Climate action on the move
By Marcus Schick I 8 minute read
08/04/2025
The economy, and the logistics sector along with it, is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. Making sustainability and climate action a part of your business is no longer optional—it is essential. DACHSER has set the course for the future with a strategic focus program it calls DACHSER Climate Protection. With regard to road freight transport, this program puts the expansion of e-mobility center stage, and DACHSER has been an impulse generator here for exactly ten years.
Global warming, extreme weather, droughts, floods, crop losses… The list of empirical evidence for human-driven climate change is getting longer and longer, making the need to reduce climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions worldwide ever more urgent. The call to action extends to logistics as well. “However, there’s still a long and rocky road to decarbonization,” says DACHSER CEO Burkhard Eling. In fact, the volume of road transport is constantly growing—according to estimates by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, truck freight traffic in Germany will increase a further 50 percent by 2050. The country’s transport sector is responsible for around 20 percent of CO₂ emissions. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that freight transportation by truck, plane, ship, and train is responsible for around 8 percent of all CO₂ emissions worldwide, or as much as 11 percent if warehouses and ports are included—and those figures are on the rise.
Road freight transport is particularly challenging: according to the MIT study, it accounts for the lion’s share of freight emissions at 2.2 billion metric tons of CO₂ (as of 2021), and has so far been based almost entirely on conventional diesel, a fossil fuel. “Converting road transports to non-fossil alternatives will require staying power. As things stand, it will take two to three decades to replace our current fleet of diesel trucks with zero-emission vehicles,” Eling says. However, he continues, that involves not just procuring the right vehicles, but also expanding the publicly available charging infrastructure and non-public charging options. The grid connection capacity at DACHSER locations must also be increased and the electricity itself must be available in Europe in sufficient quantities at the right place. “This infrastructure is a fundamental basis for the switch to battery-electric vehicles, which will make up the majority of zero-emission vehicles in Europe,” Eling says.
As things stand, it will take two to three decades to replace our current fleet of diesel trucks with zero-emission vehicles.
Increasing efficiency further
For DACHSER, increasing efficiency was and is the primary lever in climate action. The way the company calculates this is simple: every empty-truck kilometer avoided and every improvement in capacity utilization means fewer emissions. “This benefits the climate AND profitability,” CEO Eling says. “And that makes every effort worthwhile.”
“DACHSER has been working on sustainability issues for decades and is constantly confronted with new, often complex challenges,” says Stefan Hohm, DACHSER’s Chief Development Officer (CDO), “be they due to legal requirements, technological developments, or changing customer expectations.” For example, DACHSER launched its DACHSER Climate Protection strategic focus program a few years ago. At that time, Eling said: “We see sustainability and climate action as elementary tasks within our responsibility as a company for society and the environment. And it’s because of this deep conviction that we support the global community’s climate goals through a comprehensive climate protection strategy.” He was describing DACHSER’s long-term, cross-generational approach that bundles all the company’s climate actions. Today, Hohm explains that, at DACHSER, being an impulse generator also means always keeping an eye on the cost-benefit ratio and not overburdening either its own organization or its customers in this way. “To achieve our long-term goal of net zero emissions,” he says, “DACHSER selects projects and partnerships to invest in that will bring alternative vehicle powertrain systems to market maturity.”
Climate action, social commitment, and sustainable corporate management are deeply rooted at DACHSER. DACHSER CEO Burkhard Eling and Stefan Hohm, the company’s Chief Development Officer (CDO), talk about what has already been achieved, the current priorities, and measures to be taken in the future.
DACHSER has been working on sustainability issues for decades and is constantly confronted with new, often complex challenges.
Writing e-mobility history
DACHSER pursues technological development with a sense of both sound judgment and foresight. This is exemplified by the minor and major e-mobility milestones along its logistics supply chains. DACHSER took the first step on the road to e-mobility exactly ten years ago with El Carrito. This small, agile electric van would leave the microhub (a public parking garage in the city center with a truck entrance) at a speed of just under 7 kph, with a full load and a turning radius of only 1.65 meters, and hum quietly through the old historic center of Málaga in southern Spain. In 2017, DACHSER became the first customer for Daimler’s all-electric FUSO eCanter when it deployed two of these battery-electric light trucks in Berlin and Stuttgart. A year later, the logistics provider received an award in the German Federal Competition for Sustainable Urban Logistics for its innovation project on emission-free groupage delivery in Stuttgart’s city center.
What started out as a project would really take off with DACHSER Emission-Free Delivery. Here, non-refrigerated shipments are delivered within a defined zone exclusively by cargo bike and e-truck—making them emission-free. In 2019, the first Mercedes-Benz heavy-duty eActros trucks were added to complete the fully electric vehicle mix for Stuttgart’s city center. By 2021, DACHSER had already expanded emission-free city delivery to eleven major European cities, with this figure poised to rise to 25 by the end of 2025.
Since July 2023, DACHSER’s country organization in the Czech Republic has had a Volvo FH Electric in regular operation—one of DACHSER’s first e-truck models for longer routes. This heavy-duty battery-electric truck covered over 200,000 kilometers in its first 16 months and can do around 330 kilometers on a single charge. Other DACHSER branches use this truck model in regular operations, too. It shows how well electromobility can work even in the logistics sector, not to mention over long distances and in continuous use—as long as sufficient electricity and charging infrastructure are available.
In 2025, DACHSER put its 100th electric truck with a total weight of more than 3.5 metric tons into service in Hamburg. Since then, the 16-ton Volvo FL Electric with a refrigerated body has been reliably delivering fresh food to the city and the surrounding area.
Meanwhile, more and more large e-trucks in the DACHSER network are proving their suitability for everyday use. Not only do they excel in distribution transport but, equipped with increasingly powerful batteries, they are also regularly assigned to other routes with longer driving times.
DACHSER has now reached the next stage in the shift toward emission-free supply chains by introducing twelve all-electric MAN eTGX trucks, which it put into service at the beginning of 2025. These ultra-low-liner truck tractors expand DACHSER’s steadily growing fleet of e-trucks into the high-volume transport business with mega trailers, which can carry up to 67 pallets with double-deck loading. Added to that are the eActros 600 from Mercedes- Benz Trucks: with a range of 500 kilometers, they can be used in multiple scenarios. Delivery of the first twelve vehicles of this type to DACHSER’s subsidiary Brummer started at the end of 2024.
electric trucks have been in practical use at DACHSER since January 2025.
Research from everyday practice for everyday practice
“DACHSER isn’t trying to jump onto every e-mobility trend that comes along,” says Alexander Tonn, COO Road Logistics at DACHSER. “We carefully analyze the entire environment to ensure that it suits us, our network, and the needs of our customers.” This is precisely why DACHSER set up special e-mobility sites in Freiburg, Hamburg, and Malsch (near the southern German city of Karlsruhe) at the beginning of 2022. These locations run tests under real conditions to find out how best to operate a fleet of battery-electric vehicles: from the charging infrastructure to intelligent load management and vehicle maintenance. Their experiences get incorporated into concepts that will be gradually rolled out across the entire network over the coming years. The insight behind this is that integrated climate action starts on a small scale in order to provide the impetus for changes on a large scale. DACHSER has learned this and successfully implemented it many times over.
