Electric roads as an incentive-alignment strategy for European freight decarbonization

The European Union is unlikely to decarbonize road freight on time through its current policy mix. This article argues that the main barrier is misaligned incentives across freight operators, vehicle manufacturers, charging providers, grid operators and policymakers. Under current conditions, delay is often rational: battery-electric trucks remain expensive to buy, public charging is costly to use and risky to expand, grid connection queues are growing, and stronger pressure on fossil-fuel use can be politically regressive when affordable electric alternatives remain limited. The case is presented for integrating electric road systems (ERS) on dense freight corridors into the European charging infrastructure mix, as a strategy to align incentives across the transport system towards accelerated decarbonisation. The economics of ERS investments and operations favour low pricing and rapid scaling of the infrastructure. Equitable access to low-cost public charging for vehicles in motion is expected to strengthen the incentives to adopt electric trucks, through reduced vehicle pricing, operational costs, payload penalties and charging downtime. Grid connectivity challenges would be made less severe, and vehicle manufacturers would see increased demand for both new and retrofitted electric trucks. Europe should therefore treat ERS not as a niche technology, but as a potential incentive-alignment strategy within the road-freight charging mix, and use the current policy cycle, including AFIR revision, to enable corridor-scale pilots, mechanisms to facilitate ERS investments, and suitable market frameworks.