The study – titled “Cost competitiveness of alternative heavy-duty truck technologies under real-world utilisation profiles” – was recently published by a research team from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in the scientific journal Nature. The core message: under the baseline assumptions regarding costs and technological maturity, battery-electric trucks in Germany will surpass comparable diesel trucks in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) on 70 to 90 per cent of the kilometres covered in heavy-duty road freight transport by 2030.
In the introduction, the analysts emphasise that previous studies have often focused on average payload ranges or long-haul transport. However, the logistics sector is highly heterogeneous, encompassing a wide spectrum of truck usage patterns. The new study was therefore designed more broadly. It evaluates the economic viability of both battery-electric and fuel cell electric trucks using microdata from four million trucks across Europe. The researchers combine these real-world usage profiles with TCO forecasts for heavy-duty trucks—within a ‘scenario-based’ framework. In other words, they created an optimistic, a medium, and a pessimistic scenario for TCO development. Further details on the methodology can be found in the source links below. One important note: the study uses the abbreviation BET instead of BEV, and analogously FCET and ICET for fuel cell trucks and internal combustion engine trucks (see graphic below).
