Electrification arouses curiosity among hauliers, but the already pressured everyday life creates uncertainty and questions about how the transition will work in practice. This is shown by three studies within the TREE project.
Electrification-The article is a summary of results from the studies “How do hauliers reason about electric trucks”, “Decision factors and trade-offs in BET adoption: insights from Swedish forestry freight haulers” and “Electrifying Heavy Transport: Haulage Owners’ Evaluative Dimensions and the Conditions for Workability”
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That’s a remarkable amount of work hours for a single machine, the Norcar 600 owned by Erkki Rinne is taken well care of, it even has the original Diesel engine.
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Kieran Anders is a forestry contractor working in the lake district. His work involves hand cutting and extracting timber using a skidder and tractor-trailer forwarder.
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Arwel takes great pride in the fact that the mill has no waste whatsoever, “the peelings are used for children’s playgrounds, gardens and for farm animals in barns in the winter and the sawdust has multiple uses in gardens and farms as well.
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Timber hauliers need to encourage young blood in, and also look after the hauliers we have, we need make the sector a safe and positive place to work.
FIND US ON
Electrification of heavy trucks is central to the sustainability goals of both forestry and the transport sector. The transition is largely determined by the hauliers who will invest in the vehicles. It is their everyday life that needs to be combined with new conditions in terms of charging, tied-up capital and work environment. Therefore, in three separate studies, the TREE project has focused on the hauliers’ perspective – what conditions need to be met and where it often stops today.
Together, they show which critical pieces of the puzzle need to be in place for electrification to be seen as a reasonable choice for one’s own business: that productivity is maintained, that charging can be built into the working day and that there is a commercial interest from the customer side. The material indicates that hauliers are not necessarily sceptical about electrification. On the contrary, there is a clear curiosity and positive experiences among those who have tried electric trucks. On the other hand, hauliers are pragmatic: the big question mark is not the technology itself, but how it affects the daily operations.
hree perspectives on the same transition
Study 1 (Construction et al. 2025) is based on interviews with decision-makers in timber and wood chip haulage companies, as well as with drivers who already drive electric trucks in forestry operations. It shows how hauliers assess electric operation in their own everyday life – where technology, planning, investment and work environment must come together at the same time. A key result is that positive experiences of the driving itself can coexist with great hesitation as to whether electric drive can actually be made to work in one’s own business. The study also shows that more predictable arrangements, such as wood chip trucks between industries, are more clearly seen as possible first steps than roundwood flows.
Study 2 (Shenoy et al. 2026) takes a systems perspective. It shows that decisions about electric operation cannot be understood by looking at cost, charging or technology separately. Instead, charging availability, battery size, payload, productivity, and profitability affect each other in a larger system of trade-offs. In this way, electrification emerges as a systemic challenge rather than a series of separate problems. A particularly interesting point is that the study highlights driver anxiety linked to charging and operational stress as an important factor in the transition – something that has previously rarely been emphasized.
tudy 3 (Fridner et al. 2026) focuses on how haulage owners assess the possibility of electrification in practice. It shows that the owners’ reasoning is broad and revolves around no less than eight recurring dimensions: economy, charging, flows, technology, driver, service (incl. safety dimensions), sustainability and policy. At the same time, it is clear that economy and charging weigh heaviest, while sustainability and policy play significantly less of a role. The study also shows that electrification is tested in practice in two intertwined stages: whether productivity in everyday life can be preserved, and whether the investment can be made commercially viable together with the customer.
Individually, the studies shed light on different parts of the same transition. Together, they provide a more comprehensive picture. The first shows what the issues look like in close operations and everyday life. The second shows how different factors intersect and reinforce or slow each other down over time. The third shows what owners actually weigh in when deciding whether electric drive can be made to work in their own company. The overall picture shifts the focus from the binary question of whether hauliers are positive or negative to what actually needs to be in place for them to be able to say yes.
What determines in practice
Common to all three studies is that electrification is not assessed as an isolated technology issue. The key is whether the business can still be run in a reasonable way.
Three conditions recur:
- Productivity must be maintained. For hauliers, productivity is not about an abstract measure of efficiency, but about how much transport work can be done during a shift: loads per day, waiting times, turnaround times, queues, detours and the ability to deal with disruptions when the day breaks down. Diesel still sets the benchmark for what is perceived as sufficient productivity, and electrification must be close enough to be able to sustain itself in a business with small margins. Therefore, more predictable flows with appropriate stops are generally perceived as the most appropriate first steps for electrification.
- The charge must work in the rhythm of work. The important thing is not only that charging exists, but that it can be done without eating up the working day – by being built into natural stops, happening quickly enough or being placed where it disturbs shifts as little as possible. This is related to the above as charging that requires extra stops, detours or queues quickly becomes a productivity problem. It also affects the work environment. More controlled planning can be perceived as a burden, and uncertain charging access can create anxiety in drivers and increase operational stress. At the same time, electrification is described above all as something that can improve the work environment. Overall, the three studies point in the same direction: charging must function as part of the work rather than as an extra moment outside of it.
- The customer must want to make the deal possible. Nor is a technically functioning set-up enough if the deal becomes too vulnerable. Purchase price, residual value, electricity price, service, waiting times and any payload loss must be bearable in companies with squeezed margins. Here, the transport buyer becomes central. It’s not just about willingness to pay, but about how contracts are designed, how risk is distributed, how long-term the relationships are and who actually bears the cost when productivity, charging and payload change. It is not enough to demand fossil-free transports on similar terms as before, but the customer needs to actively contribute to making them investable, for example by safeguarding long-term and deep business relationships with the hauliers.
Together, the three studies paint a picture where electrification arouses curiosity among hauliers, but at the same time weighs it against an already pressured everyday life where there is little room for missteps and extra risk. What matters is less about the technology itself and more about how the whole setup works in practice. This makes electrification a common transition issue, rather than something that hauliers alone can bear.
Source; Skogsforsk.se
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