# Amazon Goes Electric – and Shows Where Heavy Haulage Really Gets Stuck

On 9 September, Mercedes-Benz Trucks handed over the first 27 eActros 600 to Amazon in Germany. By the end of the year there are to be more than 50, part of an order of over 200 vehicles for Germany and the United Kingdom – the largest order of heavy electric trucks Amazon has ever placed. They will run on what is called the middle mile, between fulfilment centres and urban delivery stations. The company puts its investment in electrifying its European transport network at more than a billion euros, over 400 million of that in Germany. I start with Amazon because the example shows three things at once: that the vehicles exist, that their use pays off when the operating profile fits – and that the real bottleneck lies elsewhere. ### What the manufacturers deliver Three years ago the electric tractor unit was a promise. This week several production models stand side by side in Hanover, and the ranges have crossed a threshold. The eActros 600 covers around 500 kilometres at 40 tonnes gross combination weight, with 621 kilowatt hours in three LFP battery packs. MAN is showing the new eTGX with up to 644 kilowatt hours and up to 720 kilometres under favourable conditions; the standard version has 552 kilowatt hours and 660 kilometres. Volvo quotes up to 700 kilometres for the FH Aero Electric with 780 kilowatt hours, orderable since the summer. Scania, DAF and Renault Trucks have their own model lines. And Tesla has for the first time given figures for the European version of the Semi: around 550 kilometres at 40 tonnes and consumption of roughly one kilowatt hour per kilometre – a remarkable figure, if it holds up in winter, on gradients and at motorway speed. Tesla still names no price. These manufacturer figures apply to good conditions. In practice, fully loaded, one should reckon with 70 to 80 per cent of them. But even then the message is clear: for domestic long haul with daily distances up to 500 kilometres the battery suffices, and with one charging stop during the mandatory 45-minute break it stretches to 800 to 1,000 kilometres a day. Hydrogen no longer plays a role in this segment. In 2025 fuel-cell trucks reached a market share of 0.1 per cent in Europe. ### How far the market has come The numbers are, frankly, still small. In the EU in the first half of 2026, some 3,400 of 146,000 heavy trucks over twelve tonnes sold were zero-emission – 2.3 per cent, up from 1.4 per cent a year earlier. Diesel holds 92 per cent. Germany stood at 4.6 per cent in the second quarter, above the EU average; the Netherlands reached over 18 per cent in 2025, Norway almost 17. Globally the picture is different: the IEA counts more than 400,000 electric trucks sold in 2025, a global share of nine per cent – driven by China. Europe is not the pioneer here; Europe is catching up. ### What a tractor unit costs No manufacturer publishes list prices; everything is negotiated. As a rule of thumb, reckon with one and a half to two times the price of a diesel tractor unit; for the eActros 600 a figure of around 300,000 euros is circulating, while a comparable diesel costs 100,000 to 120,000. That is the investment hurdle, and it is real. Operating costs turn the picture around. Mercedes-Benz Trucks itself reckons with around 40 euros in fuel per 100 kilometres for the diesel tractor unit against just under 24 euros in electricity for the eActros 600 – at depot charging on a favourable tariff, not at the public charger. Add lower maintenance, because engine, gearbox and exhaust after-treatment disappear. The largest single item, however, is the road toll. Battery-electric trucks are fully exempt until 30 June 2031; a Euro 6 diesel pays around 35 cents per kilometre in 2026, so roughly 35,000 euros at 100,000 kilometres a year. The greenhouse gas quota adds up to 5,800 euros annually for heavy electric trucks. Over five to seven years, according to common calculations, cost parity arrives at around 60,000 to 70,000 kilometres of annual mileage – below that diesel stays cheaper, above it the balance tips. Two items are missing from this calculation, and both are uncomfortable. The residual value of an electric truck after seven years is unknown, because none is that old yet. And the charging infrastructure at the depot costs between 100,000 and 500,000 euros depending on the grid connection – a sum that spreads across a fleet of ten vehicles but blows up the calculation for a single one. ### Why infrastructure decides This is the core. Amazon can electrify because Amazon has its own depots, runs scheduled line-haul services and, by its own account, is installing hundreds of charging points at its European sites. That is the profile in which electric trucks work today: overnight depot charging, fixed routes, return to base. The mid-sized haulier with changing tours across Europe does not have that profile. He needs the public network – and that is only just coming into being. The state of play: the first public megawatt charging point in Germany went into operation in September 2025 on the A2 motorway, at 1.2 megawatts. The technical specification for the Megawatt Charging System was published only in February 2026; it allows up to 3.75 megawatts. Milence, the joint venture of Daimler Truck, Traton and Volvo, aims to operate 50 charging parks in ten countries by year end, 18 of them in Germany, and to reach 90 parks with 284 megawatt charging points by 2028. The federal government has had a programme of 1.6 billion euros approved: up to 1,410 charging points at more than 120 unserviced motorway rest areas, the majority of them megawatt chargers. The first 836 points have been awarded; E.ON and Tank & Rast are building 195 of them at 24 sites. That sounds like a