When Chris Welch, Managing Director of the Welch Group, decided to shift his nearly 100-year-old logistics company to electric vehicles, he faced significant challenges and opportunities. In this episode, I dive deep with Chris to uncover the motivations behind this groundbreaking decision and the hurdles he encountered along the way. If you're in the logistics sector or simply curious about sustainable practices, this conversation is essential listening.

Chris shares that the drive for decarbonization is not just about compliance with upcoming legislation but also about protecting future generations. With deadlines looming on the horizon for the cessation of combustion engine sales by 2035, he emphasizes the urgency of transitioning to electric vehicles. In a sector that has traditionally been risk-averse, Chris explains how embracing innovation is not only necessary but also offers a chance for competitive advantage, particularly in areas like Cambridge that are leading the charge in zero-emission logistics.

You'll discover the stark reality of the current electric HGV landscape, with only about 2,000 electric trucks registered in the UK, and hear Chris's insights on why the adoption rate is so slow. We break down the financial aspects of this transition, including total cost of ownership versus upfront costs, and how government incentives can help bridge the gap. Chris's own experience with the Welch Group illustrates how understanding the economics of electric vehicles can lead to sound strategic decisions.

The stakes are high: failing to adapt to new technologies could leave companies behind in a rapidly changing market. Chris's journey exemplifies the potential for transformation within the logistics industry, highlighting how early adopters can pave the way for others.

We also spend time out in an eHGV with Liam - one of Welch Groups most experienced drivers. I ass him about how easy the transition is and what the change has bene like for him as a driver.

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Links in the show notes:

• Welch Group: Haulage & Logistics Transport Company

(C) 2019-2026 Gary Comerford

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In the UK, heavy goods vehicles travel 16.3 billion vehicle miles per year. Some of this is really long distance, some of it is short but frequent, some of it is ad hoc. For many years, people thought that heavy goods transportation was going to be one of the most difficult areas to decarbonize.

Trucks were big and heavy, needed diesel engines for the range in the grunt. And how on earth are you going to recharge an electric HGV truck without spending literally hours doing so? Hydrogen was mooted as a solution. Quick refuelling, lots of range. Ideal, Well, no. Cost issues, supply issues. And general, this doesn't work when the rubber hits the road issues. Kick that into touch. So what's the solution? Stick with diesel? Move to rail transportation?

Something else? Today, I get to spend the day in this beauty. It's a fully electric heavy goods vehicle, and this company is betting that it's the solution.

Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

On the show today, we'll be looking at e HGVs. I was at an event recently and ran into Jamie Sands, who works for Welch's Transport, the Welch Group in Cambridge. Welch's are well known in the heavy goods industry for being forward thinking when it comes to decarbonisation. I stopped him in his tracks and I said, Hey Jamie, I wonder if I could come and spend a day with one of your HGV drivers to get thoughts about making the switch.

Well, he said yes, made a call or two, and a few weeks later, here I am. This is my driver for the day, Liam. Say hello, Liam. Hello. And we'll be chatting about his experiences with electric truck a little later. But before that, let's have a discussion with the big bosses about what they're doing, what they hope to achieve, and why.

The EV Music's podcast is sponsored by ZapMap, the go to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence.

I'm Chris Welch, I'm Managing Director of the Welch Group, so we're a multi-generational, good old-fashioned haulier in the logistics sector and I have the pleasure of just looking after my 170 staff all day.

Wonderful. Now I'm interested in two things today. The first one is the reasons and rationale for upsetting almost a hundred years of Welch Group history by moving to electric and what issues and barriers and solutions you found doing that. But before we go into detail, can you just give me the thirty second overview of Welch Group, what you do, where you operate, and how many vehicles you have, please.

Yep, so, Welch group, we just mentioned, 93 years out young, fourth generation, so I started by my great-grandfather. As a group, we do what you'd imagine over 100 years, pick up a lot of different business divisions. So we've got core transport, which is probably 75 % what we do, so 70 HGVs, six of which now are electric. Some I'm spending a lot of time locally and some going up to...

Land's End and John O'Groats around the country all week. Within the business we have a truck centre, so we maintain all our own vehicles, which is quite interesting from this decarbonisation point of view and electrification. And we do lots of other fun things like a bit of warehousing. We've got cranes, the big loggies that you see jamming up the motorway. We have some of those, the big cat steg one and twos. I suppose summarising the fact that we can move everything from a parcel to a plane.

Most of it is in the middle, pallets, but we can do all of the above.

well let's start with the big issue of of why. What was the driver for going electric? Now obviously you've started fairly small at the moment, but I imagine you've got plans. But somewhere at some point you must have sat down and thought, Hmm, let's have a look into this and see see whether it's worth doing. What talk to me about those conversations, please?

There's probably, it's probably centred around three areas I should imagine. The first one, like I mentioned, we're multi-generational. So in our heads, the world is changing. So we need to protect the next generations. We're not here to build a business and sell it. We're here to build a business and continue. So decarbonisation is on the agenda and we thought it was best to get stuck into that agenda, which leads on to the second point in our industry and automotive industry, I suppose.

get stuck in. And the third one, I suppose, is the opportunity that it brings. We might touch on that a bit later. We're mainly based around Cambridge. We've always been Cambridge based. We venture out into where depots in Bedfordshire and the like close by, but we were built in Cambridge and grew in Cambridge. And if there's a centre in the UK that's going to adopt zero emission,

logistics or implement zero emissions supply chains. We like to think that one of the places is Cambridge. You can see it in London, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Oxford being a great example. So yeah, it's Cambridge we thought, hmm, we might be on something new here.

