When Team Global Express (TGE) began rolling out electric trucks at scale in 2024, the focus was on reducing emissions and proving that battery electric trucks could operate in a demanding freight environment.
Two years on, the company has accumulated a long list of lessons that extend far beyond batteries and charging infrastructure.
Speaking with Adam Ritzinger, Chief Technical Officer at the Heavy Vehicle Industry Australia (HVIA), Heather Bone, Director Sustainability at Team Global Express, provided a candid assessment of the realities of operating more than 60 electric trucks across a major freight depot.
According to Bone, some of the biggest learnings have come from unexpected areas such as tyre wear, body design and software management rather than the electric drivetrains themselves.
“We’ve had them running for quite a few years now, like at least a full two years that we’re coming out to. So lots of learnings along the way,” she said.
Tyres become a significant operating cost
One of the first areas that surprised the TGE team was tyre wear.
While electric trucks deliver strong performance and regenerative braking benefits, Bone said driver behaviour and vehicle characteristics can have a substantial impact on tyre life.
“The impact on your tyres from three different things is enormous, and therefore your cost,” she said. “Tyres get expensive when they’re flooring it from the lights.”
Bone said the company also experienced tyre wear issues during the early stages of driver training as operators learned how to use regenerative braking effectively.
“They get damaged when you’re trying to use that regenerative braking in the wrong way,” she explained.
In addition, the weight distribution of electric trucks created greater steering axle loads than expected, further affecting tyre life.
“I think that the impact of the steering weight over the tyres has actually been a whole lot more than we expected, so just make sure that you put that in your column of cost.”
Lightweight bodies bring their own challenges
Another lesson emerged from the effort to maximise vehicle range and payload.
To offset battery weight, TGE worked closely with body builders to develop lightweight freight bodies. While this helped improve operational efficiency, it also introduced durability challenges.
“We’ve worked really closely with our body makers on making something that’s both useful to look at, but also really light, so that we don’t suffer on our payload,” said Bone.
The trade-off is that lighter bodies can be more vulnerable to damage in day-to-day operations.
“The body’s now lovely and light, but that means that they can actually be harmed very easily,” she said.
To illustrate the challenge, Bone explained that TGE is operating with around 18 per cent less payload than equivalent diesel vehicles due to weight constraints associated with the steer axle and body design.
The company also encountered unexpected issues with some early body configurations.
“A whole lot of our Volvos to start off with, the bodies were actually tipping towards the cab, and so anytime it was raining, we were just getting rain in the back of the parcels. So that was a bit of a nightmare to start off with.”
Software becomes critical fleet infrastructure
Perhaps the most significant lesson has been the growing role of software in heavy vehicle operations.
Bone said fleet operators need to think beyond the truck itself and consider the interconnected nature of chargers, communications systems, vehicle software and depot infrastructure.
Using an analogy comparing software systems to nerve pain from a spinal injury, she explained how seemingly minor updates can create unforeseen consequences across the network.
“We know there is going to be some lovely person doing a software update,” she said.
“It might be a software update to the truck, it might be a software update to the charger, it might be a software update to the Wi-Fi on site.”
The challenge, according to Bone, is that operators often do not know what the downstream impacts of those updates will be.
“When that software update happens, we need to know about it because we don’t know what the flow-on effect is going to be to the rest of that network.”
She cautioned against assuming software and firmware updates are straightforward.
“All the people in the room who are thinking about, ‘Oh, you can just do a software update, or you can do a firmware update’ — it’s not that easy, and the impact to our vehicles is enormous.”
Learning by doing
Despite the challenges, Bone stressed that many of the issues are simply part of introducing new technology at scale.
With dozens of electric trucks, chargers and supporting systems operating daily, minor issues are inevitable.
“Every day there is still something wrong with one of the chargers, one of the trucks,” she said.
“It’s because we’re doing it in volume that we’ve got enough of the fleet there for something to go wrong on a daily basis.”
For fleets considering their own transition to electric trucks, Bone’s message was clear: success requires more than selecting vehicles and installing chargers. It also requires understanding the operational impacts of new technologies, adapting processes and being prepared to learn as the technology matures.
As Australia’s largest electric truck deployment continues to evolve, TGE’s experience highlights that fleet electrification is not simply a vehicle replacement exercise. It is a transformation that touches every part of the transport operation.
