Rustam Kocher on Why Electric Trucks Need More Than Just Megawatts

The megawatt charger is no longer the missing piece of the electric truck puzzle. Ask Rustam Kocher, the former Daimler Trucks North America charging infrastructure lead who chaired CharIN’s Megawatt Charging System task force, and he’ll tell you the technical fight is largely settled. What remains is the harder, messier work: getting the right hardware onto the right routes.

Kocher, now retired in Portugal but still banging the drum for heavy-duty electrification, sees a market that has matured fast since the two of us last checked in with him in 2023. The Megawatt Charging System is a fully published standard now, connector and protocol included. Any manufacturer can fit it to a truck; any operator can specify it on a charger.

That shift has consequences well beyond road freight.

One Connector, Many Machines

When the MCS work began back in 2018, the assumption was simple: this is a fast-charging standard for commercial trucks. Kocher says that framing was too narrow.

“It’s now clear that it’s for anything that rolls, digs, floats or flies. It can be an excavator, a ferry or an eVTOL.”

Marine transport is where he expects the biggest ripples. Electrifying a vessel used to mean a bespoke drivetrain and a bespoke charging setup—expensive to buy, and brutal to repair, since only the original builder held the knowledge. With MCS, operators can shop among a wide field of suppliers.

Kocher counts at least 30 charger makers building MCS hardware today. On the vehicle side, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and the TRATON brands already offer it, with series production either underway or being planned.

A Crowded, Fragile Charging Market

Public charging for heavy-duty EVs was a novelty three years ago. Now Kocher keeps a list of a few dozen companies chasing the business—and he’s quick to note that the segment is “prone to frequent new market entrants, consolidations and failures.”

Two names stand out to him: WattEV, where he sits on the advisory board, and Terawatt. With fleet spending still cautious, the survivors are the ones selling trucking-as-a-service or charging-as-a-service, letting operators test electrification without betting the depot on it.

Order books are starting to look serious. WattEV booked 370 Tesla Semis, Einride went bigger with 500 units, and a group of shippers is reportedly lining up 2,500. Whether Tesla can build that volume is an open question. Kocher’s take: too few trucks is a far better problem than too few buyers—which is precisely the corner the legacy OEMs have painted themselves into.

Europe’s Squeeze Play

Kocher has little patience for the lobbying coming out of Europe’s truck giants. At IAA, he says, nearly every legacy CEO asked for a three-year delay to rules they had already agreed to and already delayed once.

His comparison is the light-duty market, where he and this publication watched OEMs miss California targets and respond by cutting prices and pushing cheap leases rather than demanding relief. Why can’t truck makers do the same, especially with Chinese manufacturers moving into Europe ready to take share?

He also pushes back on the claim that charging scarcity justifies inaction. The oft-quoted figure of 35,000 European chargers, he says, was pulled out of thin air; the ICCT puts the real need nearer 5,000. Kocher agrees you can’t wedge a big rig into a light-duty charging site—but plenty of depot-to-depot and out-and-back routes work with infrastructure that already exists.

Credit where it’s due: the Milence network built by the European OEMs is, in his words, the best truck charging he’s seen, and it’s expanding quickly, moving from the Nordics into the Netherlands and northern Germany.

Winners and Stragglers

Inside every manufacturer, Kocher reckons, a turf war is playing out between the old guard and the EV newcomers. TRATON and Volvo are pulling ahead. PACCAR and Navistar, he warns, are dragging—and will pay for it in market share.

His message hasn’t changed in five years, and he intends to keep repeating it: truck charging is needed, and it needs to be purpose-built.