Liam, thanks for letting me do the ride along today. It's been fun so far. How long have you been driving generally articulating? How long how much of that

Since 2009.

yeah.

And how much of that was obviously you you've you've not been driving electric all that time. So you did how long on on diesels before you transferred across?

So, the first electric I started driving was October 24th. that's around about 15 years diesel. And then, from then till now, driving electric.

Now, notwithstanding what you've what you've just said about the the deadline, I think I read something earlier today that was it last month or last year, only ninety electric HGV vehicles were registered in the UK. Now, if there's I mean, you're not the only company that does what you do. There are a lot are that are your size that are bigger, that are smaller. What do you think is causing that delay? Why has there only been ninety registered? Because as a percentage of the overall EHGV par the overall HGV park.

I would expect a larger number than ninety to have been registered.

It's yes, that was probably last month, but the figures aren't on the year aren't much better. I think. I think that it's probably we're probably about 1500, 2000 electric HGVs and above three and a half ton. This is above four and a half ton. Now they've changed the restrictions for fans. There's only about 2000 electric HGVs in the country as a total. And so, yeah, that monthly figure isn't a surprise. That being said, why?

not being disrespectful to my industry or my peers, we were a bit archaic, were a bit risk averse. So the electric lorry, shall we say, is actually only before you've been around for four, five years, maybe six, the first Volvo that came out articulated tractor unit in the electric form. You fast forward to about last year and yes, all OEMs have...

a full range across all weight sizes now presenting to the market. So part of that is tech catching up, OEMs getting to grips with it. And there's been a lot of debate about what manufacturers should build. The other part of the problem, I suppose, is what I said earlier about

how often we all buy vehicles. So even if you lease in our industry, even if you lease a vehicle, you're still leasing it for three, four years. So again, it's that point that when you come up for that renewal, do you stick with what you know and what's cost effective or do you take the plunge? And again, that's the next point. Same as we saw in the car world when the electric cars first came out, were talking originally three times more expensive for an electric SUV than a diesel. And now we are

Then we were about twice as expensive last year. And now with the government grants, the plug-in grants that you can get that have been elevated for HGVs actually, we're probably within five, 10 % of the grant now. So now it's becoming a bit a lot more. And that only came out obviously in March. So it's not been a long, while to get your head around it and to be able to get an electric vehicle at price, not price parity, close to price parity. And so in the last bit to that Gary is actually infrastructure.

you came to us, you saw what we had and what we put in the ground. It's a long old journey. You could get one electric lorry, we say, plug it into a three phase up right there to a commando socket, get 40, 60 kilowatts out of that in your warehouse and that would probably be able to be handled on your load for your warehouse, your depot. If you go beyond one or two of those vehicles, you need headroom. And obviously in the press with everywhere, households commercial trying to get electric in the right places, becoming a struggle.

So you have the price barrier of the vehicle and then if you think you want to do it, you then got the price barrier and the opportunity barrier, I suppose the access barrier to the power itself.

And you've actually preempted one of my next questions, which was talking about the

You

whole financial aspect. Now, not again, notwithstanding what you've just said about the price differential between a standard diesel and an electric, that differential has come down. We have got the the government grants, as you've said, but are you still looking at this purely from a this is how much it costs to buy the the rig versus this is how much it costs to buy the electric one?

Or are you doing what a lot of people in the the electric car world do, which is well yeah, it's there's a a bigger outlay up front, but your total cost of ownership is gonna be lower. What sort of thoughts and calculations have you done from that point of view?

Yeah, yeah, we've done the full TCO piece and actually coming back to my earlier point like you mentioned, because we run these assets for so long, actually, we know electric's cheaper than diesel from a parity point of view, from an efficiency point of view. So to be there's your biggest lever to making it work. I think you have to get your equivalent MPG, so kilowatts per hour per 100 miles or however you ratio it. You have to have a price point of your electric.

in the 30s. The numbers got to begin with a three to make it have diesel price parity of an MTG and to be our night time currently is 17p and our day is 25 so we're already in the right side of that regardless of the infrastructure you've got to put in to make it work and the depreciation that asset as well as soon as you run it it's cheaper to run. So our oldest one is probably three and a half four years old now and managing to keep that electric.

electric price low has meant that yeah, we that original one will probably run for 10 years and we can come on to technology piece that I think it'll run for a lot more than 10 years. But if you map it to 10 years, you've you've paid it off parity about seven to seven or eight and then it's it's home dry from that point of view. So definitely one of these vehicles. And again, the maintenance for us operators is a big.

lever as well, shall we say. we luckily, like I said earlier, we have our own workshop, Renault branded EV approved so we can work on our next generation electric lorries. And even again, that's that three, four year old one, we've seen massive decreases in the cost of maintaining it and the amount of time it's off the road due to problems to the extent where we're actually seriously contemplating not taking maintenance packages with our latest electric variants because they just work so well.

and okay, I have the backup of having my own workshop, which a lot of operators don't, but the proof's in the pudding, isn't it? If I'm willing to sacrifice an R package that I buy on all my vehicles currently because of how reliable the new electrics are, should hopefully show how good they are, how great they are.

