There are plenty of solutions for people who can't charge at home - e.g. in the UK, in some areas every other lamppost on the street has a chargepoint built in
I have an issue with this statement as it gets banded about by the EV fanboys to shut up anyone who says they can't charge up at home. It might work in some areas but its not a solution open to all.
Agreed. Public charging is horribly expensive as well. I'm 80% sure my first non-ICE car will be powered by hydrogen because that is better suitable & cheaper for my use compared to BEV. But first long haul trucking needs to accellerate implementing hydrogen fueling stations. Long haul trucks typically have ranges from 1200km to 2500km on a single tank. There is no way to match that using batteries.
Nobody needs that much range on one charge, due to driver time limitations, provided there is sufficiently fast charging.
That is what some truck manufacturers also say about their electric trucks. But I doubt they have been on the road looking at the real life of a trucker. IF it would make sense to have a smaller range for a truck, the diesel tanks would be smaller already. They need to haul all the extra weight along as well. But appearantly, hauling the fuel along makes using the truck more efficient.
Some electric truck manufacturers state that a truck would only need to have about 4.5 hours of range because the driver needs to rest. But the thing is: the driver needs to rest, not work on charging the truck so getting the charging setup (waiting in line, doing the payment, etc) all cuts into driving time. Not rest time!
And then there is the practical side. My wife and I drive >20k km through Europe every year. One of my observations is that many parking spaces where trucks stop (with room for 50 to 200 trucks) along highways are not gas stations. About 1 in 5 parking spaces have a gas station. And in many cases these parking spaces are chuck full with trucks. This translates into needing 5 times more charging stations (compared to gas stations) that need to be able 50 to 200 trucks simultaneously. That would require tremendous amounts of energy. A long haul truck consumes about 30 to 40 liters of diesel per 100km.
On top of that, it happens that truck drivers need to take their break on the hard shoulder or a small parking spot because their driving time is up. How are those drivers going to get their trucks charged?
Bottom line: Long haul trucks on batteries is not going to work in the next 20 years -period-.
Now ofcourse you can argue that drivers should take care of charging more often, do more planning, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda but that takes you right back to the reason why long haul tucks have such large fuel tanks: fussing with fueling and needing to care about range takes too much time away from driving and thus costs too much money.