HANDLE WITH CARE

Matt Saunders has driven all manner of vehicles in all manner of locations as road test editor but never before a 20-tonne electric-powered HGV on ice. Are both man and machine up to the job?

- Matt Saunders

The road towards electrification might prove to be a dead end for some vehicle manufacturers, yet Swedish truck-making institution Scania hasn't been afraid to set out on it, just to see where it may lead.

The firm still typically fits six and eight-cylinder turbodiesel combustion engines to its wares, of anywhere between seven and 16 litres of swept capacity. Capable of nearly 800bhp and close to 3000lb ft of torque, its V8s remain objects of fervent desire among trucking enthusiasts (and where Scania is concerned especially, you'd better believe those enthusiasts exist).

But if you want to run your Scania on recycled vegetable oil instead of diesel, you can. In offering vehicles powered by either liquefied or compressed natural gas, the firm has been providing routes to lower-carbon trucking for years already and it has plug-in hybrid options and prototype hydrogen fuel cell trucks already running, too.

This is a company that answers in refreshingly nuanced, undogmatic fashion, then, when you ask it how it plans to decarbonise. Scania believes in a many-pronged solution that allows for a rapidly changing and unpredictable transport network and an equally turbulent business environment and energy market - and one that, above all else, is diligently customer-led. Because while you might be able to either legislatively strong-arm or even gaslight a luxury car buyer into believing that their next purchase really ought to run on electrons, if you try that approach with a multimillion-pound logistics company and your solution simply doesn't get the job done, you won't remain in business for very long.

Nevertheless, into that mix of alternatively fuelled models, among its smaller trucks intended for use mostly in urban environments, Scania added a few battery-electric options back in 2020. For their carefully chosen operators, they worked just fine.