Where Europe's electric trucks will stop: the truck charging market, mapped to 2035

IAA Transportation opened in Hannover this week and every stand has the same truck on it: 600 kilometres of range, a megawatt plug, a 2027 delivery slot. Across the road from the show floor the network that is supposed to charge it has 730 reserved public points in the whole EU, seventeen member states with none, and a lobby asking for 35 000. Both halves of that picture are true. Neither tells you where the chargers should go.

So we built the map. It takes what we know about supply, the chargers, the hardware, the grants and the money, and what we know about demand, the trucks, the traffic and the driving-time rule that fixes where every one of them must stop, and puts the two together on 80 000 km of European motorway, year by year to 2035. The map comes first. The rest of the piece is how it was made and what it says.

The map: where the demand lands, 2026 to 2035

Each dot is a stretch of motorway, coloured by the break-charging energy it will need per kilometre in the selected year and sized by the total. Hover for the road, the heavy-vehicle flow, the electric long-haul trucks per day and what a 60 km AFIR pool on that stretch would need in bays. Switch the colour to bays per pool to see the same thing as a hardware count. Orange dots are the truck charging sites we can place today: those in our own data with at least one connector rated 700 kW or more, above anything sold for cars, plus openings reported since November 2025. The scale is fixed across years, so stepping forward shows growth, not re-scaling.

Three things the map says that the tables do not. First, the demand is a spine, not a network: the A2–A7–A3–A5 axis from the North Sea ports to Munich and Basel carries more 2030 break demand than Spain, Poland and Italy combined. Second, the Nordic corridors light up early on adoption, not on traffic: the E4, E6 and Norway’s E6 have a tenth of Germany’s heavy flow and a third of its 2030 demand. Third, the rings and the dots disagree. The megawatt hardware we can see sits in Norway, Sweden and along the A2; the French and Polish demand has almost nothing under it.

The short version

Supply is real but thin, and counted five different ways. The EU has 730 public points reserved for trucks, about 940 locations a truck can use, and a live megawatt list short enough to print. Milence is at 38 hubs and wants 50 by Christmas; Germany has awarded 447 MCS points on unmanaged rest areas. Every charger maker has a megawatt product. Nobody publishes hub utilisation or per-site capex.

Demand is a timetable, not a guess. Regulation 561/2006 fixes the leg at 4.5 hours and the break at 45 minutes. Solve it for a 40 t truck and you get about 566 kWh installed and 743 kW at peak, which is what MAN, Scania and Mercedes-Benz shipped to Hannover. A 400 kW plug buys 194 km of a 360 km leg: a depot plug, not a corridor plug.

Put the two together and the corridor market is smaller than the lobby says. On our central path, break charging on the motorways we can measure needs about 17 GWh a day in 2030 and 40 GWh in 2035. At a 5% chance of queueing that is roughly 2 650 megawatt bays in 2030 and 6 331 in 2035, against the VDA's 35 000. Two-thirds of 2030 demand sits on twenty roads, nine of them German Autobahnen.

The grants place chargers by spacing; the trucks stop by traffic. A compulsory 45-minute stop at a fixed interval is the textbook queueing problem, so corridor rules work better for trucks than they ever did for cars. But AFIR sets kilowatts and spacing, never bays, and scales nothing with heavy flow. Of nine national and EU schemes, only the German motorway tender sizes sites on measured traffic.

The money is oversubscribed and the grid is the queue. Germany's first three calls asked for €1.05bn against €300m available; AFIF spent its second billion by November 2025. Every operator, ministry and association agrees the bottleneck is the grid connection, two to three years in Germany, a 15 000-name queue in the Netherlands.

Nobody is funding the eleven hours. Overnight rest needs 40 to 50 kW per truck and a parking space. It is a third as much corridor energy again in our model, none of it megawatt, and Germany is short about 20 000 truck parking spaces tonight.

