The European Commission has approved a truck battery joint venture proposed by Scania Germany’s Sennder Technologies.

The joint venture will see a pay-per-use model for heavy-duty battery electric vehicles along with associated digital, physical, and commercial services.

The venture will start in Germany and later roll out its services in other European countries.

Scania has been a major investor in Sennder, a digital road freight forwarder providing a wide range of full truck load services to shippers across Europe.

Sennder has a fleet of more than 40,000 connected trucks, and in 2021 was one of the first companies to demonstrate cross-border electric truck operations.

The pilot electric truck project saw Sennder use an electric truck from Breytner to transport more than 17 tonnes of product for Cabot from the port of Rotterdam to Antwerp, Belgium and then returned to base, covering a distance of more than 300km.

The cost of a battery pack is a substantial part of the cost of a truck, and if a pack needs to be replaced sooner than expected.

Providing a pay-per-use model for the battery packs allows Scania’s customers to have a reliable and consistent economic model for operating the vehicles, while Scania can benefit from the algorithmic enhancements in the BMS to improve the performance of the packs.