Carbon-free heavy goods vehicles, massified and requiring fewer drivers per tonne transported… This is what road transport manufacturers and research centers are working on. For the world of the truck, it is a question of appropriating the assets of the train while preserving its own qualities of flexibility. In other words, imitate the railway to better compete with it.
Truck-trains have already existed for a long time in countries with large spaces – United States, Canada, Australia. Those are the gigaliners or road trains : road monsters pulling three or four trailers, sometimes more. In Europe, slightly less giant sets called “eco-combi” – 32 meters long and more than 60 tonnes, all the same – are already used in Scandinavia, but also in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Manufacturers, such as DAF, or transporters, such as the German giant DB Schenker, are campaigning for the extension of the authorization for this solution in Europe (in France, heavy goods vehicles cannot exceed 18.75 meters and 44 tonnes), presenting it as a decarbonization option (− 25% CO2 per ton) of short term and immediately available.
But the eco-combi already seems to be in competition with the « platooning ». These compact multi-truck platoons consist of a lead vehicle with its driver and follower vehicles that are virtually hooked to each other via a wireless connection and keep each other safe with advanced self-driving technologies. No road transport line by platooning is really operational today in the world. Nevertheless, many full-scale tests have been carried out in the United States, where a start-up called Peloton has emerged as a potential Tesla of the platooning.
Solve the environmental question
Europe is also making progress on this subject. Since the summer of 2021, an experiment has been launched in the Mont-Blanc tunnel, with the aim of eventually testing a block of seven trucks with a single driver. A multi-brand consortium (DAF, Iveco, MAN, Renault Trucks, Scania, Volvo), called Ensemble and co-financed by the European Union, has been working since 2018 on setting up a common technology. It was able to test, last September, near Barcelona, a platoon of seven trucks in real traffic conditions and delivered its technical conclusions in March.
eco-combi or platooning however, do not solve the environmental question badly, whereas today there is no viable alternative to the thermal heavy goods vehicle on a long journey. But another path exists, that of electric road systems. The vehicles carry a battery three times smaller than that of long-range trucks and connect to the infrastructure that will provide the energy necessary for travel over most of the journey.
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