The full story

Supply: where the chargers are

Here is the count, and it is mostly empty. The EAFO counted 937 locations in Europe that a truck can charge at, but only 472 points are reserved for trucks; the rest are car hubs with a long enough bay. Sweden, Germany and France hold 65% of the truck-only points. Poland, home to the biggest haulage fleet in the EU, and Czechia, the transit country between Germany and everything east of it, have none in that count; ORLEN’s first motorway hubs are the only orange dots on our map there. Seventeen EU member states have none.

Germany is the country to watch because it is the country with the most trucks, the most money and the most grid operators. The Nationale Leitstelle counts 88 sites and 355 points built for trucks as of July; the eTrucker app, which counts anything a truck has actually charged at, says about 790 locations. Both are true. The first is what was designed for a 16.5 metre articulated truck; the second is what a driver will put up with. Of the 355, seven were megawatt points in July.

The live megawatt list is short enough to print. Milence has MCS at three hubs: Antwerp-Bruges, Zwolle and Landvetter. Aral pulse switched on five megawatt parks on the A7, A2, A9, A24 and A10 in March. Circle K has one in Värnamo on the E4 and Kempower units at Järna and Vädermotet. Creek Power opened a ten-megawatt yard in Norsborg with eight MCS plugs. St1 has two in Norway, OMV one on the A12 at Kufstein, and the HoLa research network completed five stations between the Ruhr and Berlin in June. That is the megawatt map of Europe in September 2026. You could drive it in a weekend, if you did not need to charge.

What has been promised is a different order of magnitude. Milence is at 38 hubs and wants 50 by Christmas and 90 by 2028, with more than 300 MCS points. The Autobahn GmbH awarded 124 unmanaged rest areas on 30 June with 836 points, 447 of them MCS, first openings 2027. The E.ON, Voltix and GreenWay consortium is building 330 MCS points at 55 sites by autumn 2028 on EU money. France wants 8 000 truck points by 2035. Sweden has 146 public truck stations built and 250 more funded. Add it all up and Europe reaches perhaps 1 500 megawatt points by 2028 against a 35 000 ask for 2030. The pipeline is real. It is also a rounding error.

Our own data can see the network, roughly, and cannot date it. No European charging register tags a station by the vehicles it serves, and a site’s total power says nothing about its plugs: 11 200 kW is a big car hub, not a megawatt bay. The one hard signal is the rating of the individual connector. Nothing built for cars is rated above 500 kW per plug, so once the obvious reporting errors are stripped out, a 700 kW floor leaves about 40 sites in ten countries. They are the ones you would expect: St1, Circle K and Uno-X truck stops in the Nordics, Milence Landvetter, the Mercedes-Benz hub in Hamburg, ORLEN’s motorway hubs in Poland, OK Truck at Korsør, Disfrimur in Murcia and Plugit’s ports in Finland. Softer signals, Norway’s truck tags and operator names, add a few hundred candidates and too many false positives, so the map keeps the hard 40, topped up with the openings reported in the news since November 2025.

Dating them is another matter. Only the French and German registers carry a commissioning date, which gives us 34 Milence sites in France from April 2024 to June 2026 and eight in Germany from December 2025. Everywhere else, the date a site first shows up in our data is the date we started watching it, not the date it opened. So we went to the news archive, pulled every truck-charging opening reported since 1 November 2025, and placed them on the map by hand. Until the registers carry a truck flag, that is as precise as the count gets.

Supply: the megawatt plug

MCS was first demonstrated on a bench in 2021 at 3.75 MW and has spent five years becoming paperwork. The paperwork finished this year: the IEC published the connector specification in February, and the ISO 15118-20 amendment that tells a truck and a charger how to talk about a megawatt landed in July. That is the boring milestone that matters. It is why MAN could start series production of MCS trucks in the same month, and why Kempower reported more than 4 300 MCS sessions and half a gigawatt-hour of megawatt charging by 1 July.

