Battery Electric Truck Trial findings published

Sat 09 March 2024 View all news

Cenex has published the results of the Battery Electric Truck Trial through which, in June 2021, DAF Trucks was awarded funding from Innovate UK to deploy 20 electric trucks. The outputs are intended to help commercial fleets understand the best way to implement electric vehicles and charging, and overcome barriers to adoption.

The trials involved:

  • The collection of data from trial vehicles to understand their real-world performance.
  • Analysis and reporting trial data.
  • Survey of drivers and fleet managers to gather feedback on experience with driving, charging and operating EV vehicles compared to diesel trucks.

Learnings from the trials enabled Daf Trucks to gain a detailed understanding of the real world performance of individual vehicles and the overall fleet. They also helped participating fleets to understand how their drivers use and view the vehicles that they operate and, in so doing, provided an information base to enable other commercial fleets to assess how electric trucks could fit with their operations.

The findings should also help inform the Government's policy development in the area of zero emission trucks.

The trial, which ran from April 2022 to October 2023, saw 20 Daf Electric LFs – a rigid 19-tonne battery electric truck equipped with a 250kWh battery - deployed to nine fleets.

These were a mix of councils, NHS-associated and public purchasing organisations. The vehicles completed nearly 21,000 journeys and travelled almost 287,000km.

Each vehicle was fitted with telematics technology to gather data, and this was used to update a live feed of vehicle statistics on the BETT portal.

Cenex provided Daf Trucks with specialist support in the areas of independent trial analysis and dissemination, generating evidence to show fleet operators how electric trucks can cover real-world operations.

Fleet News published an article including a summary of the main findings of the trial under four headings:

1 Factors affecting range

2 Driver/fleet manager acceptance

3 Total cost of ownership

4 Environmental impact

Fleet News' summary can be found here. 

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