Alpitronic announces it will have its one-megawatt charging system ready in 2025

The Italian company Alpitronic plans to offer its own one-megawatt charging system for electric trucks starting next year. This was announced by Philip Senoner, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, during the E.ON Drive Summit held in the German city of Munich.

The new generation of high-power charging stations for trucks will be tested by E.ON customers and launched on the market in early 2025. Although many details are still unknown, such as the exact charging power and the product name, what is known is that the Italian company seems more interested in electrifying the private facilities of logistics companies than in public charging with the MCS –Megawatt Charging System– system.

An important feature that distinguishes Alpitronic’s system for electric trucks from other competing systems is that the former will be able to manage charging by intelligently distributing the available energy among the parked vehicles. In this way, a truck that needs to leave immediately will be able to charge faster than one that remains at the company’s facilities for longer.

In his speech at the E.ON Drive Summit, Senoner highlighted the complexity of charging a truck compared with a car, placing special emphasis on the fact that logistics operators do not want to waste time and therefore prefer to charge the trucks in their fleet at logistics hubs rather than on the road. It is precisely there that Alpitronic believes it has a lot to offer with its one-megawatt charging system for this type of vehicle.

At present, some electric trucks are already using Alpitronic’s HYC300 and HYC400 high-power chargers, which are widely used for electric cars. Alpitronic is one of the hardware suppliers of Milence, a joint electric truck charging company between Daimler Truck, the Grupo Volvo and Traton. Aral Pulse also uses Alpitronic chargers for its truck charging corridor, as do some individual fleet operators. Recently, Mercedes-Benz also began offering its electric truck customers the option of purchasing charging points for their new vehicles, which, coincidentally, are from Alpitronic.

Is the new MCS standard really necessary?

Although it is true that in many cases the 350 kW CCS connection is sufficient for charging an electric truck, it is not ideal for trucks dedicated to long-distance transport that use high-capacity battery packs. The one-megawatt MCS standard will finally become a reality in 2025, and from then on all electric truck manufacturers will want to equip their models with the MCS charging option. This will be the case, for example, of the Mercedes-Benz eActros 600, or of the MAN eTruck, which we have already discussed on other occasions here at HighMotor.