ACEA — 2024-03-27
News from Brussels
Trucks and buses are the backbone that keeps society on the move, notes Harald Seidel, President of DAF Trucks and Chairperson of ACEA’s Commercial Vehicle Board. Europe needs to ensure its vehicle industry is not only sustainable but can also stay competitive globally.
Trucks and buses are essential to our daily lives
Trucks transport around 80% of goods by land, and buses account for the majority of public transport journeys in the EU.
Trucks and buses are like the blood in our veins, transporting essential oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. Trucks and buses do the same by keeping society on the move.
Think about the truck delivering goods to stores, medicine to hospitals, and materials for construction. None of this would be possible without trucks.
Buses get people from all walks of life from A to B. Every bus on our roads replaces 50 cars, helping ease traffic congestion, drive down emissions, and improve air quality.
Trucks are not just bigger cars
There are so many ways to use a truck. A long-haul truck is completely different from trucks that collect garbage, operate a crane, or extinguish fires. Trucks are really versatile and multipurpose.
You buy a truck with a calculator because you need to earn money with it, and it serves a purpose. You need a job to be done. A car you buy with your heart because you like it.
Cars also stand still most of the time, while trucks are frequently on the move. A truck can drive up to 150,000 kilometres a year – that’s over 12 times more than a car on average. In a business-to-business market, keeping trucks moving is a top priority. An hour not driven is an hour lost.
If you drive an electric car on vacation, it might be fine to wait an hour for it to charge. You can take a break and grab a coffee. However, for a truck with perishable goods, the business case will be disastrous if the truck needs to stop for a couple of hours to charge. If you transport flowers from Holland to Italy, an hour lost in traffic is an hour of lost money and even the potential loss of goods.
The main difference with cars is the business case for our customers. That’s very important.
Europe needs to ensure its vehicle industry is not only sustainable but can also stay competitive globally
Regulations can set the stage for whether a business thrives.
The transformation truck and bus manufacturers face is enormous, whether that’s the Green Deal, digitalization, or all the data legislation coming our way. On top of that, policymakers do not always consider the specificities of trucks and buses when regulating.
Europe needs to ensure its truck and bus industry is not only sustainable but can also stay competitive globally. This means having a good industrial strategy and coherent regulations. Not piling up law after law, but ensuring we have a consistent framework we can work with and that enables viable business models.
Truck and bus makers are doing their part by getting battery-electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles on Europe’s roads. We are committed to making all new trucks and buses we sell fossil-free by 2040.
But we operate in a business-to-business environment, and we rely on our customers buying new models. For example, if I am a transport operator and I want to buy a zero-emission truck, I need to know whether I can earn money with it and whether I can charge or refuel it — no matter if my destination is Italy, Poland, or Turkey.
To have a viable business case, you cannot just regulate the supply side. You also need to support the demand for zero-emission models, and this means having what we call the right enabling conditions in place.
For example, the EU recently agreed on the most ambitious CO2 reduction targets for truck and bus manufacturers globally. But policy makers must match ambitious targets for vehicle manufacturers with equally ambitious enabling conditions.
What are the enabling conditions?
The enabling conditions are about making sure that the infrastructure is in place. It’s also ensuring that there is enough green energy to charge trucks and buses. Otherwise, we are simply not decarbonising.
There should also be a viable business case for transport operators. Currently, the total costs of ownership (TCO) of a zero-emission truck are not on par with a diesel one in most cases. If we want to really convince transport operators to go zero-emission, we also need to change that by incentivising transport operators with purchase and tax schemes, carbon pricing measures, and so much more.
Those are the enabling conditions. Vehicles are not the bottleneck. Europe’s policy makers need to recognise this if we are to collectively achieve our shared goals of decarbonising while allowing vital industries like ours to thrive.