Making a sustainable fleet: Can we electrify heavy-duty transport?

Trucks that carry goods over long distances use a lot of diesel fuel. That needs to change. The logistics industry must find cleaner ways to transport heavy loads without slowing operations. This will support global efforts to combat climate change and help us achieve our own sustainability goals.

While electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming more common for delivering mail and packages right to your door, which we call last-mile deliveries, heavy-duty electric vehicles moving large amounts of goods over long distances, like between cities, are still pretty rare. The technology exists to build heavy-duty electric trucks for these longer trips, also known as line-haul operations, but it’s expensive and requires the proper charging setup and partners to make it work.

DHL Freight in Germany is working on this challenge to show that fully electric heavy-duty trucks can handle big jobs over longer distances just as well as traditional diesel trucks. 

To tackle this challenge, DHL Freight teamed up with Mercedes-Benz Trucks to roll out the battery-electric eActros 300, a heavy-duty model designed explicitly for sustainable road transport.

The eActros 300 is a powerful electric truck with two electric engines and a peak output of up to 400 kW. It can travel about 220 kilometers before needing a recharge, which takes just over an hour to go from 20% to 80% at a charging capacity of up to 160 kW.

With a maximum weight of 19 metric tons, these are DHL Freight’s first heavy battery electric trucks in Germany. 

This partnership is even more unique because we’re using one of the eActros 300 electric trucks to transport freight sustainably between a DHL distribution center and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Kassel, a Daimler Truck location.

By working together, DHL and Mercedes-Benz are exploring ways to utilize more heavy-duty electric trucks in logistics and offer carbon-free deliveries to more customers. This helps them reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet their sustainability targets.

This initiative is also part of our broader strategy to increase the share of electric vehicles in our growing sustainable fleet. It complements our 2030 targets to electrify 60% of our last-mile delivery vehicles and increase the share of sustainable fuels to more than 30%. 

The success of these first eActros 300 trucks will hopefully serve as a model for our sustainable transport operations in other locations and for widespread adoption across the logistics industry, encouraging other companies to invest in heavy-duty electric vehicles and build sustainable fleets. 

We’re testing similar models with other alternative technologies, such as hydrogen and biofuels like HVO, to understand their potential and integrate them into our fleet.

This project shows the power of collaboration between manufacturers and logistics companies. So far, the Mercedes-Benz eActros 300 has proven that the electrification of heavy-duty vehicles is possible and that heavy-duty EVs can not only get the job done but do it well.

But the future of alternative fuels is far from clear, especially for long-distance road transport. By embracing electrification and other solutions and sharing our successes, we hope to lead by example and help encourage a sector-wide shift towards more sustainable road transport and ultimately a better world.