lot. It is the beginning. And the real hurdle appears in none of these announcements: for the rest areas, grid connections have to be realised with more than 90 distribution network operators. A charging park with eight megawatt points needs a connection of the kind a mid-sized industrial company has. Permits, land, transformer station, cabling – in Germany that takes two to four years. Milence has therefore integrated a stationary battery into its charging park in Kassel to make do with a weaker grid connection. That is a clever workaround, but it is a workaround. I see the same pattern here as in the chemical industry: the technology is further along than the grid that is supposed to supply it. The vehicles come from Wörth, Munich and Gothenburg – the transformer stations come from permitting procedures. ### Where the trucks already are There is a charging infrastructure that appears in no funding programme, because it already exists: the industrial sites. A large chemical park on the Rhine handles more than 1,000 trucks a day. They run fixed relations – to the port, to the customer, to the neighbouring site –, they wait at the gate, they are weighed, loaded and unloaded, and they come back. That is exactly the profile in which Amazon runs electric today. Except that a chemical park has something neither Amazon nor the motorway rest area has: a grid connection designed for energy-intensive production. The transformer station that a motorway charging park fights three years for has stood there for decades. That shifts the arithmetic. The federal government is investing 1.6 billion euros to create grid connections at rest areas that already exist at industrial sites. A chemical park that equips its gates with charging points replaces part of that network – for the trucks that call there anyway, and in principle for those merely passing by. Twenty megawatt charging points at a site with a thousand truck movements a day would be more than the first Milence corridor between Paris and Berlin has today. That it has hardly happened so far has reasons, none of them technical. The site operator is not a charging provider. The hauliers are many, and none of them is large enough to invest alone. And the grid connection belongs to production, not to the vehicles at the gate. A coordination problem in which any party could start and none has the incentive to go first. I am not writing this purely as an observer. At the site where I work, precisely this start has been made: site operator and site logistics provider are tackling the subject together. Whether it becomes a model for other industrial sites will be decided over the next two years – and by whether hauliers and shippers come along. Anyone interested will find me. ### What this means for the industry The EU is tightening CO2 limits for heavy-duty vehicles to minus 45 per cent by 2030 and minus 90 per cent by 2040 against 2019. The manufacturers have responded, visibly so in Hanover. The toll exemption until 2031 gives fleet operators five years of planning certainty – what the equation looks like after that is open. For logistics companies this means: anyone running depot-based services with high mileage today can make the electric case and should. Anyone dependent on the public network has to match their core routes against the planned sites and will probably run a mixed fleet for another two to three years. And anyone who defers the switch to 2030 will find that grid connections and charging parks are even scarcer then than now. What remains open for me is whether the federal government's 1.6 billion euros will be enough if the ramp-up actually arrives – and who builds the grid connections when the distribution network operators are already at capacity with heat pumps, wallboxes and industrial electrification. My question to you: do you see the bottleneck in the vehicle, in the price or in the grid – and what would have to happen first for mid-sized companies to make the switch as well? ## Sources - Amazon / Mercedes-Benz Trucks, press release of 9 September 2026: handover of the first 27 eActros 600 https://www.presseportal.de/pm/118379/6348514 - electrive: Amazon takes over first eActros 600 in Germany (9 September 2026) https://www.electrive.net/2026/09/09/amazon-eactros-600-i… - trans.info: IAA Transportation 2026 – trends, MAN eTGX, Volvo FH Aero Electric (September 2026) https://trans.info/de/iaa-transportation-2026-lkw-trends-… - ecomento / ICCT: zero-emission trucks in the EU in the first half of 2026 (7 August 2026) https://ecomento.de/2026/08/07/mehr-emissionsfreie-lkw-un… - electrive: ACEA figures 2025, market shares by country (29 January 2026) https://www.electrive.net/2026/01/29/acea-bilanz-2025-e-l… - E-LKW24: TCO comparison electric vs. diesel, fuel, toll and infrastructure costs (July 2026) https://www.e-lkw24.de/wissen/tco-vergleich-e-lkw-diesel/ - emobicon: e-truck TCO calculator, toll rates and GHG quota (August 2026) https://emobicon.de/tco-rechner-e-lkw/ - electrive: "Deutschlandnetz" for trucks – operators awarded for 124 rest areas (1 July 2026) https://www.electrive.net/2026/07/01/deutschlandnetz-fuer… - ingenieur.de: 1.6 billion euros for a truck charging network (December 2025) https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/verkehr/deu… - electrive: Milence charging corridor Paris–Berlin, expansion targets to 2028 (23 April 2026) https://www.electrive.net/2026/04/23/e-lkw-quartett-erpro… - Fraunhofer ISI: first public megawatt charging point on the A2 (October 2025) https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/presse/2025/presseinfo-1… - Cleanthinking / IEA: electric mobility 2026, global truck sales 2025 (September 2026) https://www.cleanthinking.de/elektromobilitaet-2026-globa… Image: concept study, AI-generated.