On the hardware side, every serious charger maker now has a megawatt product and most of them are the same architecture: a one-megawatt cabinet feeding several dispensers, allocated in slices. Alpitronic’s HYC1000 does it in 62.5 kW steps across up to eight outputs, which is the plugs-versus-power trade-off we measured on 8 966 European sites in August, sold as a box. The interesting arrivals in Hannover were small: Alpitronic’s 35 kg depot dispenser and Kempower’s dual CCS-or-MCS satellite. The industry has decided that the depot is where the volume is, and it is building for it.

Supply: who is building, and who is just sharing

Truck charging has no Ionity yet, but it has one company that looks like it. Milence is the OEM joint venture (Daimler Truck, Traton, Volvo Group) that was supposed to solve the chicken-and-egg problem by being the chicken. Its CEO, Anja van Niersen, told the FAZ this week that hauliers ‘have to see and touch the chargers before they believe the operation is possible’, and that Germany’s 860 distribution grid operators, against three in France or the Netherlands, are the drama. Milence’s hubs are four to eight bays of 400 kW CCS with MCS bolted on later. It has never published a utilisation number, and neither has anyone else in this list.

Around Milence the field has sorted itself into five kinds of company, and the most interesting one does not build anything.

The sharing platforms are the 2026 story. Depotcharge says more than 60% of German depot charging capacity sits idle during the day, which is the one utilisation statistic anybody in this sector has volunteered. So instead of building a hub next to a motorway and waiting for a grid connection, it connects the hauliers’ own yards into a bookable network and takes a cut. Daimler’s TruckCharge does the same with dealers. SMATRICS runs a Depot Club in Austria. It is the cheapest network in Europe because it already exists, and it explains why the venture money this year went to software.

Supply: grants, siting rules and the money

Germany is the test case for whether money is the problem, and the answer came back in June. The Transport Ministry’s first three truck-charging calls were so oversubscribed that the SME window opened and closed on the same day; the depot call for larger firms drew 400 million of requests against 67 million on the table. Berlin tripled the first budget and it still was not enough. Hauliers want to build chargers. They want it five times more than the state expected.

Brussels is the opposite story. The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility spent its second billion by November and cancelled the March 2026 cut-off for lack of money. What is left is a 130 million euro CEF call closing on 6 October, against a gap T&E puts at half a billion a year until the next budget in 2028. AFIF did fund the interesting things while it lasted: 142 million to Milence, 61 million to Voltix, 70 million to the E.ON consortium for 330 MCS points. Depot charging was never eligible, which is one reason the depots are the part of the system that is working.

The subsidy that actually moves trucks is not a grant at all. It is the toll. Germany exempts zero-emission trucks from the Maut until mid-2031, a gap Daimler puts at 33 to 35 cents a kilometre. The Netherlands switched on its truck toll on 1 July and charges an electric tractor 3.5 cents a kilometre against 18.6 for its diesel twin. Austria discounts 75% to 2030. Only 13 of 27 member states differentiate tolls by CO₂ at all, which is why the truck makers spent IAA asking for the other 14 rather than for more chargers.

Which brings us to where the grants put the chargers, because that is the supply-side decision the map is about.

We have argued in what it takes for a CPO to be profitable, that grant schemes built on spacing and corridors are a reliable way to build the wrong thing in the wrong place for passenger cars. A car driver’s stop is optional, its timing is elastic, and its location is wherever the coffee is. Subsidise a charger every 60 km and you get chargers every 60 km, including on the stretches nobody stops on, and the utilisation data shows it.

Trucks break three of those assumptions at once. The stop is compulsory. Its timing is fixed at 4.5 hours after the last one, so a truck that left Hamburg at 06:00 will be looking for a bay somewhere between Kassel and Würzburg at 10:30 whether it wants to or not. And the place is constrained: a 16.5 m articulated vehicle needs a drive-through bay at a rest area, a truck stop or a logistics park, not a supermarket car park. Put those together and truck charging on a corridor is a queueing problem with known parameters: arrivals follow the heavy-vehicle flow, the service time is 45 minutes, and the customer cannot go elsewhere. That is the Erlang model we used in plugs versus power, and it works better here than it did for cars.

