Every time a new electric truck turns up in Britain, the same review gets written. It's too long. The turning circle won't work in a tight industrial estate. The cab's wrong and the drivers won't have it. And even if it did work, have you seen what it costs to charge on the public network?
Most of that is fair. I've said a fair bit of it myself. That's the problem, because a fair objection to one truck keeps getting read as a verdict on all of them.
Windrose is the cleanest recent example. The Global E700 took its first UK charge at Tilbury in March and has been touring depots since. Over 700 kWh of battery, a single central driving position, and a length that makes most British transport managers wince before they've opened the door. The yard reaction has been about what you'd expect. Wrong cab, won't fit, no thanks.
Every one of those objections is probably right. For that truck, on UK distribution work, today. But nobody at Windrose is designing the next one with the same cab and the same length. The next one will be shorter, or sit the driver where British drivers expect to sit. Probably both.
The Tesla Semi gets the same treatment from a different angle. The debate here is whether it'll ever be rated for 44 tonnes and turn up in British yards in any numbers. That matters less than what it's already done. ABF Freight ran one for three weeks on Reno to Sacramento work, loaded over Donner Pass, and averaged 1.55 kWh a mile. European trials of the Mercedes eActros 600 land around 1 kWh per kilometre at 40 tonnes, the same ballpark. A few years ago figures like that were the argument for why heavy electric couldn't be done. Now they're the baseline.
And when BYD, or whichever Chinese manufacturer is next, brings a tractor unit here, the review will be written before anyone's driven it.
So what are we actually reviewing? One point on a curve. And we keep marking it pass or fail as if it were the only truck that'll ever be built.
Go back to that list of objections, because it splits cleanly in two.
Length, cab layout, turning circle and range are truck problems. They're exactly what product iteration fixes, and it's fixing them quickly. Every truck OEM I've spoken to in the last eighteen months is on the same internal trajectory: lighter packs, better efficiency, faster charging, and cells getting cheaper as production scales. The published figures just confirm from the outside what's already happening in the development pipelines.
Charging cost, charger availability and the power at your depot aren't truck problems. They're system problems, and the next model won't touch them.
That's where the time goes. A depot grid connection is a project measured in years. Choosing a truck is a procurement decision measured in weeks. Too many operators are doing it in the wrong order, waiting for the truck that answers every objection before they start on the power. By the time a connection is energised, that truck will probably exist. It might already.
The charging cost objection proves the point. Nine times out of ten, "it's too expensive to charge" means public rapid charging, priced for occasional use and charged at someone else's margin. On your own depot, on your own tariff, overnight, the maths changes completely. But only for operators who've got the power in. The objection isn't about the truck at all. It's about whether you started the depot work early enough.
We run battery-electric 42-tonne artics on Palletline work out of Duxford, Bedford and St Ives. None of them is the perfect truck. The ones we'd buy today are better than the ones we bought first, and the next ones will be better again. The truck side keeps improving without us lifting a finger. Getting the power to them is the bit that never got easier.
So review the truck if you're buying one this quarter. Run it against your duty cycles, put your drivers in it, check the turning circle in your own yard. Those are the right questions for the procurement decision in front of you.
For everything else, stop asking whether this particular vehicle works. Ask how fast the next three are coming, and whether your depot will be ready when they do.
The next truck will be better than this one. Your grid connection won't be any quicker.
Destination: LinkedIn article (cross-posted to The Loading Bay)