Beyond the pilot purgatory: Scaling electric freight in Europe – Learnings from RPX’s battery-as-a-service rollout

Heavy-duty road freight is essential to Europe’s economy but remains one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. While electric heavy-duty vehicles have improved rapidly and charging infrastructure is expanding along major freight corridors, adoption remains limited. Increasingly, the challenge is not technology readiness but economics.  

RPX (Renewable Power Accelerator – formerly Solar Power Accelerator) is spearheading unique technological and financial solutions to accelerate the electrification of European logistics.i The company is currently working on a pilot programme with electric truck manufacturers to offer fully electric heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) at a distinct total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage.  

Founded in early 2023, the company initially scaled commercial and industrial rooftop solar installations across Sweden. Changing market conditions drove the decision to redirect towards heavy-duty transport electrification, a sector that accounts for more than 25 per cent of EU carbon emissions. Pilots are currently active across Sweden, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, with plans for a pan-European rollout.  

The key challenge: the upfront cost barrier 

Historically, a lack of charging infrastructure was the primary bottleneck preventing the transition to electrified long-distance road freight.ii However, as charging networks have expanded along key European logistics corridors, the core barrier has shifted. Many logistics operators recognise the long-term benefits of electrification, but the financial risk and capital requirements of fleet replacement can prevent adoption from progressing beyond small-scale pilot projects. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), the upfront purchase cost of electric medium- and heavy-duty trucks has historically been significantly higher than their diesel equivalents.iii Despite cheaper operational and maintenance costs over the vehicle’s lifespan, this high initial capital expenditure weighs heavily on fleet owners. In a logistics industry where profit margins are quite constrained, relying on fragmented, state-by-state subsidies is insufficient to drive mass adoption beyond small-scale, often publicity-driven, pilot programmes.iv  

The solution: value chain innovation and battery-as-a-service (BaaS) 

To align supply and demand and bypass these financial barriers, RPX implemented an innovative operational solution: separating the ownership of the truck’s chassis from the battery. By doing so, fleet owners can drastically lower the initial unit price of the vehicle while still qualifying for available national grants on the chassis. 

Furthermore, RPX bundles the battery lease cost directly with energy prices. By consolidating hardware, software and power into a single integrated offering, the model cuts out the inflated margins typically added when multiple, non-collaborative parties deliver fragmented solutions. This ensures that operating costs remain at or below those of a fossil-powered fleet, creating genuine TCO parity today. Rather than waiting for vehicle prices to decline further, the model aims to make fleet electrification economically attractive under current market conditions. 

The business case: achieving cost parity between fossil-powered and clean transportation 

However, electric freight will only scale when it makes financial sense for operators. They already offer advantages through lower maintenance and operating costs but the initial investment is a big deterrent for mass adoption. RPX’s model ensures that the transition makes immediate financial sense for fleet operators, reducing their financial risk while insulating them from volatile fossil fuel prices. This demonstrates that business model innovation can be as important as technological innovation. Market transformation depends not only on better vehicles, but also on financing structures that allow customers to adopt them at scale. 

While the model is highly scalable, it is currently constrained by customer readiness and securing the necessary capital. Reaching volume is essential to reduce the perceived risk per vehicle for customers and investors alike, and only through scaled financing can exponential growth be unlocked. While the EU’s net-zero targets, the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) and the Clean Vehicles Directive provide strong demand signals, early-stage, capital-intensive startups like RPX often fail in the ‘valley of death’ for startups.v The capital requirements (for both the BaaS provider such as RPX and fleet owners) are too large for early investors but perceived as too high-risk for traditional institutional lenders.  

Policy recommendations  

To fully realise the IAA’s ambition of creating lead markets for low carbon products, policymakers must tackle the structural and financial bottlenecks that stall promising clean-tech initiatives like RPX. By harmonising demand signals, deploying targeted high-risk funding and accelerating infrastructure development, Europe can secure long-term competitiveness and drive mass adoption across the clean transport value chain beyond isolated pilot programmes. The following are the key policy learnings across CLG Europe’s key priority areas based on RPX’ case: 

• Implement green public procurement targets: Instituting a specific percentage of zero-emission logistics for all publicly funded supply chains will create a guaranteed lead market for companies like RPX working to decarbonise EU logistics, sending a clear demand signal that justifies the financial risk of scaling operations. The Clean Vehicle Directive has already initiated the growth of EVs in the public fleet,vi and capitalising on that momentum to create strong market signals is essential. It would also be conducive to have a rationalised price criterion where not only the initial investment but also total cost of ownership and maintenance over an asset’s lifetime are included in the calculus.  
• Deploy public funds strategically and unlock private investment: Instruments that are specifically designed to bridge the investment gap for capital-heavy startups are necessary to level the playing field for new startups and innovators. Existing public instruments such as the Innovation Fund and European Competitiveness Fund can be leveraged. The Draghi report on EU competitivenessvii also recommends mobilising roughly €750–800 billion in additional annual investments by deeply integrating capital markets (such as by finalising the Capitals Market Union), issuing joint EU debt, and reforming regulatory and state-aid frameworks.viii This would help in providing the necessary volume in both public and private financing to companies falling into the ‘investment purgatory’, allowing them to scale innovative models (like vehicle–battery separation) without relying solely on risk-averse traditional institutions. 
• Facilitate regulatory sandboxes and EU-sponsored industry consortia: Bringing together key stakeholders such as truck manufacturers, fleet operators, energy providers, financial institutions and tech startups will allow for holistic value chain reconfiguration. As RPX aims at demonstrating, consolidating hardware, software and power into a single offering could eliminate stacked margins; policy should actively encourage and facilitate these cross-sector joint ventures. 

Key policy takeaway 

The single most important lesson from the RPX initiative is the urgent need for dedicated, high-risk venture capital. Unlike the American market, where diverse venture capital ecosystems readily fund ambitious clean-tech hardware and software, the European investment landscape is highly risk-averse. To empower startups that directly contribute to the EU’s decarbonisation mandates, policymakers must design funding mechanisms that bridge the investment purgatory for capital-intensive clean innovations.