When the when the guys at Welch came to you and said, Lee, we won't you put you in a in an electric vehicle, what were your first thoughts?

think it was more because it was more like the it was kind of offered out by the companies they were looking for drivers for the trucks that were coming and it was something that I was interested in I approached the driver trainer at the time sort of ask his any information he had about it and then said I'd like to put my name forward. Cool.

So yeah, I then had a meeting set up with Chris Welch, boss, and he called me to his office and said he was happy to have me drive one of the trucks for him. And yeah, it's been a very interesting experience since.

So

before you obviously got into the truck, you will have had a s a set of expectations about what it can do, what it can't do, how you might work with it. Y I've probably not too far off the truth by saying you probably heard some misinformation about electric vehicles and all that sort of stuff. Talk to me a little bit about that and and what your feelings were before you first got into into this.

think the range anxiety is probably one that most people would associate with it and thinking about what's it going to be like when it gets to that point where you think, am I going to have enough charge to get to wherever you're going to? Yeah, there was a bit of a learning curve and an adjustment that went with that. But once I got around sort of...

learning the vehicle and what the vehicle is capable of and how much the range and the battery power is used up with depending on weather conditions, weight of the load and all that. Once you got used to that it was quite, it was much easier then to just, I know what to expect and how the vehicle is going to work with, you know.

was able to almost then carry on as before. Obviously not going as far as I was with the diesel. for the jobs I was being given to do, I was not having any real issue. could just be given a load, go and deliver it to here, collect it from there. And the fact that it was an EV wasn't really a problem.

what sort of internal targets did you set for a transition to electric? What's what sort of I hate to use the the

management speak of KPIs, but you know, at some point you

Yeah.

you would have sat down and said, Well, we you know, it's got to wash its face at very at the very least. But what else was sort of went into that decision making?

It's strange one. As you alluded to beginning ago, there's actually, I think there's 70,000 O license and you've got to have an O license to run a HGV fleet in the UK. So there's 70,000 operators with fleets like you said, between one vehicle and Amazon who have got tens of thousands. So it's half a million diesel lorries on the road in the UK for three and a half tonne and above. So that's your pool, shall we say.

And it was a learning exercise. and the TCA model like we said as well, the price of energy has come back down. That's started to work. But we in effect sacrificed, you said about washing your face. We came to the assumption that we might end up losing money in that lobby all day long, every day for the life of that vehicle. it goes beyond that. It goes back to the other point about making it work for future generations. And it's an educational activity. But then as we got done that journey,

It is achievable when you pick those as a lot of industries, you pick those low hanging fruits, don't you? And at the moment, and you said earlier, Gary, we were chatting about the routes that you went on and you did a lot of local stuff. So we have a lot of local vehicles. Probably half our fleet doesn't go more than 100 miles away from any one of our depots in the day. Perfect for electrification. We do a lot of pallet network freight, which the average pallet weighs about 750 kilos, so works with the vehicle dynamics. So actually we've established that

we will probably never buy another 18 or 26 ton diesel rigid again, because the TCO modelling is working, the upfront cost is working, and it works from an operational point of view. And then the two outliers there are this small stuff like your seven and a half lorries, your vans, there's still big payload penalties to make that work. And at the top end, your arctic, whilst weight's not always a problem, but we do run a lot of full weight at 28 ton, is your distance piece. And the infrastructure needs to go behind

and which will carry on washing us through the rest of it. so we kind of created our own roadmap through inadvertently learning, I suppose.

And who did you sort of consult and speak to before you did this? Because there's it's one thing to get a lot of people who've done this before to help you. And it's another thing to kind of go out there and do it yourself. But you you're pretty much leading edge. As as we've already said a number of times, there aren't that many other companies that have done this because there aren't that many other electric HGVs on the road. So were you, I'll use the phrase, sort of flying blind on this, or did you have people

good people behind you who you who you could lean on for help and advice.

We did, we supported a little bit right up the start with the government. The government have a body called the Energy Saving Trust and five or so years ago, they're stalling existence, they do do a lot of work, they're mainly public sector but they had a remit four or five years ago that they needed to go into private sector. They knew electrification and decarbonisation was coming and they needed to go and find some case studies from the private sector, from private operators, ideally SMA, SMACE, because we're the ones that need the most support.

And we happened to connect and they came and did this. They did it at our Cambridge Depot here. They did this complete net zero road map, shall we call it. So they took our depot, our infrastructure, our energy connections, our 30 minute meter readings, and then looked at all our vehicles, all our telematics for like two or three years and said, right, to look at looking at your operation and looking at your infrastructure and looking at what you've got and what you need to get to, this is the road map. And actually it started with lot of soft touches because

Decarbonisation to a certain extent, and that's what it was, a lot of it is like stuff that we're doing for years, aerodynamics, routing more efficiently. If you can route better and take a vehicle off the road, actually you're decarbonising. But then they said, right, this is the current tech of current electric vehicles. This is in theory the direction of travel from a research and technological deployment point of view. And this is where we see your stepping stones, like I just alluded to a little while ago about targeting certain vehicle brackets. They gave us that

started five years ago and we were doing what we thought was right for the business and what was right for the environment and the deadlines and to keep us rolling, keep our wheels turning. And my head of solutions, Jamie, turns it quite well. We stopped after about a year, looked around to see what everyone else is doing and realised everyone was watching what we were doing. At that point, we were

Yeah.

leading the way and making the mistakes ourselves. But what I did is once you become identified as kind of a lighthouse or a leader in that space.

everyone levitates towards you and so many more doors opened up from a technology point of view, from a manufacturing point of view, everyone's like, well, Welch's are having a go at it and doing it. If we want to be part of that space, let's ask them to try something new. Let's try this, let's try that. you create a we created a lovely little ecosystem. It actually is at the point now where we have started a non-profit tech division that supports and consults for other operators to help them on the transition. And we meet and I...