So spacing rules are not wrong in principle for trucks. AFIR’s 60 km on the core network is comfortably inside a 360 km leg; a driver loses at most 60 km of flexibility. The problem is what the rules do not say. They say where a pool must exist and how many kilowatts it must have. They do not say how many bays, and they scale nothing with traffic. A 3 600 kW pool is four MCS bays whether it sits on the A2 at Immensen with 23 000 heavy vehicles a day or on a comprehensive-network stretch in Extremadura with 800. The table shows what each scheme actually requires.

That is the wrong-place risk for trucks in one line: grants pay for spacing, demand follows heavy traffic, and heavy traffic on European motorways is spectacularly uneven. Which is what the rest of this piece measures.

Our August M&A scorecard found that nobody is buying car CPOs either; they are buying the pieces. In trucks there are not yet pieces to buy, so 2026 has been a financing year, not a deal year. Milence raised its first outside money in May, a 120 million euro debt facility backed by InvestEU, on top of half a billion of shareholder equity. Voltix took 90 million of equity from VINCI, ADEME and Épopée on Monday. Zenobē signed a 382 million dollar facility to lease trucks and depots across Germany, Spain, Benelux and Sweden. Banks are lending against truck chargers for the first time, which is the signal that matters.

Notice what is missing: an acquisition. No fund has bought a truck hub network, and no oil major has bought a depot specialist. The reason is the same as the utilisation gap. You cannot value an asset whose demand curve has not started, and the only firm data point anybody has is Fraunhofer ISI’s planning assumption of 4% energetic utilisation for a megawatt site in 2025. Consolidation arrives when the trucks do. Until then, the smart money is lending, not buying.

Supply: what it costs, and the queue at the grid

Nobody in Europe publishes what a truck hub costs, so we are left with the models and one American price list. Fraunhofer ISI’s cost study puts megawatt hardware at 340 to 460 thousand euros per MW in 2025, installation at another 100, and the grid connection for a four-bay site at about 900 thousand. Call it three million euros for four megawatt bays before you have bought land or built a toilet. Germany’s billion-euro rest-area budget, spread over its 350 planned sites, comes out at a similar 2.9 million a site. Tesla, characteristically, just prints the number: 188 000 dollars for two Megacharger posts, hardware only.

Those three prices are the whole business case. At 16 to 24 cents at the depot an electric truck beats diesel today on energy, and MAN’s fleet cases show five-year TCO advantages of up to 13%. At 40 cents on the motorway it does not, which is why ICCT says long-haul trucks that depend on public charging are still not TCO-positive anywhere. Milence’s own Paris-to-Berlin sum came out at 99.5 cents a kilometre electric against 100.3 diesel, which is parity with a rounding error and a toll exemption doing all the work.

The number nobody will say out loud is utilisation. Fraunhofer plans on 4% energetic utilisation for a megawatt site in 2025 and 5% in 2030. Norway, the most electrified truck market in Europe, will have about ten e-trucks per dedicated public point once Enova’s sites are finished. Sweden’s Energy Agency said in January that more trucks need to get on the road for the stations it has funded to make economic sense. dena says a truck charging park pays back in eight to twelve years and that banks know it. That is a lot of expensive hardware waiting for trucks, and it is the reason the industry is fighting over the CO₂ target rather than over sites.

Every operator, association and ministry we read this month agrees on the bottleneck, which is rare enough to note. It is not capital and it is not demand. It is the connection. dena’s dossier puts a German truck-hub connection at two to three years, up to ten in individual cases, with a year just to get a first answer. The Netherlands ended 2025 with 15 014 large consumers and 9.3 GW on the waiting list, and since 1 July a truck hub gets no priority in it. Sweden’s Energy Agency warns that a haulier buying an e-truck ‘may have to wait several years’ to plug it in. Milence’s CEO counts 860 German grid operators to negotiate with. BDEW, which represents them, says truck charging now competes with data centres, heat pumps and electrolysers for the same capacity.

