Maritime Transport has begun rolling out electric heavy trucks across the UK, but the bigger development for hauliers may be that it plans to open its new high-powered charging network to other operators. As the company deploys 56 eHGVs across 13 sites during 2026, it is also building more than 22MW of charging capacity — enough, it says, to charge more than 100 electric HGVs at the same time.
That shifts the story beyond vehicle numbers alone. Maritime has so far put 19 electric trucks into service at Wakefield and Birmingham, with the first wave including Mercedes-Benz eActros 600s as well as Volvo Aero and DAF XF electric models. The trucks are expected to deliver ranges of 300 to 500 kilometres per charge, depending on duty cycle, making them suitable for a wide range of regional work.
For Trans.INFO readers, the most interesting point is that Maritime is not just adding battery-electric vehicles to its own fleet. It is also investing in the kind of depot and terminal charging infrastructure that could help other operators make the switch. In a sector where lack of charging access remains one of the main obstacles to adoption, that may matter more than the truck rollout itself.
The real test is infrastructure
At Wakefield, Maritime has installed six chargers rated at up to 400kW, while Birmingham has five chargers of up to 360kW. A later phase is due to add 1MW hyperchargers at further locations. In other words, the company is not treating charging as a side issue. It is building out the power network alongside the vehicles, which is exactly where many electrification plans begin to stall.
That is also what makes Maritime’s role in the UK’s Zero Emission HGV and Infrastructure Demonstrator (ZEHID) programme particularly notable. The operator is involved in three of the programme’s major projects — ZENFreight, Electric Freightway and eFREIGHT 2030. The wider scheme, backed by around £200 million from the Department for Transport and delivered with Innovate UK, aims to put about 350 battery-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell HGVs on UK roads and support more than 70 depot and public charging or refuelling installations by 2030.
This gives Maritime’s rollout a relevance that goes beyond one operator’s fleet strategy. The company is effectively becoming one of the live test cases for how zero-emission freight might work in everyday logistics operations — not in theory, but across depots, terminals and customer routes.
Rail plus electric road
There is another reason this story stands out. Maritime is not trying to present battery-electric trucks as a universal diesel replacement. Its model combines long-distance rail with battery-electric trucks for onward journeys from inland terminals and port locations. That makes the strategy more credible than many broad-brush fleet announcements, because it reflects the current strengths of eHGVs rather than pretending they can already do every type of long-haul job.
The company’s wider intermodal network gives that approach some logic. Maritime says it operates more than 40 daily rail services linking major deep-sea ports with nine open-access inland terminals, allowing electric trucks to be used on shorter road legs where range and charging windows are easier to manage. For operators watching closely, this is one of the clearest examples so far of an attempt to build a workable rail-plus-road electrification model rather than simply swapping diesel trucks for battery-electric ones.
Even so, the rollout also highlights the sector’s biggest constraint. Innovate UK says the ZEHID programme is focused not just on trucks, but on the infrastructure, planning and charger connections needed to make them usable in the real world. Maritime itself says several sites are expected to go live only once grid connections are in place.