And I purposely made it a non-for-profit aid because it helps access, if I'm being honest, helps access grants and academia. But it's inoffensive. We want this to work for every operator. So I don't want be seen to making money out of it because if I can get more operators to buy more electric lorries, then the price comes down. So it's selfish in one way. Whichever way you look at it, it's selfish. But we're here to support the cause. And if I can get the electric price of electric lorries down quicker and help support the trade bodies with

weight penalties and length of vehicles and all the legislation that goes with it as well, then it's self-serving if I'm being honest.

No, that's fine. I think that's excellent. absolutely superb. First time I've actually

You

heard of a a company doing something like that in the electric space. So well done for that. let's just move on quickly to charging. Now I say I've I've been at your site, they've you've got is it just the one charger at the Duxford site?

Yep, we've got one little, as it's deemed now, one 150 kilowatt charger. So when we we installed that five and half years ago, we thought, it was not very often I managed to go in my car somewhere and get 150 kilowatt charger. Obviously now we're about three, four hundreds that back five years ago. It's like we'll put something in that we think is big and it married up with a rigid that can only take 150 kilowatt charge. So, yeah, we've got one charger which has got two points of connection which can charge simultaneously. So 70 in each.

and it's currently charging five HGVs every night on a little, luckily we're 24 hours, so we've got to move them through. But yeah, so that's where the infrastructure journey started.

Presumably as you increase the number of electric vehicles on site at Duxford, for example, that one single 150 kilowatt unit isn't going to cut it that much. So what sort of discussions have you had about, well, we need to put another one in or we need to move our charging to somewhere else or whatever? How how are you thinking about upgrading that moving forward?

Yeah, so it's been maxed out on six. We were trying another one for another OEM, like I mentioned, and we were doing six a night and that, we couldn't fit any more in between the operational window, between the downtimes of the vehicles. And again, luckily, lot of our vehicles have shifted during the day, not the night. Only about 10 vehicles go out at night. So we can make it work, but we physically couldn't get any more vehicles through that charger over six. I'm surprised you didn't see it, Gary, when you had a little...

Tour on the yard, but we've got we've currently got a megawatt charging hub going in our Bedford and Duxford site So that's a dedicated megawatt fed dedicated line into a six bay megawatt charger, which load shares and We literally can the Duxford one we literally connected last week and it's being held. It's being handed over next week So it sounds like you have to come back mate

I'm annoyed I didn't see that.

So, yeah, so that's the next step so that

And that again, it's about there. All these different things I heard was a barrier. like we got to the point where we couldn't deploy them or electric vehicles and we needed that infrastructure. And in fairness, that infrastructure, a megawatt shared load with six bays means we are close to making the whole of our ducks with depot probably be able to sort out electric. We've got 35 vehicles here. And if you've got the charging cycles right, you might get a good way through all those vehicles because some of them come back at five o'clock, some of them.

night. the max charging can put out as 400 so we're now we're now back above what a vehicle can physically take at the moment. think the best, maybe the new E-Actual 600 could take 400 but like our DAF can take 300 kilowatts so we're now back, our charging infrastructure is now above what our vehicles can physically take which is the place where you need to sit and then yeah we can balance and load share and that hub is actually upgradable to 12 points of connection so we can dilute that

connection shall we say and get 12 on at a time, which would be great.

And of course, the next logical step for that, and I think I had this discussion with Liam when I was out, is the at the moment for a lot of the work specifically that Liam does, it's it's out and back. So you charge at the depot, you go out and you come back. And one of the barriers for obviously doing longer distance is the public charging aspect or the the ability to charge outside the depot. Now, obviously, there will be other companies who are in the same situation. So if you've got somebody based in, for example, Cardiff.

Who's coming over to Cambridge, it would be great for them to say or or for you to say, right, if you're delivering in or around our area or our depot, we've got charging here that you can use. And I think, have you had discussions with Neil Riddle from Power about using their PowerPins products so you can actually deal with all the cross charging and that? So is that's something that's

Yeah, we have. We have.

on the on the horizon for you then, is it?

Yes, it's interesting going. The power piece and Neil and Laura and the team, we use the power cards for our company car fleet, shall we say. So we're good friends with power. But going back to the sharing and the public-private part of this, and it's always an interesting conversation to have. I actually don't have fuel cards. have probably 12 to 15 Arctic's that drive on the country all week and never go into a garage, shall we call it, a forecourt.

got places we can stop off in Peterborough. Unfortunately we're all around the east of England so I can go to Corby, I can go to Peterborough. I know I've got friends around here that have done the same journey. None of my friends in Scotland are doing it yet, don't know, don't figure. But again it's that network, it's that collaborative piece in our part of the industry and it will be that because as we all know from charging our cars and GridServe and Instavolt all do a great job at what they do and what they provide but it's

horrendously expensive. When I commented back earlier where that price point is at a three, not a nine or an eight as we see when we charge our cars, it's never going to work. You're never going to get a public charging network at the price it needs to be, unless it's facilitated by the operator. And to be it's been released already. I'm already having conversations and agreements with large electric van fleets, tier one operators and...

