by Walther Ploos van Amstel
One of the most common objections to battery-electric trucks is charging infrastructure. Long-haul electrification, the argument goes, would require huge charging parks everywhere and grid reinforcement across the board, so hydrogen or e-fuels must remain essential. A new report from Fraunhofer ISI and the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) suggests otherwise. Demand clusters in …
Digital twins are among the most promising ideas in urban logistics, and among the most overhyped. The pitch is familiar: a live virtual copy of your delivery operation that lets you simulate, reroute, and optimize in real time. Fewer failed deliveries, fuller vans, lower emissions. A new paper in Research in Transportation Business & Management …
Fleet electrification is usually told as a technology story: replace the diesel van, optimize the route, tick the zero-emission box. Hyunji Chang’s paper in Mobilities tells a different story. Sustainable last-mile delivery is not simply implemented. It is assembled, day by day, by the people who do the work. Chang studied PostNL’s rollout of light …
The commercial vehicle industry is at an inflection point. A new factbook from BloombergNEF, produced with the Smart Freight Centre, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and Traton, offers the clearest picture yet of how fast electric trucking is scaling, and where the friction still lies. For transport and logistics managers weighing fleet …
Europe’s transition to zero-emission mobility is well underway, but progress is uneven — and without solid data, that unevenness is easy to miss. That’s the gap Transport & Mobility Leuven (TML) is closing for the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA): building on an earlier gap analysis, TML is now developing a set of key performance …
Tanaka, Sakai, Hyodo and Kodera (Journal of Transport Geography, 2026) tackle a persistent gap in city logistics: local governments are typically responsible for zoning, curbside management and local infrastructure, yet they have far less experience and data on freight than on passenger transport, and struggle to know which freight issues to prioritize or how. The …
DHL, together with Chinese autonomous-vehicle startup Zelostech, has put fully electric, driverless vehicles into operation to move goods between hubs, sorting centers and warehouses. At its Advanced Regional Center (ARC) in Singapore, this marks the first DHL site globally where such a vehicle has moved from innovation trial to daily operational use. The focus isn’t …
A master’s thesis from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) offers a useful corrective for fleet managers who view electric truck adoption primarily as a procurement decision: pick a Battery Electric Truck (BET), sign the purchase order, and that’s it. Boris Leferink’s research, “The Real Decisions Behind Electric Truck Procurement” (supervised by Prof. Lóri Tavasszy, …
A study in Transportation Research Part E quantifies something every delivery driver already knows: finding a place to park is often harder than finding a route. Giacomo Dalla Chiara and colleagues (University of Washington, University of Groningen) analyzed GPS data from a beverage distributor’s delivery operations in downtown Seattle (472 manifests, over 2,400 trips) to …
The Horizon Europe project NEXTLOGIC has released its first major deliverable (D1.1), Urban Logistics Challenges, a report that combines a state-of-the-art review with real-world benchmarking and primary data collection across the project’s eight EU Mission Cities: Aarhus, Bergamo, Differdange, Dublin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, The Hague and Wroclaw. Coordinated by the University of Luxembourg and led on …