The freight industry’s conversation around electric trucks has changed.
We’re no longer asking whether they have a place in commercial transportation. The more useful questions today are: Where do they fit? Which applications make sense? And what needs to happen operationally for them to succeed?
At Fuel Transport, we’ve had the opportunity to explore those questions firsthand this year through Electric Loop (eLoop), our electric freight pilot with Kenvue Canada. Since January, we’ve been operating an electric Class 8 truck on a short-haul, multi-stop route across the Greater Toronto Area, testing it through real-world urban and winter conditions.
The goal has been to learn. And several months into the deployment, one thing has become increasingly clear: the priorities you identify while planning an EV operation aren’t necessarily the ones that end up shaping it.
Once the truck enters day-to-day service, the conversation becomes more about the operation around it.
The truck is just one part of the equation
When we started planning eLoop, many of the questions were understandably centred on the fundamentals.
Is the route a good fit? Does the charging infrastructure support the operation? How will the vehicle perform in Toronto traffic and Canadian winter conditions? Are we setting it up to succeed?
Those questions still matter. But once an operation settles into a rhythm, your attention starts shifting elsewhere.
You begin looking more closely at route consistency, stop sequencing, dwell time, traffic patterns and scheduling decisions. You start seeing where unnecessary variability is entering the day and how seemingly small changes can affect the broader operation.
None of these are uniquely EV questions. Transportation teams think about them every day.
What an EV deployment does is make their importance much harder to ignore.
Predictability creates room to learn
One of the biggest lessons we’ve (Fuel) observed from our deployment so far has been the value of predictability.
Consistent mileage, repeatable schedules, and reliable return-to-base operations don’t just make an electric truck easier to deploy. They make it easier to understand what is actually influencing performance.
When fewer variables are changing from one day to the next, you can more clearly identify why something worked, why it didn’t and which adjustments are worth making.
That’s particularly important when you’re learning a new operating model.
Diesel operations have been refined over decades to absorb disruption. A delayed pickup, route adjustment or last-minute customer request can often be accommodated without fundamentally changing how the vehicle is fuelled or deployed.
According to us (Fuel), EVs can still accommodate change, but they encourage us to be more deliberate about it. A scheduling adjustment can influence vehicle availability, charging windows, or what happens later in the day.
That’s not necessarily a limitation. In many ways, it forces better operational discipline.
Charging is as much of an operational question as it is an infrastructure question
Before you deploy an electric truck, charging can feel like an infrastructure project: select the equipment, install it and make sure the necessary electrical capacity is available.
Once the truck is running, you realize that’s only the beginning.
We’ve had to think about how charging fits alongside route completion, vehicle dwell time, dispatch schedules, maintenance and customer commitments. The objective isn’t simply to charge the truck. It’s to charge it without introducing unnecessary friction elsewhere in the operation.
That changes the way you think about charging.
It becomes another input into the daily operating plan, alongside equipment availability, appointment times, traffic and driver schedules.
And once you start looking at it that way, electrification becomes a network-design conversation.
Electrification doesn’t belong to one team
That’s also why I don’t think successful electrification can sit solely with a fleet or sustainability team.
Our experience with Kenvue has reinforced how interconnected these decisions are.
The carrier may operate the truck and charging infrastructure, but the shipper’s freight patterns, delivery requirements and network design directly influence where electrification can work effectively. Internally, dispatch, facilities, maintenance and operations all have a role to play.
The encouraging part is that bringing those groups together can expose opportunities that go beyond EVs.
When teams start examining routes, dwell time, scheduling and network consistency more closely, they’re often asking questions that can make the overall transportation operation better – regardless of what’s powering the truck.
That’s one reason carrier-shipper collaboration will be increasingly important as the industry moves beyond isolated EV trials. Technology alone can’t create the right operating conditions. Those conditions have to be designed together.
The numbers matter, but so does what sits behind them
There are encouraging early results.
For Fuel Transport, the deployment has provided real-world data on energy use, charging, route performance, fuel costs and emissions, while helping the team better understand the operational considerations and potential savings associated with electric freight.
Those early numbers are useful, and we’ll keep evaluating efficiency and savings as conditions evolve, but I don’t think any single metric tells us whether freight electrification works.
The bigger question is whether the operation can reliably support the technology day after day – and help us better understand the conditions required for broader adoption of electric freight transportation.
That’s why pilots matter. They’re opportunities to understand everything that has to happen around that truck for electrification to become repeatable.
The next phase will be about operational confidence
I don’t think the next chapter of freight electrification will be defined by one breakthrough.
It will come from hundreds of operational decisions being made across fleets, facilities and supply chains.
Our experience with eLoop is still teaching us what those decisions look like in practice. We’re learning where predictability matters most, how charging can fit naturally into an existing operation, where greater coordination is required and which operating environments offer the strongest conditions for electrification today.
As more fleets move from testing the technology to integrating it into live networks, I expect the industry’s questions will continue to evolve.
Not can an electric truck do the job? But where can it do the job reliably, repeatedly and in a way that makes sense for the broader network?
That’s ultimately what early deployments should help us answer.
Because widespread adoption won’t depend on technology alone. It will depend on building the operational confidence to use that technology at scale.
A big thank you to Kenvue for being willing to learn alongside us. Progress like this depends on partners who are prepared to test, adapt, and work through the operational realities together – and at Fuel, that’s exactly the kind of work we’re always willing to jump into.