Service providers that will use my Cambridge and Bedford depot to charge their vans because I can give it to them a lot cheaper than the public network and that's a great use case an example of how how I think it's going to go we'll still make a bit of money and it'll still be profitable all round but you're half that public charging cost at least and that's the way it's going to have to go and but I understand the public charging network I understand what the backing was and the

standing charges and the standing charges for our two new hubs are horrendous. But yeah, it's going to be an interesting dynamic but we need more than those 2,000 lobbies to be able to service any kind of network.

Now when we were talking earlier you said that when you when people come up and speak to you about this, the two questions they always ask are, how far does it go and where do you recharge it? Yeah. So let me ask you, how far does it go and where do you recharge it?

recharging?

This one about 250 miles on a single charge. The only place we tend to charge it at the moment would be our own charging station in our own depot. have been a few occasions where we have charged it off base where like council depots and stuff where it's all been pre-arranged by Welch's

to go to these places and then use their charging facilities. But yeah, we do tend to do it on a kind of like based on a round trip where you're starting an ending back and then charging back in the yard. But yeah, I believe there is sort of a big change in trying to sort of start pushing the vehicle out a bit further and using the range of the vehicle a more.

as the technology and the range improves, that it will be coming closer to what we do with a diesel on daily basis.

Tell

us me a bit a bit about those differences 'cause at the moment we're on a I'm not gonna say it's a short route, but we're we're doing we've gone out to one particular location, we've done a couple of drops around there. Yeah. We're gonna go to another location not that far away and then we're returning back to the base and it's gonna take I don't know, we're gonna be out what five, six hours, something like that, maybe maybe seven. Now you also already mentioned the fact that with some of the older diesels that you've you've driven, you will be going much

further distances. So yeah, how is that being dealt with back at the office with the planners? How are they making sure that you've you're not taking a route that's gonna take you uncomfortably close to the end of your race?

I think it was kind of like a... Initially when we first started doing it, what, nearly two years ago, it was a bit of a sort of trial basis in terms of, you know, we'll start with a sort of what we know is a short run first and then kind of then just push it a little bit further and a little bit further until we get to where, you know, it's kind of like a comfortable, you know, sort of barrier or buffer if you like from that we know that the vehicle is going to be out there.

go out, do those deliveries and get back without pushing too close to the limit. There have been one or two occasions where it has got a little bit close and you you're getting, we're still making it back to the yard but the battery power has been quite low but I mean that's only been in what 20 months or so that's happened once or twice so it's not too bad and we've you know fingers crossed that we've never run out of charge.

always managed to make it back. But generally speaking, most days it's able to make it back with a fair 10-15 % at least.

A nice little b

The range anxiety is not too bad. After a while of doing reasonable amounts of runs that they give you that you saw.

have done on a few occasions that you sort of, well I know I'm going that far and I'm going to have a comfortable amount of charge to do that. you just sort of just drive it like you would if you were driving a diesel and the range is not something you've got to worry about.

Now I know when

we were chatting earlier you said you don't really look at your remaining range, your remaining mileage, you don't work on that basis. Tell the the viewers how it is that you work out, you know, whether you've got enough range left.

Well,

through just getting used to the vehicle, I found that with the other truck I had before this one, that it was working out the battery percentage as a general rule of thumb per hour of driving. So normally because where we were coming down to where we are in Hertfordshire here today is I know that's about an hour from our base.

generally every day, obviously it varies with the weight of the vehicle, the weight of the load, but most days you're driving that distance about an hour's drive and you're using about 25 % of your charge with my old truck. With this one I've now found it's about closer to 15 % with the extra range that this vehicle's capable of. yeah, so then it sort of becomes like a knowing then that when you're getting to your delivery points,

driving down delivering the goods and everything. Once you've finished, you think, how far, well, yeah, if I'm returning back to the yard, if I am about an hour or an hour and half away from the yard, you think, well, I know that's how far it is for me to drive, well, that's gonna be, you know, in this truck, say, around...

15 to 20 percent. If I've got 40 percent, which most days it tends to be, but by that stage of the day, about 40 percent left. Well, I know I've got 10 percent in hand. I can just drive and just not worry about what the battery says it is. I know I've got an hour to go, it's going to use that much in that time.

I wanna move on a little bit and talk about education because obviously there is the education of the drivers on what are the the subtle differences between driving a diesel lorry and driving a an electric one. But one of the things that I hadn't actually appreciated until I spoke with Liam was the fact that you've got a whole load of dispatchers and and people who work in the office and they can't just send any vehicle out to any location or on any route.

The fact that it's electric, there are as you said already, there are weight limitations, you've got distance limitations. Talk to me about how that kind of education took place. How how is it now that you end up sending the right van out, the right lorry out on the right route to pick up the right weight at the right time?

Yeah.

