Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): a new model to estimate the cost of trucks

The transport sector is one of the sectors that contribute most to CO2 and greenhouse gases emissions, contributing to climate change that leads to serious hardship in the word. Nowadays, the transport sector, in particular the heavy transport sector which the report focuses, is mainly made up of conventional trucks, that is, Diesel-powered. The goal si to progressively replace these vehicles with trucks powered by zero-impact sources on the environment, such as hydrogen and electricity that can be produced through renewable sources and therefore without the emission of CO2 into the environment (or with minimum quantities). In order to study the feasibility of this operation and to better understand when this transition from conventional trucks to alternative trucks can be done, the elaborate develops a new model for the estimation of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To build this model a lot of parameters are considered, such as the country in which the truck is registered, that influences the taxation applied to the truck, the number of days for which the truck is used during the year, the cost of all the components (chassis, battery, powertrains, hydrogen tank, fuel cell module, etc.), the infrastructure cost, the energy/fuel cost and the truck consumption. The alternative technologies analysed are two: Fuel Cell Electric Trucks (FCET) and Battery Electric Truck (BET). The first technology is divided into three different technology according to the conditions in which the hydrogen is stored and used: FCET at 350 bar, FCET at 700 bar, and FCET LH2. Furthermore, three different truck typologies are considered: tractor 4x2 (with a power of 330 kW and a total gross weight of 40 tonnes), rigid 6x2 (with a power of 270 kW and a total gross weight of 27 tonnes), and rigid 4x2 (with a power of 220kW and a total gross weight of 18 tonnes). The results obtained from the model is that for tractor 4x2, BET is not competitive until at least 2030, while FCETs are competitive in just 4 years (2027), for rigid 6x2 the situation is better with BET technology that is competitive with respect to Diesel truck in 2027, while FCETs gives a similar result of BET. Finally, for Rigid 4x2 the outputs of the model show that all technologies are competitive in 2026. By analysing all these results it is possible to understand that without incentives from Governments, as it is considered for the evaluation of these results, the goal of reaching TCO of alternative powertrains lower than TCO of Diesel powertrain is achieved not before than 2026/2027. The second aim of this study is to evaluate which parameters mostly affect the TCO in order to understand in which direction Governments must go to reach the goal as soon as possible.