The story that captures it is a petrol station in Lahr, a kilometre from the A5, with a fenced meadow ready since 2022 and a transformer next door. The owner applied for 8 MW and was refused. He applied for 4 MW, then 2, and was refused twice more. His fourth application, for a single charger, is pending. Baden-Württemberg’s own study says the state needs 13 800 public truck points by 2035. In February it had 50.

The workarounds are batteries and flexibility. Milence’s Kassel hub is its first with on-site storage, put there because the grid could not deliver. Alfredsson’s yard in Norrköping runs twelve heavy bays and a megawatt plug off 2.4 MW of grid and 2.4 MWh of battery. The Dutch have cut the grid threshold for their public truck-charging subsidy from 600 to 100 kVA precisely so that buffered sites qualify. And Fraunhofer ISE’s Andreas Hensel, asked about the megawatt race, called it a marketing instrument and said distribution grid capacity has to double in ten years. The industry heard him. Every IAA charger launch this year came with a battery option.

Demand: the trucks turned up on time

Two years ago the standard objection to electric long-haul was that the trucks could not do it. That objection is gone, and it went in a single model year. The new MAN eTGX carries up to 644 kWh and claims 720 km; Volvo has started building the FH Aero Electric at 700 km; Scania’s seventh battery pack takes its tractors past 700 km and, on a good day, past 800. The eActros 600 has now done more than 160 million customer kilometres and half of its daily runs exceed 400 km. The one European that did not turn up was IVECO, which skipped Hannover altogether.

The plug is the new spec-sheet battleground. MAN and Scania ship at 750 kW, Volvo at 700, Renault at 720, and Mercedes-Benz will follow with series MCS in the second half of 2027. Then there is the visitor. BYD’s ETT 44 charges at more than 1.5 MW on its own megawatt hardware, comes with a ten-year battery warranty, and is sold as a bundle of truck, chargers, storage and financing. Windrose, a Chinese-founded outfit now assembling in Antwerp, is selling its first hundred E700s at 195 000 euros. The European average for an electric tractor is around 320 000. Reuters reckons more than a dozen Chinese makers plan to sell here in 2026, at up to 30% below that.

Demand: how many are on the road

Two numbers set the demand side: how many heavy trucks drive the corridors, and how many of them are electric. The first is large and measured. The second is small and moving fast.

The comparison every European truck executive now makes unprompted is the one they used to avoid. In 2025 China registered 231 000 new-energy heavy trucks, a 29% share, and in December electric heavy trucks outsold diesel for the first time. Europe’s heavy-truck share was 2%. The United States managed a quarter of one percent in the first quarter of 2026. BCG’s IAA study says the three regions have simply stopped being one market: China has reached cost parity on regional haulage and swaps batteries at 1 600 stations; Europe has the mandate and is building the chargers; America has neither.

What China exports is not only trucks. It is the operating model. CATL now owns the largest swap network in China and a joint venture with Octopus to build the same thing in Britain from 2027. BYD sells the truck, the megawatt charger, the stationary battery and the loan in one contract, so the haulier never meets a grid operator. Whether Europe’s answer is 35 000 megawatt plugs or 7 000 shared depots, it will need to be as simple to buy as that.

Trucks on the road come from the national count stations. We hold AADT and geometry for about 80 000 km of motorway and Nordic trunk E-road across 21 countries, and the road authorities publish the heavy-vehicle share of that flow, in most cases station by station. The shares are not uniform. Poland's motorways run 22.8% heavy, the Brenner and the Italian A4 near 30% of vehicle-km, Germany 14 to 18% depending on the definition, the Nordics 8 to 12% and Finland 7%. The corridor anchors are the ones you would guess: 23 000 heavy vehicles a day on the A2 at Immensen, 25 000 on the Dutch A16 at Zonzeel, 30 000 on the AP-7 at Barcelona, 12 000 on the A31 north of Metz, and 2 800 across the Svinesund bridge into Norway. Belgium, which would rank high, is excluded because we hold no road traffic data for it.

