You would expect a little more love for progress from men who know how difficult it is to maneuver a fifty-ton truck backwards. Yet that is exactly what disappoints in the transport world.
Look what they say to Peter Kleijwegt (64) as soon as he unloads his electric truck somewhere. ‘Can you only drive 150 kilometers in a row, dude’, they ask. ‘And your sound. Where’s your sound?’
Kleijwegt shrugs his shoulders at such moments. His father was a lifelong trucker, he himself has been driving the truck since 1980, so if he wants to, he can easily trump all tough trucker stories.
It’s actually quite quiet, he says, having such an electric motor in your fifty-ton truck. ‘In the beginning I had to get used to it. Very occasionally you have the idea that it gives less power, because there is less noise. But that’s not true. They actually drive just as well as a diesel truck.’
For the time being, Kleijwegt with his electric truck is still a sight in the world, but that is slowly starting to change. Last month, for example, it turned out that the special subsidy pot of 13.5 million euros for the purchase of electric trucks was empty on the first day. The State Secretary for Infrastructure and Water Management immediately decided to make another 11.5 million euros available, with the result that next year there will probably be about six hundred emission-free trucks in the Netherlands.
But, to be fair, that remains a fairly marginal number of a total fleet of more than 63 thousand diesel trucks. Most men in the transport business just enjoy driving a V8 through the present way too much to really care about the loss of the future.
‘Nevertheless, we have decided to jump in at the deep end’, says Dé Post of HN Post en Zonen.
‘I’ve been getting the question from customers for a number of years: when can we have our freight transported electrically? Our answer was always: not yet. There were no trucks available, or they were way too expensive. There was nowhere to recharge, the number of kilometers you could drive was too limited, you name it.’
But then one day Post ran into Marie-José Baartmans and everything changed. Baartmans founded the transport company Breytner in 2014, which was the first in the Netherlands to convert existing trucks to electric, and he was looking for partners to work with. ‘Finally’, Post thought, who now has five electric trucks.
Kleijwegt today uses one of these to transport fifty tons of orange juice of the Innocent brand from the port of Rotterdam to the juice terminal 40 kilometers away. A relatively short ride that you can easily make three times a day, provided you plug in the car during unloading.
Yet the change comes in fits and starts. For example, Post spends most of his time on its five electric cars, while the company owns a total of 175 trucks. He is busy with subsidy applications – a diesel costs a ton, an electric truck four tons – talks with the Port Authority to install more transformer houses for fast chargers, and consultations with scientists who are investigating how to charge such a large battery as effectively as possible.
‘For the time being, it costs more than it yields, but we are doing it anyway. On the one hand because you build up a knowledge advantage, but more importantly: if you want our company to still exist in a hundred years, there must of course be a world in a hundred years in which our cars can drive around.’
And the truckers themselves? After all, men who usually dream of a placeless life full of freedom – something that a diesel truck that can drive up to three thousand kilometers on a single tank can offer better than its electric brother that has to be charged after 150 kilometers.
‘Ah,’ says driver Kleijwegt about this. ‘Not much is left of that freedom of the past. ‘You used to have no cell phones, no trackers. Then you could linger at the regular table and say that you were in a traffic jam. Now at the office we can see exactly where you are driving via the GPS.’
‘Do you know what it is? I will be 65 in January, have two grandchildren and for their future the world will have to look a bit different. If I can contribute to that by sometimes putting a plug in my car, what’s wrong with that, dude?’
