapest, actually, of all of these systems. You load and unload, you come back and you charge. So you charge the battery and therefore you don't need any additional stops. The battery is small and therefore you don't need any additional stops. The battery is small and therefore you can carry a full load.
So the two things which make electric logistics more expensive, which are that you have this weight constraint and you have the time constraint associated with charging, they're the two things that make it more expensive. Both of those things go away. Sso the logistics becomes cheaper. Furthermore, it's more electrically efficient because when you're driving on the system you don't have to charge and discharge the battery. So that saves you round trip efficiency of the battery and it gives you the most efficient way of running an electric vehicle. We don't even have to charge the battery.
So, you have the lowest total cost of ownership, you have the lowest weight, you have the lowest energy consumption, you have the lowest carbon emissions and you don't have any additional cost due to the logistics delays. So this is the solution. The final thing that you get by having an electric so-called electric road system or dynamic charging, is that you only have to connect it to the electricity at a small number of locations and what you do is you have a big substation at a connection point which is convenient. Where the transmission lines cross over the road you have a drop, a big substation there, and you put a private wire along the road which you connect your logistics.
BRUCE MCCABE: And we're good at it. We already know how to do this for railways and everything.
DAVID CEBON: We absolutely know how to do it. It's been well demonstrated. In the UK our calculation is instead of 30,000 warehouse connections, you need about 10,000 warehouse connections or less, and 100 big connections to the electric road system. We’ve still got some warehouses around the periphery of the country that will ultimately need to be connected up.
BRUCE MCCABE: So the future probably looks a lot like that, with pantograph equipped trucks?
DAVID CEBON: There is one other type of technology which it could be, which is in the road conductive road.
BRUCE MCCABE: Really? Okay, I've looked at them and I thought the cost of digging up the roads and doing that was prohibitive.
DAVID CEBON: No. I was pretty skeptical about those …
BRUCE MCCABE: Wireless inductive charging on the move?
DAVID CEBON: No, no, not wireless.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, okay.
DAVID CEBON: We can't afford to do wireless, for a bunch of reasons. But you can do conductive, which is more like scalextrics.
BRUCE MCCABE: Wow, okay.
DAVID CEBON: It's not exactly scalextrics …
BRUCE MCCABE: The third rail, as well.
DAVID CEBON: The third rail. So there's a system from Sweden which consists of alternating segments one metre long -- plus, minus, plus, minus, plus, minus. Segments get switched on by a microprocessor as a truck goes past, so they're never on unless the vehicle is over the top of them and you pick up electricity from a conductive pad which just sits down on top of the unit. It's able to actively move from side to side as you go along, as the vehicle wanders around a bit.
BRUCE MCCABE: So this is highway speed?
DAVID CEBON: Highway speed, no problem. 300 kilowatts, which is what you need. So it's an alternative. And the jury's out in my opinion. The overhead contact lines are more advanced.
BRUCE MCCABE: And cheaper, surely.
DAVID CEBON: Well, I have my doubts about that. I think the in-road is probably cheaper. The big question about the in-road is whether it will stay there. You've got an environment where you've got very high temperature swings, you've got frost cycles, you've got some number of axle loads pounding over them and so on. And you've got, in winter, salt on the road, salt water. So there are some issues there around robustness and whether the thing will work in under those conditions.
BRUCE MCCABE: Is there a test bed I can do my own homework on after this and have a look at?
DAVID CEBON: Yes, there is, in Sweden.
BRUCE MCCABE: In Sweden. Okay, that's fantastic. Well, look, coming to the end …
DAVID CEBON: Go on ask me your other questions. Quick fire round.
BRUCE MCCABE: Well, look, I've covered most of them. Overall, I'd like to get a bigger picture of your hopes and expectations on the transition. I mean, do you feel that most of that transition is inevitable to electrification? I know you said the very long-haul use case you actually used the word “never” for perhaps transitioning to electric there. And also, is this a 20-year journey? Is it a 30? I'd like to get a sense of your timetable in your head.
DAVID CEBON: Yeah, well, I think, those really long-haul vehicles. I think my opinion is that the solution is a series hybrid approach, that is, a range extender. So you run on diesel or biodiesel or biogas when you're going across these long distances, but you have the advantage of the electric drivetrain, which will give you regenerative braking and those kinds of advantages more efficient operation and electric operations in cities and so on. Where there's charging infrastructure, you use it. Where you haven't got charging infrastructure, then you're running on HVO [Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil] biodiesel, or whatever. In my opinion, that is a solution for the long haul, those really long journeys, and that means that you don't have to have expensive charging infrastructure in the middle of nowhere.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, that makes sense and I guess, lastly, are there any other factors or messages you'd love more business and government decision-makers to know about? Things that they just miss at the moment in a lot of the debates.
DAVID CEBON: Well, I think they're missing this question about the electricity distribution. I don't think they see that. I don't think they really understand logistics. They think that we can just put chargers into truck stops and job done. There's nothing further from the truth. Yep, it needs a lot more work to quantify it and we're in the process of trying to do that, but when you actually try to do the logistics operation, that doesn't work anymore.
BRUCE MCCABE: They need to be thinking in terms of systems.
DAVID CEBON: That’s right. And you are the futurist, the other thing that's coming along is autonomous trucks. They're coming on the same timetable that we're talking about. Trucks will be autonomous before cars, because if you take the driver out of the truck, you save 40% of the operating cost. That's worth doing. That means that there is a real business case for having an autonomous vehicle. Autonomous vehicle doesn't have to stop. It doesn't have to have the four and a half hour break. It drives all the time, so you've just lost your charging charging time.
BRUCE MCCABE: The packaging is better as well. The vehicles don't have to have a cab.
DAVID CEBON: Well, that's right. But the other thing that's coming along is automated warehouses which are able to load and unload a truck in five minutes instead of an hour. So again we've lost the time when the vehicle is going to be stationary.
BRUCE MCCABE: There's an energy dividend …
DAVID CEBON: That means that the times when you could have charged the truck have just gone away, and that's all the more reason for charging on the move while you're driving around.
BRUCE MCCABE: Ah, I see. It's another pressure on the system, because we're so effective at the unloading and loading. We'll need to definitely do it dynamically.
That's right. We don't have time to charge them. So that's happening on the same timetable and it's all the more reason for dynamic charging to be the thing.
BRUCE MCCABE: That is brilliant. And you took me in a couple of directions I absolutely did not expect. Lots of homework for me to do. Professor David Cebon, thank you so much for that time and those insights. It's been a privilege.
DAVID CEBON: My pleasure. I look forward to hearing it.