Overview
The volume of the commercial freight sector is expected to increase towards 2050, especially in the medium to heavy truck modes (N2 and N3 type). However, in parallel to that, the recent European climate goals bring challenges for the transport sector. Given the fact that the typical vehicle development cycles can be of 5-7 years, an immediate collective and collaborative action from the research organizations, business strategists, technology companies and OEMs is necessary. The result of this would be to attain high-TRL concepts that are ready to roll out in the European and global market, where there is more room for a gradual adoption at the consumer side. In any case, given the fact that there are substantial technological and business steps are being taken in the zero-emission transport field, the next 30 years towards 2050 potentially requires more dramatic changes than the last 30 years (i.e., since 1990).
NextETRUCK aims to address different optimization challenges regarding tomorrow’s urban and suburban logistics for medium duty vehicles into systems-approach that is reliable, strongly integrated, affordable, and flexible enough to re-applied to different applications via dedicated tools/methods.
The overarching objective of the NextETRUCK project is to play a pioneering role in the decarbonization of the vehicle fleets, via demonstrating next generation e-mobility concepts consisting of holistic, innovative, affordable, competitive and synergetic zero emission vehicles and ecosystems for tomorrow’s medium freight haulage, while aiming significant leap of knowledge at component, vehicle, fleet, infrastructure and ecosystem levels, via innovations at e-powertrain components and architectures, smart charging infrastructure and management, improved thermal design of the cabin, fleet management systems with IoT and digital tools.