IAA Transportation 2026 Opens With 700 km Electric Trucks and Almost Nowhere to Charge Them
Hannover opens its doors on 15 September (press day the 14th), and the exhibitor list promises more than 150 world premieres. Most of the attention will go to the vehicles, which is understandable, because the vehicles are finally good.
MAN gives the eTGX its first public showing with a new battery generation, six packs, 552 kWh. Volvo brings the FH Aero Electric with a new electric axle and a claimed 700 kilometres. Mercedes-Benz shows the eActros Lowliner for high-volume work under a mega trailer, orderable from this quarter, and alongside it the NextGenH2 fuel-cell tractor running liquid hydrogen for something over 1,000 kilometres. Renault Trucks comes back after skipping two editions, with a model-year 2027 T High. Tesla is bringing the Semi. Eighty-four vehicles from seventeen exhibitors are available for test drives, about 40 percent more than in 2024, and most of them are battery-electric.
Two shows ago the argument was about range. That argument is now over, and the industry won it. What has not moved nearly as fast is the thing the trucks plug into.
The bottleneck migrated from the vehicle to the socket
ACEA puts European demand at around 35,000 publicly accessible megawatt charging points by 2030, inside a total of up to 50,000 charging points suitable for trucks. The VDA’s own estimate is that Germany alone needs roughly 4,000 public MCS points by the end of the decade.
Set that against what exists. Germany’s first public megawatt charging point opened in September 2025, on the A2 at Lipperland Süd, delivering up to 1.2 MW under the state-funded HoLa project. Milence, the joint venture between Daimler Truck, Volvo and Traton, has opened an MCS site at the port of Antwerp-Bruges and plans 284 megawatt charge points across 71 locations in ten countries by 2027. Those are real projects with real steel in the ground, and they are still two orders of magnitude short of the 2030 number.
There is a standards reason for part of the lag. The international specification for megawatt charging, IEC TS 63379, was only published on 9 February 2026. Nobody was going to place volume orders for hardware against a moving target, and the target stopped moving seven months ago.
Car charging numbers are not truck charging numbers
The tempting counter-argument is that Europe has been through this before with passenger cars and it worked out. Transport & Environment reported in July that the EU has already met its collective 2027 AFIR target for car charging, with 64 percent of the 2030 requirement in place and only Malta missing the fleet-based capacity rule.
That comparison flatters the truck side badly. A car charger needs a parking space and a few hundred kilowatts. A truck charging pool needs bays that a 16.5 metre combination can enter and leave without shunting, and a grid connection in the megawatts, at a motorway service area originally sized around a diesel tanker delivery once a week. AFIR’s 2030 requirement is a pool every 120 kilometres in each direction on the core network with at least 3,600 kW aggregated, which is roughly 2,000 truck charging locations. The charger itself is the cheap, fast part. The connection and the permit are neither.
The money runs out at the wrong moment
The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility has been the main EU instrument here, close to €3 billion committed, with a recent round of €422 million spread over 39 projects, much of it to operators building truck charging parks. It is now nearly exhausted. In June, IRU, ACEA and Transport & Environment wrote jointly to the Commission warning that a financing pause across 2026 and 2027 would hit exactly when fleet buyers are making their first serious electric orders.
Hauliers run on thin margins and long depreciation. A gap in the corridor build-out does not delay their decision by the length of the gap; it pushes the whole decision back into the next replacement cycle.
The review matters more than the premieres
The Commission’s AFIR revision is the real event of this quarter. The call for evidence in spring drew over 1,000 responses, the public consultation closed on 3 August, and a legislative proposal is expected before the end of the year. On the table: whether the heavy-duty targets should rise, whether depot charging should count toward them, price transparency, and how hard to write megawatt charging into the text.
The modelling behind that debate is not comforting. ICCT work presented over the summer projects around 150,000 battery-electric trucks in Europe by 2030 and roughly 700,000 by 2035, needing something like 4,000 to 5,300 megawatt chargers by 2030. Those units would be about 2 percent of the charge points by count and close to 15 percent of the installed power. Current AFIR targets broadly cover projected demand to 2030 and then fall away.
An asymmetry nobody has fixed
Here is the structural problem the show will not resolve, however many premieres it stages. The CO2 standards for heavy-duty vehicles carry penalties, and those penalties fall on manufacturers. There is no equivalent instrument pointed at the grid operator who quotes a five-year connection date, or at the member state whose permitting process runs longer than the truck’s warranty.
So the OEMs arrive in Hannover legally obliged to sell zero-emission trucks into a market that is under no comparable obligation to make them usable. The Chinese entrants filling out the exhibitor list, and the roughly one third of companies exhibiting for the first time, are competing for the same undersupplied corridor.
The trucks are ready. Ask again about the corridors after the Q4 proposal.