Demand: the driver’s clock sizes the energy

Start with the clock and work backwards. At a realised 80 km/h, which is what Volvo, Scania and the Fraunhofer models all measure on real motorway runs, 4.5 hours is 360 km. A loaded 40 t tractor uses about 1.1 kWh per kilometre on the annual average, so one leg is about 400 kWh. The first leg of the day starts from a full overnight charge, so it only needs 440 kWh of battery with a 10% reserve. The second leg is the one that sizes the truck: it starts from whatever the break put in, and a break can only fill the fast window from 10 to 80%. Divide 400 by 0.7 and you get 570 kWh installed. Then divide the same 400 kWh by the 40 minutes that remain of a 45-minute break once the truck has parked and plugged, allow for charge taper, and you need about 750 kW at peak.

Now look at what shipped in Hannover. Mercedes-Benz built 621 kWh and 1 000 kW. MAN built 552 to 644 kWh and 750 kW. Scania 560 kWh net and 750 kW. BYD 651 kWh and 1.5 MW. Volvo went to 780 kWh with 700 kW, which is the other way to solve the same equation: a bigger battery buys a slower plug. Every one of them lands inside the ‘typical’ and ‘heavy’ rows of the table. The industry did not converge on 600 kWh and 750 kW because a marketing department liked round numbers. It converged because the driver’s clock has one solution.

The other side of the same table is what 400 kW does not do. In a 45-minute break a 400 kW CCS plug puts about 194 km into a 40 t truck. The leg is 360. The driver can leave, but arrives at the next compulsory stop with an empty battery and an hour-plus charge instead of 45 minutes, and the day’s second leg is gone. So a 400 kW bay is a depot plug or a destination plug. Counting it as corridor infrastructure, which every rollout statistic currently does, is the reason 730 points looks like more than it is.

Demand: how much of it lands on the corridor

Two assumptions turn trucks on the road into energy at the roadside, and both deserve their argument in the open. The first is how fast the long-haul fleet electrifies. We use 25% of long-haul kilometres electric in 2030 and 65% in 2035. That is not a forecast of sales; it is a share of kilometres, and long-haul electric trucks drive more of them than the fleet average because they are bought for the busiest routes first. It sits above the compliance minimum the 2026 amendment to the CO₂ standards leaves manufacturers, below what the OEMs said in Hannover they expect to sell, and inside the 21 to 25% for 2030 and 63 to 77% for 2035 that the Potsdam Institute found feasible on today's driving patterns. Germany is already at 4.6% of new heavy registrations and Norway and the Netherlands higher, so the country multipliers in the model give them a head start and Spain and Poland a lag.

The second is what share of that electric energy is taken at corridor breaks rather than at the depot. We use 30%, plus 10% overnight on the corridor. ICCT's use-case work puts public charging at 30 to 35% of long-haul energy, with depots supplying the rest, and the mean long-haul day of about 450 km means most days need one en-route charge, not two. Our 40% public total is therefore the top of ICCT's range, not below it. Speth and Plötz's often-quoted 68 GWh a day for the EU assumes every long-haul truck charges at every break, which is a ceiling, not a plan. This is not regenerative braking, which is already inside the 1.1 kWh/km consumption figure; it is the split of the same energy between the yard and the road.

The model: supply meets demand

The traffic side is the one described above. From there the chain is short. Heavy-vehicle share of the flow comes from the national road authorities, station by station where they publish it. Long-haul tractors carry a set share of heavy motorway kilometres. A rising share of those tractors is battery-electric, faster in Norway, the Netherlands and Germany than in Spain or Poland. Each electric long-haul kilometre costs 1.1 kWh, and a set fraction of that energy is taken at breaks on the corridor rather than at the depot. Per stretch, that gives energy per day; per 60 km pool it gives sessions per day; Erlang C turns sessions into bays at a 5% chance of waiting.