Yeah, does perceive it as a bit of a block or a bit of a barrier, again, using those words. But actually, harmonises and syncs with how we do exactly what you said we do. So we call it a melting pot. Sorry, the planning department is just one big melting pot. And all I do each day is play poker, is the best analogy I can come up with. So all our customers, we don't really do contract logistics. We don't have five vehicles with that customer doing exactly their thing.

today, tomorrow, it's one big pop, one big melting pot. And our customers might give us 20 loads. That customer will give us 20 loads a day and 10 tomorrow and 50 the next. And it might be Christmas and they give us two. And that all goes in together. So my plan is sit there all 24 hours a day and play poker. This is going to go that way. This is going to go that way. We're going to keep this subcontract palette networks, all the different modes of distribution. So you're right. And you would think that bringing an electric lorry into the mix just makes it harder.

It did harmonize as I said with how we do things. So I've we've got vans seven and half twelve eighteen twenty six forty four some oversized fifties double decks single decks flats Hazardous non hazardous. We've got so many variables in what my planners have to plan to every day actually putting a 19 ton that has a two ton Penalty on it. Well, sorry, even more than that two and a half ton penalty. So you can only take

probably take about nine and a half tons worth of payload compared to a normal 11, 12. It's just not available in that Tetris game, that poker game. they know, but it is, you're right, Gator, there's a learning piece, there's an understanding piece, but it just becomes the norm, it becomes available. All those vehicles that I spoke about that had different payloads that kind of, you have deliveries that say, can't take an RTK, it has to be under this height.

or going over a weight limited bridge. It's all stuff that they do with every day. So actually a 42 ton electric Arctic that can only take 22 and a half ton or 24 ton if it's one single drop, actual weights come into play as well. It's just another piece that they have to get their heads around. They're very good at getting their heads around something like that. So they now just brush it off as just another vehicle in a fleet, which is good because I keep buying more of them. But on the whole, yeah.

from an electric vehicle point of view, you're losing 10 to 20 % of the payload and you are probably losing 30, 40 % of the range, give or take.

And the other aspect to that that that I talked about was driver education. So you've got somebody like Liam, for example, I think he's been driving diesel for 17 years, and then suddenly you're gonna say, right, here you are. It looks the same, it's probably laid out the same, it goes the same places, but it's not the same at all. So what sort of education did Liam go through? and I will ask him the same question to see whether your your answers

Hahaha

line up.

No. Again, it comes back to that, the way that we've always worked. A big part of that, you're right, Gary, there is differences. For those of you who drive a car or electric van and have made the transition, you drive differently. And usually it means you've got more power, so you do drive differently. So again, if we rewind for Liam's 17 years of diesel driving.

We already have telematic systems and driver aids in the cab that tell him if he's speeding, if he's harsh braking, if he's going a corner too fast, debriefing, we've got on-site driver trainer. So he's quite used to.

being scrutinised, we say, for lack of a nicer word, about his driving style. Because in our game, if an average HGV 44 tonnes, 9.5 MPG, anything you can, and I've got 70 of them, well, I've got 35 of the big ones, and I spend £7 million a year on fuel, on diesel, then small incremental changes in how you drive have a massive effect. for the past 10, 15, 20 years,

Whilst we've had telematics and trackers, it has been the remit that you teach your drivers how to drive properly. Electrification came along and to begin with, again, coming back to the idea that OEMs didn't have many products five, six years ago and now they've got lots, they're trying to sell. They've got mandates and they're going to get fined into oblivion if they don't make it work. So they actually do, hats off to the OEMs, they do everything they can do to A, sell it, but B, support it. So they're driver trainers.

They'll come down a drop of hat to teach you Liam's been with the Renault Guy Andrew numerous times Just to keep up to date because it's again It's something new for my driver trainer and Darren's getting a lot more I failure of it But it's still only by the of the year will actually be 10 % electric Which is a massive for one of the biggest percentages in the country from a SUV point of view But it's still a small percentage as far as Darren my driver trainers really it's concerned

And actually you were right, Gary. A lot of it's the same. It's same seats, the same steering wheel. It's the same everything. The biggest thing is recuperation and again, those who drive electric cars, you don't use your brake foot really. If you drive it properly, you don't brake anymore. So there are two keys. It's about, and again, going back to what I said, we've been driving it into our drivers for the past two decades about don't, don't roll up to a roundabout and smack your brakes on because

it's gravity for petrol motion. It's not gonna help your performance. Anticipate, slow down if you can get to that roundabout. now when I learned to drive a HGV 22 years ago, believe it or not, how young I look, I know, they still had air brakes, they still had engine brakes, which was a button in the floor which you push down and it let off some of the engine.

And now we're going back and then obviously when driving a car, your torches shift down because the engine does the braking for you. And actually now in this with this world of electric motors, it's gone back to quite easily supporting you in. you plan it, if you time it right, you will stop before you get to that roundabout by doing nothing as you see in the cars. that's that people, drivers that have had electric cars and getting electric lorries, as you can imagine, a lot better electric lorry drivers. They are the diesel to diesel, diesel to electric variants.

Now I don't think for one minute that the guys at Welch's gave you the keys and said away with it. I'm assuming they gave you some education, they taught you through some of the pros and cons and th and and that sort of stuff. Talk to me a little bit about that that level of education that you received.

Yeah, when the first truck we had, we had a guy from Renault Trucks who came out to sort do a handover and he sat with me for a while and sort of went through the the main controls and everything and then started to speak in a bit about how the...

the mechanics of the vehicle being different to a diesel and what to expect. When you're using more of the range of the vehicle, how to maximise the efficiency of the vehicle using sat-nav and everything to and tell the vehicle where it's going to help with boosting the range or just trying to get more out of the vehicle.

