trans.info — 2026-05-27
Land transportation
The issue has now reached Germany’s transport ministry, after long-haul electric truck driver Tobias Wagner submitted an open letter calling for a temporary national solution until EU law is clarified.
A long-haul electric truck stops at a public charging bay late at night. The driver begins an 11-hour daily rest period. The battery may be full within one or two hours, especially as megawatt charging systems become available, but the vehicle may still have to remain at the charger for the rest of the night.
The reason is legal: under the current interpretation of Regulation (EC) No 561/2006, rest must be uninterrupted. Charging time can count as a break or rest period if the driver is genuinely free to use the time as they wish and is not required to supervise or manage the charging process. But if the driver moves the vehicle away from the charging location after the battery is full, that movement can be treated as an interruption of rest.
The result is a contradiction that could become more serious as electric trucks move from depot-based regional work to long-haul operations: the driver may be resting legally while the truck occupies a public fast charger it no longer needs.
For diesel trucks, the issue almost never arises. Refuelling takes minutes and is carried out during working time. Electric trucks change the timing. Charging can last much longer than refuelling, while a driver’s legally protected rest period may last far longer than the vehicle actually needs to remain plugged in.
The law protects rest, but creates a charging bottleneck
Regulation 561/2006 sets the core EU rules on drivers’ hours and rest. In standard daily rest, a driver must take at least 11 consecutive hours. The problem for electric trucks is not the duration of rest, but the requirement that it must remain uninterrupted.
CORTE, the European road transport enforcement organisation, has confirmed in guidance that charging can count as rest or break time where the driver is not performing work and is free to dispose of the time. That interpretation is important for electric truck operations, because it means a driver does not automatically lose rest simply because the vehicle is charging.
The difficulty begins when charging is complete. Paulina Eliasz-Pietrusewicz, attorney at law at Transcash Law Firm, says moving the truck from the charger to another bay would, from the tachograph and working-time perspective, mean the driver is no longer resting. It makes little practical difference whether the truck is moved within the charging site or to a nearby marked parking space.
Removing the tachograph card before moving the vehicle is not a workaround. The tachograph would register driving without a card, creating a separate and potentially serious infringement.
A driver asks Berlin for an interim solution
The issue has now been put directly to Germany’s Federal Transport Ministry. Tobias Wagner, a working long-haul electric truck driver, submitted an open letter to Transport Minister Schnieder on 23 April 2026, ahead of a Milence industry event. The letter was signed by logistics companies and charge point operators.
Wagner is calling for a narrow national interim measure modelled on the existing ferry and railway exception in EU drivers’ hours law. The proposed approach would allow a driver to move a fully charged electric truck away from a charger without losing the whole rest period, provided the total rest still amounts to at least 11 hours and the repositioning time is added on rather than counted as rest.
The request is deliberately limited. It does not seek a general relaxation of fatigue rules or a broader change to driving time. It is aimed only at brief post-charge repositioning, so that public charging infrastructure is not blocked for hours by trucks that have already finished charging.
Wagner argues that the current uncertainty is being pushed onto drivers, who must choose between leaving a fully charged truck on a charger or risking an infringement by moving it
Why the problem is still partly hidden
Martin Bulheller of the German road transport association BGL notes that electric trucks are still used mainly in urban and regional distribution. These vehicles usually return to depot, charge on private infrastructure and do not need to occupy public chargers during overnight rest periods.
That will change if long-haul electric trucking scales up. Public megawatt charging hubs are expected to play a central role in longer-distance operations. In that setting, charger availability will become more sensitive: a single truck left plugged in for several unnecessary hours can reduce access for other vehicles and weaken the business case for expensive fast-charging infrastructure.
Katharina Kramer of eMobility Europe sees the issue as a timing problem. The current rules may not yet be a major barrier while long-haul electric truck numbers remain low, but they risk becoming a bottleneck as public charging networks and megawatt charging systems expand.
Germany’s existing shortage of truck parking adds another layer. If electric trucks cannot move from charging bays to standard parking spaces without interrupting rest, charger occupancy and parking pressure become linked problems.
What could change
There are several possible routes, but they differ sharply in speed and legal certainty.
A German interim enforcement position could be introduced relatively quickly. It would tell enforcement authorities not to penalise brief post-charge repositioning if the driver still completes the full rest period. But such a measure would be national and legally fragile, especially for international operators.
European Commission guidance could give enforcement bodies a common interpretation in the short term. eMobility Europe supports this kind of clarification. However, lawyers warn that guidance cannot override the wording of Regulation 561/2006, so it may not give operators full legal certainty if challenged.
A formal amendment to Regulation 561/2006 would offer the clearest solution. A narrow derogation, similar in structure to the existing ferry and railway exception, could allow brief repositioning after charging, with the movement recorded by tachograph and excluded from rest calculations. That would provide a harmonised answer across the EU, but it would take longer.
Technical workarounds may also reduce the pressure. Vehicle manufacturers and charging providers are looking at options such as low-speed automated repositioning, charger layouts that allow power to be shifted between bays, and reservation systems that match charging speed to break or rest duration. These solutions may help, but they do not remove the legal uncertainty for drivers.
A diesel-era rule meets electric truck operations
The underlying problem is not that EU rest rules are wrong. They were designed to protect drivers from fatigue, and that protection remains essential. The difficulty is that the rules were written around a diesel operating model. Refuelling was short, predictable and separate from daily rest. Electric trucks make energy supply part of the working-time and rest-time equation in a way the regulation did not anticipate.
Several experts therefore point to a narrow EU-level derogation as the most robust long-term answer: allow a driver to move a fully charged electric truck a short distance from a public charger to a parking bay, record the movement properly, and add the time back to the rest period.