There is a reasonable argument to suggest the trucking industry is too competitive to be able to actually reach the zero emission goals which the government has set out for our industry into the future.
The whole trucking world is extremely competitive. In a fiercely competitive environment like this, one of the issues is the constant and ongoing rounds of cost cutting and downward pressure on rates.
These mean that most businesses in the trucking industry will go for the low cost option first, simply because the profit margin on any work they’re doing is not high enough to enable the kind of investment decisions on new equipment required to actually make the long term and costly transition across to zero carbon possible.
Most decisions made within a trucking industry are informed by the fact that many operations within the trucking industry work on extremely tight margins, the return on capital which is normal in road transport would not be acceptable in most other industries.
As a result, there is a lot of short-termism going on and very little, very long term thinking happening in the boardrooms and the offices of people running trucking fleets.
Quite often anyone managing a trucking fleet decision making will be a matter of lurching from one short term crisis to the next. Needing to solve problems this week, today, in the next two hours. In that sort of environment it is not easy to start concentrating on something in the far distance, as far away as 2050.
What this means is that we are not going to be able to move very effectively in the right direction, in the direction which the powers that be want the trucking industry to move.
There is a solution to this issue, but that would involve government intervention. Because of the short term nature of our industry, it is going to need government action to actually make effective changes in the way that trucking industry operates in order to achieve zero carbon.
How the government chooses to incentivise the industry can be its own choice. The most effective avenue would be to give tax breaks on low carbon investment or use the tax system to penalise non zero carbon investment.
The whole industry is also going to need the government to actually demonstrate that there will be sufficient resources for a future trucking industry, in terms of charging infrastructure available in order to charge the number of trucks required. Plus, we will also need the guarantee of a reliable and stable, and not too expensive, supply of hydrogen also available and supplied through an infrastructure which the trucking industry could practically use.
Otherwise, we could try and make road transport a less competitive industry?