So yeah, a lot of stuff like that. Not really any sort of like specific like EV train or anything like that. Cause the, I think the way that the truck was sort of, all these trucks have been designed by the manufacturers is they've tried to keep them very similar to the days on the way that you use them. So it's not like a, like a transition or anything that needs to be done. It's just that they're quite easy to do.

sort of intentionally easy to get into and just use them as what you know the vehicle that you'd be used to using.

And talk to me a coup about a couple of things that that you've discovered from driving where you thought, I like this, this is better than how it used to be with the diesels.

I think the, with lorry driving, you tend to be, obviously there's a lot of time at the wheel driving a lot of distance and that, I think it's quite nice having a lot less noise in the cab, vibration and stuff like that. When you're stuck in traffic, I think that's when it's most noticeable, slow speeds, not having the vibration of a big engine underneath you, and the...

It's much more, it's good for the comfort side of it. The smoothness of the way the vehicle operates, the inherent smoothness of being that it's electric, way that the truck moves forward and takes off, the uptake of power, it's very smooth. And the...

power delivery, the instant torque you get from an electric motor is nothing quite desirable for a vehicle that's put in a lot of weight. So yeah, mean that's definitely a benefit over the diesel as well.

What sort of feedback have you had from your customers about this, if any?

Well they love it. They love it. To begin with, as others will have said, there is no such thing as a green premium. I've not been able to charge my customers more. So we don't try it. So that means that our customers are even more surprised and happy when they have an electric lorry turn up in their yard to collect some goods because they weren't expecting it. And they know the transition we're on and it's won us a lot more business. The customers like it because...

It's the same for everyone. Every business has been spent the last decade looking at its scope ones, looking at its scope twos, and it's probably now looking at its scope threes, which is us, we're everyone's scope three, just for distribution, distribution. So everyone's done their LCD lights and have got a bit of solar and probably if their manufacturer looked at their process and taken carbon out of production process. So now our customers are, especially our big customers who have to report CO2 in their financial annual report.

are nearly chomping at the bit. We've won numerous tenders on the basis that we weren't the cheapest and we weren't sometimes the closest, but we had electric lorries and they didn't actually want to take those electric lorries, but on the basis that they know it's coming, again, like how we are actually towards it, because our customers know it's coming on the line and it is a thing and it will continue to be a thing, regardless of who's in power and the government, the road has been set. Like we might deviate, we might slow down, but we're not going to stop.

And our customers know that, so they're in effect, shall we say, backing us as a business. So they're like, well, we'll go with Welch's and we'll do it the good old fashioned dirty way and we'll get good value. But we know as soon as our board or our global HQ or whoever it is says, right, electrification or decarbonisation, how are we going to decarbonise our supply chain, the ops director or the distribution director will go, it's lucky. Luckily, I've got Welch's up my sleeve.

They can do it tomorrow because they've the infrastructure. They've got the lorries and just and that at that point it becomes a question about Does become a question about the green premium actually because at that point they need it and then that's good old-fashioned supply and demand But no custom customers love it it's it's great to connect with them they yeah, they're on board And don't ever get a phone call saying why aren't you sending a diesel lorry to me not an electric? No

It's a wonders for our customers and our brand and our relationships.

And I was, I don't know whether I was shocked or whether I was just surprised. I know when we dropped off at one location, and just for those people who are watching and don't know a lot about a lot of the things that you deliver are the ones where you you go to a big warehouse and you back up until the the trailer hits the rubber bumpers and then they send the the forklifts on and that sort of stuff. But there are a number, and I know we went to one of them where it's actually it's not an open warehouse, but it's a huge warehouse, and you physically drive the truck in.

So it's it's covered and they've got the forklift guys who come in, you take the the curtain sides off and all that sort of stuff. Now, to me, working in an environment like that where you've got diesel trucks coming in and out, there's got to be some sort of benefit for that c company to go, right, we want a a a nicer environment for our people to work in.

Yeah, definitely, definitely Gary. Actually if you'd seen our Bedford operation, we work that way at Bedford. Whilst you're here at Cambridge, we've got a nice big canopy, it's quite open, you drive through it, you get loaded, you go off. Bedford,

Yep. Yep.

have a, as they call it, trans-shipping warehouse. So all our lorries are driving through one warehouse that's bolted onto the other warehouses. And like I say, not only is it a worse environment for our staff, but it's a worse environment for our goods as well. Staff are more important, but you've to look after the customer's goods.

even just the exhaust fumes of blowing that particulate around that enclosed space makes everything so dirty. then obviously therefore, the ipto facto is going in your lungs and you're breathing in and particulate is there. That's why it's called particulate. You can't really see it, but it is there. So no, yeah, we have a lot of customers that at the very least will be backing through their door a little bit. Like there's a lot of bay tips. But all the pallet networks that operate at night.

and there's six of them that handle god knows how many thousands upon thousands upon thousands of trailers every night. R1, pallet line, you drive through the middle, it will have 300 lorries driving through the middle of that warehouse every night to unload its stuff and then they all go back through again to load the freight back on to come home. the environment, and that's the same reason why we've transitioned from diesel forklifts and gas forklifts to electric forklifts, same principle.

Yeah. There's also what were they called the shunters? So they're the ones the the like cut down rigs and all they do is they move the the trailers from 'cause I think I saw half a dozen of those inside one of the pallet warehouses we went through. did are there electric versions of those already?

