What BGL Charge actually is
The BGL represents roughly 7,000 companies through its regional associations. Under the new scheme, a member with spare capacity at its depot can open those points to other fleets — and in return gets access to charging points run by other participants. The hardware does not change: the site owner still sets the price, the access rules and the availability windows. Depotcharge supplies the layer underneath — access control, billing, payment — and says it works independently of charging hardware, backend systems and vehicle manufacturers.
Reach comes from E.L.V.I.S. AG, a purchasing group with more than 250 partner companies at over 350 locations, which plans to plug its members into BGL Charge. On paper that turns a few hundred depots into something resembling a network. In practice, "registered" is not "used" — the interesting number will be utilisation, not member count.
The technical problem here is not exotic: if a charger in one fleet's yard has to be billed to a truck from another fleet, you need identity, authorisation and settlement that cross company boundaries. That is the roaming problem car drivers know from public charging, and we covered a neat version of it in the Netherlands, where Ubitricity and Deftpower wired 1,500 public charge points into a smart-charging setup over OCPI 2.2.1. Depotcharge is essentially selling the same plumbing to freight, minus the street furniture.
The cost maths: why depot sharing is not a side benefit
Take a 40-tonne long-haul tractor. At 33 l/100 km and roughly €1.65 per litre of diesel, fuel costs about €54.45 per 100 km, before AdBlue. A battery-electric truck of the same size needs around 120 kWh/100 km — that is the consumption implied by Mercedes-Benz's own figures for the 600 kWh eActros 600 and its 500 km claim. On depot electricity at €0.20/kWh, those 100 km cost €24. On public high-power charging at €0.60/kWh, the same distance costs €72.
That is the whole initiative in three numbers. Public charging is what makes electric trucking look expensive; depot charging is what makes it cheap. And a depot charger that sits idle 80% of the day still has to be paid for — so sharing spare capacity is not charity, it is asset utilisation.
Two German rules push in the same direction. Zero-emission trucks pay only a quarter of the corresponding HGV toll rate until 30 June 2031. And under current rules, publicly accessible charging points can be taxed on electricity at €0.50/MWh instead of €20.50/MWh — about 2 ct/kWh, or roughly €2.40 per 100 km for a 120 kWh truck. Making a depot accessible rather than private can therefore be worth more than the session revenue itself.
Rooftop solar is a nice extra, but be realistic about scale: a vehicle-integrated solar roof yields around 400 kWh a year. A long-haul truck burns through 600 kWh in a single day of driving. The kilowatt-hours are on the hall roof and behind the grid connection, not on the cab.
600 trucks is only about 3.4 MW of continuous load
Run the fleet arithmetic. Six hundred e-trucks at 45,000 km a year and 1.1 kWh/km consume roughly 30 GWh a year — an average continuous draw of about 3.4 MW. That is one mid-sized industrial connection. Energy volume is not the bottleneck; where the trucks sleep is. Six trucks charging simultaneously at 400 kW is already 2.4 MW on a single site, which is why spreading sessions across dozens of depots and shifting them into the night matters more than adding megawatts.
Our own supercharger database — 483 locations across Europe — is a passenger-car tool, but it illustrates the point: public networks optimise for corridor speed, depots optimise for cost. For trucks you need both, which is why the AFIR corridor targets (charging pools of at least 800 kW every 100 km on the TEN-T core network by 2027, rising to 1,400 kW per pool every 60 km by 2030) only solve half the equation.
Switzerland first, then DACH and Benelux
The association model has already been tested: since May, the Swiss commercial vehicle association ASTAG has been running ASTAG Charge on the same platform. Depotcharge itself was available in Germany beforehand, so BGL Charge is a scale-up, not a launch. The €2.7 million pre-seed round, led by High-Tech Gründerfonds with xdeck, Kopa, Prequel and business angels, is earmarked for expansion across DACH and Benelux within two years, plus reservation functions, open interfaces and integration with transport management systems.
What remains open is pricing transparency. Operators set their own tariffs, so there will be no single BGL Charge rate — fleets will have to compare each site. For orientation on what public power costs elsewhere, our cheapest-superchargers list is a useful sanity check.
What a fleet should do now
Inventory which of your sites has spare capacity, at what time of day and at what grid connection. Meter every bay individually — you cannot bill what you cannot measure. Then run your own per-100-km comparison with your real supplier tariff, not brochure prices, using our charging cost calculator. Add the toll class and the electricity-tax position, and only then decide whether opening your depot is a cost centre or a revenue line.
BGL Charge is not a hardware announcement. There are no megawatts and no ribbon to cut — it is a settlement layer, and settlement is precisely what depot sharing has been missing.
