From the peloton to the pavement: why truck charging is a different race entirely

Any avid cyclist will recognise that to ride is to suffer. Whether you’re an amateur or a pro, suffering is the very essence of the sport. From a distance, the masters of endurance – like Mathieu van der Poel (MVDP) and Tadej Pogačar (Pogi) – might look similar. They both win, they both wear spandex, and they often fight for the same podium.

But look closer, and the two athletes could not be more different. MVDP is an explosive beast, a master of the short, violent effort. Pogi possesses arguably the world’s best sustained power, a rider who grinds down his prey over hours. They are built for completely different battles.

This blog is not really about cycling. It’s about closing a major financing deal for long-haul truck charging – and why the two have more in common than you’d think.

If you follow the energy transition, you likely know passenger electric vehicles (EVs) well. You might be tempted to assume that charging a truck is just “charging a car, but bigger”. But that’s like confusing MVDP for Pogi because they happen to wear the same spandex. Passenger-car charging is the explosive, MVDP-style effort: a quick, violent top-up grabbed on a road trip and then forgotten about. Long-haul truck charging is the Pogi game – sustained, predictable, and won not in a single sprint but by grinding out the miles, day after day.

Wheels, wires, and reality

Cars and trucks both have wheels, they both have motors, and they both inhabit roads. If they’re electric, they both need a plug. That is where the similarities end.

In a world of commercial EVs, the vehicle exists for one reason: business. This changes the financial and operational DNA of the infrastructure – and it makes the truck-charging race look a lot more like Pogi’s than MVDP’s.

• Predictability: We tend to picture trucks roaming freely, like delivery vans. In reality, long-haul trucking is highly scripted. As an infrastructure operator, you can often predict with near-certainty which truck will arrive at which hub, on which day, at what hour. It’s more like Pogi’s training schedule – and a lot less like mine
• Patterns: Trucking is a low-margin, high-utilisation game. A truck only makes money when its wheels are turning, so an idle truck isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s lost revenue, hour by hour

The similarities between trucks and humans

A single truck model family can have literally millions of valid configurations – but the configurations aren’t the interesting part. What matters is that, much like humans, no two trucks live the same life. One runs the same regional corridor twice a day, six days a week. Another wanders the continent on irregular loads. A third shuttles a fixed loop between a port and a warehouse.

That variety is the whole story, because the economics follow the use case rather than the make of truck. Some duty cycles are still years away from making sense on electric, while others crossed the tipping point a while ago – the mileage high enough, the route predictable enough and the charging cheap enough that diesel simply can’t keep up. Same truck, completely different answer. And the operators winning this race aren’t guessing which corridors will electrify; they are in constant dialogue with the fleets themselves about where the crossover has already happened and which routes come next – and they build there first.

Are electric trucks cost-competitive?

The simple answer: yes – and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on the use case. Some routes are still a few years from the crossover. But a growing number have already passed it, and on those, the math isn’t close.

In trucking, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the name of the game, and it’s the per-mile economics that decide the race. Electric trucks are meaningfully cheaper to run per mile than diesel, so every mile driven is money saved. The upfront sticker price is higher, but on the routes that have tipped, the operational savings more than make up for the premium.

And here’s the part you won’t find in a report: those of us close to the sector are watching it happen in real time. The trajectory doesn’t look like a market that’s still “coming” – it looks like one that has already arrived and is accelerating. Operators aren’t electrifying to be “green”; they are calculating, route by route, exactly where electricity already beats diesel – and moving fast on the ones that do.

Like Pogi on a long mountain pass, they win on relentless, sustained power – knowing precisely where the road tips in their favour and pressing the advantage mile after mile.

Bridging the gap to bankability

This is where the cycling logic meets the financial world. To finance these networks, you cannot simply bolt the passenger-car playbook onto something bigger. You have to read the endurance, the predictability and the razor-thin margins of the logistics sector – and then convince the market that these hubs aren’t interchangeable commodity kit, but critical infrastructure: the backbone of a decarbonised freight network, with cash flows solid enough to finance it.

At Green Giraffe Advisory, that translation is precisely our job: turning how a fleet actually behaves into a structure a lender can underwrite. We don’t just see chargers and trucks; we see the strategy behind the endurance.

We’re incredibly proud to have recently supported Milence in securing a EUR 120 million financing facility – proof that when you understand the specific discipline of the race, the capital follows. The long-haul transition now has a little more of the sustained power it needs to reach the finish line.

The race is long. But with this financing in place, the road to a decarbonised logistics corridor is finally clear – and the rest of the peloton is starting to chase. Pogi would approve.