Startup firm building 7.5-tonne truck at Essex plant after receiving European type approval
The truck startup Tevva has become the first company to begin mass production of electric lorries in the UK.
The company has begun making its 7.5-tonne electric truck for customers at a plant in Tilbury, Essex, after obtaining European type approval – the regulatory clearance required by all volume manufacturers.
Tevva, which means “nature” in Hebrew, was started in 2013 by Asher Bennett, a former submariner in the Israeli navy. He is the elder brother of Naftali Bennett, the former entrepreneur who became a far-right politician and served as the prime minister of Israel for a year until June last year.
Notably, the trucks manufactured this year in Tilbury will be delivered to customers including the Royal Mail and the builders’ supplier Travis Perkins, with the goal of selling 1,000 vehicles in 2023. It has had test vehicles on the road with the delivery company UPS since late 2019.
Decarbonizing lorries will be a key part of the world’s efforts to achieve net zero carbon emissions. About 19 percent of the UK’s carbon emissions from transport in 2020 were emitted by heavy goods vehicles, according to the Department for Transport.
However, truck manufacturers are falling behind carmakers in getting ready for the shift away from fossil fuels because batteries have been too heavy and expensive to use at the scale required in a lorry traveling long distances.
Tevva is not the first company to make electric lorries in the UK: the Dutch lorry maker DAF Trucks manufactures its 19-tonne LF Electric at its Leyland subsidiary in Lancashire. However, DAF is not producing hundreds of trucks a year on a production line.
The Tevva trucks will have a 140-miles range from a 105kWh battery, which is almost twice the size of those used in a standard electric car.
Buy Crypto NowTevva, which has been backed by investors including the Indian conglomerate Bharat Forge, is also making plans to produce hydrogen-powered lorries that would be capable of refilling faster than battery lorries can charge, potentially enabling them to tackle longer distances. Those lorries would come in 12- and 19-tonne models, with the production of the latter expected to begin in Tilbury in 2024.
Tevva is planning to eventually make trucks in the US, the EU, and the Gulf.
The world’s largest lorry manufacturers are also working on electric and hydrogen lorries, although they are still unclear on which technology will become dominant for longer journeys. Daimler Truck last year built a long-haul electric lorry, while Tesla delivered its first electric semi trucks last month – five years after the chief executive, Elon Musk, launched the prototype.
