Russell Group demonstrates megawatt charging on MAN eTGX in Coatbridge
Russell Group demonstrates megawatt charging technology on MAN eTGX, which MAN says makes it the first UK haulier to do so.
Coatbridge hosted what MAN calls a UK first: Russell Group of Glasgow demonstrating megawatt charging on a heavy truck, plugging a MAN eTGX into MCS hardware at its own railhead depot in front of roughly 50 onlookers, including Scottish and UK government officials, ZENFreight, InnovateUK, OAL Limited and Scottish Futures Trust (MAN Truck & Bus). For an industry that has spent years fretting about whether electric artics can ever match diesel turnaround times, this is an early UK demonstration that the charging side of the equation might keep pace, though no charging data from the event was published.
The numbers explain the fuss. Russell Group says MAN's MCS-equipped trucks can take a battery from 20 to 90 per cent in half an hour, against the 350 kW ceiling of a standard EV charger; MCS itself is rated up to 3.75 megawatts (MAN Truck & Bus). The demonstration truck, an eTGX 20.544 4x2 tractor, runs a permanently excited synchronous motor producing 400 kW (544 PS) and 1,250 Nm, fed by six 80 kWh battery packs totalling 480 kWh and routed through a 4-speed TipMatic automated gearbox. That is a lot of stored energy to replenish quickly.
Russell Group isn't dabbling. It took delivery of its first eTGX 4x2 tractors in September 2025, added two more in December, and now runs four all-electric MAN trucks - a number it plans to grow to 14 by early 2027, all in service of a stated ambition to be net-zero by 2040.
Why it matters: charging speed, not battery range, is the constraint that has kept most UK operators watching electric HGVs from the sidelines. A 30-minute top-up that gets a truck from 20 to 90 per cent changes the arithmetic on driver hours, depot dwell time and how many chargers a yard actually needs per vehicle. If MCS infrastructure scales beyond a single Coatbridge demonstration, the business case for electric artics on trunk routes gets considerably harder to dismiss.
The catch is that one working charger at one depot proves the technology, not the network. Nothing in this announcement commits anyone to rolling MCS out beyond Russell Group's own site, and while the DfT-funded ZEHID programme part-funded the vehicles and will collect five years of performance data, that is not the same as funded infrastructure policy. Operators eyeing electric HGVs still need to ask who pays for the grid connection and the charging hardware at their own yards, because megawatt charging is only useful where megawatt charging exists.
Fleets running or planning heavy electric trucks should treat this as the moment to start costing MCS installation against their own depot electrical capacity, rather than waiting for someone else to build it first.
Sources
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