Technology choice for road freight electrification

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• Dr Parth Deshpande, CUED
• Friday 13 February 2026, 16:00-17:00
• JDB Seminar Room, CUED.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Elizabeth Howard.

Heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) contribute disproportionately to global CO2 emissions. Currently, the world primarily uses one type of technology everywhere, which is a diesel truck. Electrification is seen as a promising solution but has several challenges. The primary challenges are a loss of payload capacity in vehicles and charging downtime, both of which directly affect logistics costs. There are also multiple electrification pathways, which raises questions about aspects such as electricity grid connections and choice of technology.

This talk will compare various electrification options using a novel metric called “total cost of logistics” and attempt to narrow down on the choice of technology for different scenarios. The options compared will include static charging, electric road systems (or dynamic charging), battery swapping, and a new type of solution called “pony express” (or tractor-unit swapping). It will be shown that dynamic charging can tackle most challenges given enough utilisation. Among the other options, pony express and range extenders are seen as second-best choices depending on infrastructure feasibility.

This talk is part of the Engineering - Dynamics and Vibration Tea Time Talks series.

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