EU approves Scania pay-per-use truck battery joint venture
The European Commission has approved a truck battery joint venture proposed by Scania of Sweden and sennder Technologies of Germany.
The joint venture will see a pay-per-use model for heavy-duty battery electric vehicles along with associated digital, physical, and commercial services.
The venture will start in Germany and later roll out its services in other European countries. Sender has a fleet of over 40,000 connected trucks and back in 2021 was one of the first companies to demonstrate cross-border electric truck operation. The pilot electric truck project saw sennder use an electric truck from Breytner to transport 17+ tonnes of product for Cabot from the port of Rotterdam to Antwerp, Belgium and then returned to base, covering a distance of more than 300km.
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Through its investment arm, Scania, part of the Volkswagen Group, has been a major investor in sennder, a digital road freight forwarder providing a wide range of full truck load services to shippers across Europe.
The cost of using battery pack in trucks is a major unknown factor that is holding back the roll out of heavy duty battery vehicles. Although the battery technology, particularly LFP lithium iron phosphate chemistries, and the battery management systems (BMS) are improving to give more power and faster charging, there is still a lack of data on the long term performance of the packs. Scania has along term strategic partnership deal with European battery maker Northvolt.
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The cost of the pack is a substantial part of the cost of truck, and if a pack needs to replaced sooner than expected that can impact on the economics of Scania’s customers. This is an area where European startups such as Twaice are working with BMS chip providers such as Analog Devices to provide digital twin models of the packs to enable more detailed data.
Providing a pay-per-use model for the battery packs allows Scania’s customers to have a reliable and consistent economic model for operating the vehicles, while Scania can benefit from the algorithmic enhancements in the BMS to improve the performance of the packs.
www.scania.com; www.sennder.com
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