Corporate giants collaborate to fast-track decarbonisation for HGVs

HGVZero was established last year and is being overseen by Innovation Gateway. It will follow a similar model to Innovation Gateway’s EVZero scheme which was launched earlier that year in response to the need to scale electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across the UK, but will be pan-European rather than national.

HGVZero’s founding members are supermarket giant Tesco, beverage bottler Coca-Cola European Partners, logistics providers Eddie Stobart and XPO, and parcel delivery service DPD.

Collaboratively, representatives from these businesses will map EV charging infrastructure across the geographies where they operate, identifying gaps. They will also map refuelling infrastructure for alternatively-fuelled HGVs.

This week (15 March), the group has confirmed its expansion, HGVzero 2023 (HGVzero23) consists of new members and will spend the next six months exploring the challenges related to HGV decarbonisation and co-developing potential solutions.

New members include Diageo, Yusen Logistics, Clugstons, Gregory Distribution, Green2 Delivery and more. The group will focus on mapping market-ready innovations and transition fuels, infrastructure development related to charging and hydrogen and building the business case for low-carbon HGVs.

Commenting on the announcement, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’s projects and supply chain senior manager Ian Anderton said: “As a founding member of HGVzero, we are excited to welcome new organisations to the group that will enable us to further accelerate our collective ambition to decarbonise fleet logistics.

“We look forward to exploring some of the detailed challenges facing us as a sector, such as transition fuels and long-term asset projects.”

Only a handful of companies in Europe have launched pure-electric HGVs beyond the trial stage – Sainsbury’s being one, as well as Amazon, which recently launched five pure-electric HGVs in the UK.

However, businesses are largely slow movers in this area. Research following a study of 300 fleet decision-makers found that only half feel they have adequate plans in place to decarbonise in alignment with net-zero by 2050 at the latest. Click here to read edie’s coverage of that study.