Scania’s head of eTruck Mobility, Peter Forsberg, sounded an alarm bell for the UK at the Motor Transport Decarbonisation Summit last week (09 Nov) warning the nation was falling behind the rest of Europe in its electric vehicle and infrastructure roll-out.
Forsberg was delivering a keynote presentation to the 150 delegates at the event in Liverpool in which he gave an overview of the electric vehicle landscape across the continent. ”[Our] map is a snapshot of how we view the potential for electrification with different markets in Europe,” he explained.
“The key takeaway here is that Europe will be the leader when it comes to electrification globally, that we see for sure. Great Britain is red here, light red. Before the summer, we had also Spain light red, but now Spain has introduced quite good incentives for making [electrification] happen. So then we see that, the potential has increased. We are also seeing improvements when it comes to customer orders.”
Forsberg went on to highlight the work Sweden is doing to accelerate the rollout of an EV charging network and explained more about Scania’s, through parent-company Traton, involvement in the CV Charging Europe initiative to develop a network of 1,700 truck charging points across Europe by 2027: ”Charging is the main, maybe the most, crucial part of all the services and solutions around the vehicle to make decarbonisation happen,” he explained.
There are three distinct areas of charging requirement for freight operators, Forsberg added. These are depot charging, destination charging and public charging and all three have a very important use case for operators. “We are building a portfolio of products with hardware in different performance level to be able to fit the needs of that particular customer and also future proof the investment in charging infrastructure,” he said.
“We are part of the CV Charging Europe joint venture,” he continued. ”We are investing to build the charging network all over Europe. We have a CEO and a management team working on the strategy right now, agreeing where to where to start building the network. We want to show that, together with Volvo and Daimler that this is the future and it is possible today.
”You can trust we will make this available for you, the operators, and but it will be open to all brands of course.”
Freight Carbon Zero understands the first CV Charging Europe site will be located in the Netherlands and is expected to be operational early next year.
Summing up, Forsberg concluded: “The secret to getting ahead, is getting started. Perhaps we should change that here today to say ’the secret of getting to catch up, is to get started’.”