One honesty note before the numbers. The model allocates demand to where the traffic is, not to where a driver would actually pull off, so it says how much a 60 km stretch must serve, not which rest area gets it.

Read the amber bars first. Break charging on the measurable corridors is about 1.0 GWh a day today, 17 GWh in 2030 and 40 GWh in 2035. For scale, Speth and Plötz’s 2023 trip-chain model put break charging at 68 GWh a day for the whole EU at 15% electrification, because it assumes every long-haul truck charges at every break; ours assumes a quarter of long-haul energy goes through the corridor and a smaller fleet. The order of magnitude agrees; the ambition does not. Then read the teal bars, which nobody lobbies for. A third as much energy again wants to land overnight, at 40 to 50 kW per truck, in a parking space that in Germany does not exist for one truck in five.

Turn energy into bays and the lobby number shrinks. At a 9% peak hour, a 45-minute service time and a 5% chance of waiting, the 2030 break demand on these corridors needs about 2 650 megawatt bays, and 2035 about 6 331. That is not 35 000. It is not even the 4 000 to 5 300 megawatt chargers ICCT expects, because ICCT sizes for whole-EU coverage including roads we cannot measure and for the compliance fleet rather than the feasible one. It is, uncomfortably for the pipeline, close to what has already been awarded: Autobahn GmbH’s 447 MCS points, the E.ON–Voltix–GreenWay 330, Milence’s 300 by 2028. Bays are not the shortage. Bays on the right twenty roads, with grid connections, are.

Where the market is headed

Read the map year by year and the market has three acts. 2026 to 2028 is a German-Dutch-Swiss story: about 1.0 GWh a day of break demand today, rising to 4.6 GWh in 2028, and most of it on the A2, A7 and A3 and the Dutch A15 and A16. Germany alone is 378 MWh a day now and 1 765 in 2028, the Netherlands 90 rising to 418. This is the phase the current pipeline is sized for, and it is roughly right: Milence's 300 bays, the Autobahn GmbH 447 and the E.ON consortium's 330 cover it, provided they land on those roads and get connected.

2030 is where the map turns amber. Break demand reaches about 17 GWh a day, Germany 6.3 GWh of it, France 2.3, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain each near or above 1 GWh. That needs roughly 2 650 megawatt bays at a 5% queueing target, and the rings on the map show where the hardware is not: France's A1, A7 and A31, Poland's A2 and A4, and the Spanish AP-7 have heavy flows and almost no 700 kW plugs under them. The Nordic corridors light up early on adoption rather than traffic, which is why Norway's E6 and Sweden's E4 rank alongside German roads with ten times their flow.2035 is the market the lobby numbers describe, and it is still smaller than they say: about 40 GWh a day and 6 331 megawatt bays on the measured corridors, with Poland and Spain finally catching up on adoption and the German spine saturating. By then the binding constraint is not the number of bays but the grid capacity on twenty roads, and the parking. The overnight bars in the ramp chart, 13.2 GWh a day in 2035, need 40 kW per truck and a place to stand, and no scheme in the table funds either.

What it adds up to

Europe has solved the problem it spent a decade arguing about. The trucks exist, the plug is standardised, and the regulation fixed the spec: about 600 kWh and 750 kW, or a bigger battery and a slower plug. Anyone still debating whether MCS is necessary can stop; the 45-minute break is the spec.

The corridor is a smaller problem than the lobby says and a harder one than the grants assume. Two to three thousand megawatt bays serve 2030 on the motorways we can measure, and the pipeline already promises a thousand of them. But they have to sit on twenty roads, in the order the heavy traffic dictates, with grid connections that in Germany take two to three years and in the Netherlands sit in a 15 000-name queue. A spacing rule that treats the A2 and a Portuguese comprehensive-network stretch as the same 3 600 kW pool will build the wrong thing in the wrong place, as it did for cars, unless the traffic data decides. Germany's motorway tender is the only scheme that uses it.