Yeah, there is electric versions of those. And again, that's one of those use cases. There's low hanging fruits that works really well because payload isn't a problem on the whole. And also it's on private land, if we're being honest. the range is not a problem because you're just driving around in circles all day. And interestingly, I was on a call last week about talking about Chinese OEMs and how far or close behind they are with the European OEMs to entering our market.

And one of the big hurdles was service and quality of products and bits and pieces and the price points were getting very close. But one of the two things at the end we started talking about, and one was autonomy, which I'm very excited about. And the second one was those shunters. So the Chinese have those manufactured in effect, you can order one. And because you don't need the refinement, you don't need the servicing, you don't need all the things that...

us operators need our actual lobbies to do. Actually, the biggest threat was from the Chinese OEM shunt of manufacturers because it's ready to go, it's cheap, it's electric, and there you go, have it. But no, yeah, so they've been transitioning a lot already. And it's a bit like the bus world. People don't realize that a lot of buses have been electric for a decade.

And actually a lot of those shunters have been electric for a very long time, all been gas. They started that decarbonisation journey a lot sooner than the rest of the fleet. But also it swings them round about. all our shunters on our yards, we have them, but we just use our diesels because they're come to the end of life, they're not going to go on the road anymore, but they can still pull. So yeah, there's different horses for courses on that.

Now I know when we were chatting earlier you said you don't really look at your remaining range, your remaining mileage, you don't work on that basis. Tell the the viewers how it is that you work out, you know, whether you've got enough range left.

Well,

through just getting used to the vehicle, I found that with the other truck I had before this one, that it was working out the battery percentage as a general rule of thumb per hour of driving. So normally because where we were coming down to where we are in Hertfordshire here today is I know that's about an hour from our base.

generally every day, obviously it varies with the weight of the vehicle, the weight of the load, but most days you're driving that distance about an hour's drive and you're using about 25 % of your charge with my old truck. With this one I've now found it's about closer to 15 % with the extra range that this vehicle's capable of. yeah, so then it sort of becomes like a knowing then that when you're getting to your delivery points,

driving down delivering the goods and everything. Once you've finished, you think, how far, well, yeah, if I'm returning back to the yard, if I am about an hour or an hour and half away from the yard, you think, well, I know that's how far it is for me to drive, well, that's gonna be, you know, in this truck, say, around...

15 to 20 percent. If I've got 40 percent, which most days it tends to be, but by that stage of the day, about 40 percent left. Well, I know I've got 10 percent in hand. I can just drive and just not worry about what the battery says it is. I know I've got an hour to go, it's going to use that much in that time.

Come to the end of our time, Chris, is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about?

not really, Gary. just hope that you enjoyed your time with Liam. I gave you one of my most well-established and most talkative EV drivers.

Passam, my thanks to Liam for that. and thank you as well for your time. Much appreciated.

Final question for me, and it's a bit of a devil's advocate kind of question. obviously there are still quite a few drivers back at the the depot who haven't been in electric, they're diehard diesel fans. What are they saying to you about about your move into the electric?

You don't have to name names.

I think

generally sort of most of them are sort of quite positive and inquisitive I think is probably the word into you know even like we're talking to when you come across when you're delivering out and you're meeting drivers from other companies and they're sort of like you know just just being interested in asking what I'm asked questions like most people do

I mean, you know, because they're sort of like thinking that, you know, might not, you know, a few years what they could be driving as well. So, yeah, most people are inquisitive and reasonably positive. You're always going to get the odd person you're to come across here and there who's a bit skeptical and a bit... I think it's more because people don't tend to be too keen on or possibly even afraid of change. And that's what...

I think puts a lot of people off. Yeah, think there's, I mean, there are some things with this, a vehicle like this, because it can't take quite as much weight as a diesel and the range is not quite as much as a diesel that, yeah, it's not, it is falling a bit short at the moment, but that's not to say that it's impossible for it to come up to the level of a diesel and possibly replace a diesel in the next, how many years. It definitely looks to me like that's achievable,

But yeah, generally most drivers are quite positive about it, which is good.

Excellent. Right, Liam, appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

So that's what it's like working as an EHGV driver. Not perfect, but what is? Still lots to do. But I'm fascinated how the issues of going electric at this scale are not too dissimilar to the issues of going electric for your everyday EV driver. Vehicle efficiency, range, charging, education. For the driver, of course, the financial aspect, less important, but not for the company running the vehicles. So what surprised you most about today? Let me know in the comments, please. And that's our show.

The EV Museums Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence. Zapmap is free to download and use, with thousands of public charge points to choose from, live pricing and availability information, and a range of filters to find the right charge for you. Plus, choose subscription models for enhanced features such as using Zapmap in car, on CarPlay, or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge points.

This week's show was put together with the help of Liam Ely, Chris Welch, and Jamie Sands from the Welch Group. Many thanks for their time.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on BlueSky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there? Many thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon, on a monthly basis, and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one. Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks.

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If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at MusingTVWBSguide at social with the words keep on trucking. Hashtag if you know, you know nothing else. And thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know, like me, he's a huge advocate for electric transportation. In his case, it's electric unicycles. And I often wondered if he thought that promoting something like that

Could be seen as a little selfish.

So it's selfish in one way. Whichever way you look at it, it's selfish. But we're here to support the cause.

Thanks for listening and watching. Bye bye now.