Inside the Software Making Electric Heavy Trucks Practical

Дата публикации: 27-05-2026 12:00:01

The electric vehicle (EV) market in Europe is flourishing, to the point where, in late 2025, nearly 100 percent of new registrations in Norway were EVs. But large electric freight trucks, called electric heavy-goods vehicles (eHGVs), are still as rare as hen’s teeth. Researchers and innovators on the continent are seeking to change this picture, and fast.Chugging around the European Union are around 4.5 million HGVs, of which only around 14,500, or 0.32 percent, are electric. Figures in the United Kingdom are even more dire. Of the ~625,000 U.K. HGVs, a little over a thousand are eHGVs, making 0.16 percent. Despite diesel prices going through the roof since the start of the Iran war, eHGV sales are not trending upward. In late April, the U.K.’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) reported a drop in eHGV registrations from 1.4 percent last year to 0.9 percent this year. Similarly, the E.U. market is stalling, climbing only from 4.2 percent of new registrations in 2025 to 4.4 percent so far this year. Why?The long-haul problem“On the last mile, people are very happy to switch to electric,” summarizes Alex Foote, of Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, who leads the road part of the Transit project, a large-scale research program seeking to holistically decarbonize all U.K. transport—road, rail, maritime, and air—using digital twinning. “It’s long haul where there’s big range anxiety, there are big costs, and then we also have the ‘payload penalty.’” The payload penalty refers to how increasing an eHGV’s range calls for more batteries, whose weight cuts into the payload.One major improvement would be to speed up charging. A standard CCS2 (Combined Charging System Type 2) rapid charger delivering maximum 350-kilowatt power takes four hours to fully recharge an eHGV with a ~350-kilometer range, a completely impractical amount of time for most long-haul applications.The new Megawatt Charging System (MCS)—international standards for which were only fully ratified in early 2026—is designed to address this problem. The MCS can deliver over 1 megawatt of power, meaning it can charge a massive HGV battery in 30–45 minutes, perfect for a driver’s mandatory 45-minute break every 4.5 hours of driving.However, Foote sees practical flaws. “A lot of drivers say that they’re not on break if the vehicle is charging because they have to be there, monitoring it,” he says. “Also, it needs a very reliable and universal booking system, because drivers will need to know there’s a charger there with their name on it that’s not broken or in use.”On top of this, a truck stop or depot with 10 MCS chargers needs a 10 MW+ connection, equivalent to the needs of about 10,000 homes. Such a massive draw on the power grid could exceed local power constraints, and add massive cost.Thoughtful eHGV implementationInstead of installing huge MCS stations in every fleet operator’s depot and at every motorway service station, many researchers and innovators see a more realistic and practical way forward in better combining existing technologies.The U.K.-based battery innovator Zenobē says that requires thinking holistically. In 2017, a bus company complained that the cost of installing depot charging infrastructure would be more than the cost of the 10-bus fleet itself, and take three years. Zenobē came up with a more tailored solution that reduced this cost to half that of one vehicle, and completed the job in six weeks. The rear of an iONTRON electric ready-mix concrete truck (eMixer) fitted with a 350-kilowatt-hour battery, part of a trial project with the building-materials supplier Aggregate Industries.Zenobē“What we see going wrong in a lot of projects is you have ‘margin squirrelers’ across the supply chain, who are all looking for safety buffers because they’re not responsible for the total result,” says cofounder Steven Meersman. “In contrast, we take the attitude that this isn’t a vehicle problem, this isn’t a charging problem—it’s a problem that’s all about optimizing your whole operation.”Zenobē’s also addresses two other pain points for fleet operators. One is providing private financing options for fleet electrification projects when government grant funding is insufficient or unavailable, reducing initial outlays. The other is removing any risk surrounding battery-life degradation.Zenobē replaces batteries when their capacity is below a certain threshold, but then uses these old batteries for second-life applications. These batteries might find use as an alternative power source for eHGV charging during peak energy demand, a strategy called “peak shaving,” or they might be used to work alongside a diesel generator on construction sites. These second-life applications have real-world value, which Zenobē can then pass on to their customers. “This means that the [eHGV] customer only pays for what they use,” Meersman says.Software will drive eHGV adoptionThe Swedish freight-technology company Einride offers a somewhat different holistic solution for electrifying fleets.“Instead of thinking of the transition as a gradual electrification of an existing fleet, we took a step back and asked, ‘Where would full electrification make sense now?’” says electric-mobility general manager David Hallgren. “We wanted to start there and operate more or less entirely with an electric-only fleet from day one.”Einride’s fully autonomous, driverless, cab-less electric trucks have been operational on public roads since 2019, even completing the world’s first driverless international border crossing in 2025, between Sweden and Norway. But it’s the company’s Saga AI software that sets Einride apart. This software simultaneously weighs up all of the usual freight-operation factors as well as those specific to eHGVs, such as state of charge, sizes of loads, grid connections, topology, driving style, even the weather. It then learns from real-world data and applies it to future scenarios in order to continuously improve.Further improving Saga AI, Einride recently partnered with the U.S. quantum-computing company IonQ to help solve a nagging problem in freight logistics. Idle schedule gaps caused by shipment cancellations are difficult to fill optimally using classical optimization techniques. Combining classical techniques with a quantum approximate-optimization algorithm allowed the partners to achieve improvements of up to 12 percent in shipments delivered and a reduction of up to 6 percent in drive distance.“The number of factors you need to consider and the nonlinearity of how those intersect mean that it becomes impossible to manage an eHGV fleet at scale with any level of manual planning,” says Hallgren. “This is why we’re incorporating AI…and trying to look around the corner at new technologies that will allow us to do this even better.”

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