And the problem nobody is funding is the eleven-hour rest. A third as much corridor energy again arrives overnight at 40 kW, and it needs a parking space before it needs a plug. The megawatt debate is about the 45 minutes. The 11 hours are where the trucks actually are.

Sources

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HoLa network complete

Creek Power Norsborg

New MAN eTGX

Volvo FH Aero Electric production start

Scania MCS orders

Mercedes-Benz eActros 600 MCS timeline

Tesla Semi European specification

Tesla Megacharger pricing

BYD ETT 44

Windrose E700 pricing

Chinese truck makers’ European plans (Reuters via trans.info)

ACEA full-year 2025 truck registrations

ACEA H1 2026 registrations

ICCT EU HDV market development, H1 2026

China new-energy heavy trucks 2025

BCG: three regions, three paths (via Edison)

CATL takes 24.9% of Qiyuan Green Power

Swaptopus (CATL and Octopus)

Einride acquires Flipturn

Chargepoly €23m (Meridiam)

Depotcharge pre-seed (HTGF)

German Maut exemption to mid-2031

EU toll rules for zero-emission trucks agreed, Jul 2026

Regulation (EC) 561/2006, consolidated

Fraunhofer ISI WP01-2023: public charging requirements for long-haul BETs (trip-chain on 561/2006)

Shoman, Yeh, Sprei, Plötz, Speth et al., Battery electric long-haul trucks in Europe, TR-D 2023

Karlsson & Grauers, agent-based charger queues, Energies 2023

ICCT: charging infrastructure needs for BETs in the EU by 2030 (Oct 2025)

ICCT: effect of the 2026 HDV CO₂ amendment

ICCT: real-world use cases for zero-emission tractor-trailers (Aug 2025)

Öko-Institut: real-world data analysis of BETs in Germany (EVS38, 2025)

PIK et al., Nature Communications 2026 (feasible electrification share)

Fraunhofer ISI / NOW: Schwere Batterie-Lkw in der Logistik (Jul 2025)

Daimler Truck: eActros 600 European testing tour (1.03 kWh/km)

Daimler Truck: eActros 600 winter tour

electrive: MAN eTGX to the Arctic Circle (1.17 kWh/km)

electrive: Scania engineer, 73 500 km at 76 km/h

Volvo Trucks: FH Electric 343 km test at 80 km/h

NEFTON: 3 000 A charging (Jun 2026)

Eurostat: road freight by journey characteristics (2026)

BASt: Straßenverkehrszählung 2021, Ergebnisbericht

BASt: automatische Dauerzählstellen 2024 (Jawe)

ASFINAG Verkehrsstatistik 2024

Land Tirol: Verkehr in Tirol, Bericht 2024

ASTRA: wöchentliche Verkehrsentwicklung 2024–25

DfT: road traffic estimates in Great Britain 2025 (TRA0104)

TII: national road network indicators 2024

ASFA: chiffres clés 2025 (PL share on concession motorways)

data.gouv.fr: TMJA sur le réseau routier national

Rijkswaterstaat INWEVA 2025

GDDKiA: Generalny Pomiar Ruchu 2020/21

Magyar Közút: keresztmetszeti forgalom 2023

MITMA: Carreteras 2023 (pesados share)

Autobrennero: Bilancio 2024 (heavy veh-km on the A22)

Trafikverket: trafikarbete på statliga vägnätet 2010–2025

Trafikverket: planeringsunderlag elvägar (corridor heavy AADT)

Statens vegvesen trafikkdata API

Vejdirektoratet Mastra nøgletal (open data)

Väylävirasto: maanteiden liikennesuoritteet 2025

ICCT AFIR policy update (HDV targets)

PtJ: Förderaufruf öffentliche Ladeinfrastruktur e-Lkw (May 2026)

RVO: SPULA 2026

NFOŚiGW: stacje ładowania dla transportu ciężkiego

Panteia/ESPORG for DG MOVE: safe and secure parking study (Jan 2025)

Autobahn GmbH: Lkw-Stellplätze