The loudest sound is the crunching of snow under the mighty tires as a dark giant rolls onto the company premises on an icy February morning. The brand new Mercedes eActros 600 has arrived to test the power electronics and communication capabilities of the company’s own charging stations on the Phoenix Contact premises in Paderborn.
Four meter wheelbase. 11.7 tons unladen weight. 544 hp continuous output, 816 hp maximum power. 1000 kW charging power in Megawatt Charging Mode MCS. And three battery packs with 207 kWh capacity each – the eActros 600 is a real heavyweight. With plenty of power hunger. Just the right challenger for the experts from Phoenix Contact Power Supplies in Paderborn. The aim here is to test whether the truck can communicate with the power electronics of the in-house charging station without any problems.
To carry out tests of this kind, the team led by Guido Remmert, Director of High Power Systems at the laboratory, not only has access to a medium-voltage connection that provides the necessary energy on site. In the laboratory rooms on the first floor, the engineers also have a direct view of the two charging stations. Only a door and a few meters separate the specialists from the vehicle and charging point, so that changes can be checked immediately on the vehicle.
The current candidate, the eActros, was only presented to the public at the end of 2024 and has been rolling on European roads since 2025. The heavyweight star carrier from Swabia is (still) owned by the Rosier commercial vehicle branch in Paderborn. But Thomas Müther, Team Leader Truck Sales at the Rosier Commercial Vehicle Center and deliverer of the truck, which cost around 300,000 euros, is certain: “It pays for itself so quickly and is so convincing that the future of freight transport has certainly arrived here. The haulage companies know this too. Because what counts for them is a sharp pencil, economic efficiency, not ideology or diesel romanticism.”
The powerful truck doesn’t really care about the temperatures, it can manage its 500 kilometer range even in today’s icy conditions. “We’ve also had drivers who have driven up to 700 kilometers on a single charge,” Müther reports from practical experience. However, the truck’s 800 V network has to communicate with the charging station’s power electronics. “Actually, everything is now standardized,” says Sebastian Schriek, Product Manager at Phoenix Contact Power Supplies, who is part of today’s test team. “But even small deviations in communication between the vehicle and charging station that are within the standard can cause the charging process to be aborted. For example, if the standard describes that a vehicle logs on to the charging station and must receive a response within 10 milliseconds, but the vehicle is programmed so that this response must be received after 7 milliseconds, then the charging process is aborted immediately. This is intended for the safety of the user and is also within the standard, but faster than required. We have to determine this and program it into the charging controller so that there are no problems in practice.” For every vehicle model? “In principle no, but in practice it does. We can’t leave our customers, i.e. the charging station manufacturers, to deal with these problems on their own.”
A look outside, however, shows: The eActros gets along brilliantly with the charging station and sucks its thick batteries full without any problems. “Charging itself is not a problem for the utility vehicle either,” sighs Guido Remmert. The engineer knows what is (still) lacking: “Our infrastructure in Germany and Europe is not yet developed in such a way that every fleet, every haulage company can get access to the medium-voltage grid. But that’s what we need to be able to load trucks really quickly.” Lost in thought, he strokes an entire tower with special Charx power modules and adds with a grin: “Well, so far. With the eActros, we have also tested a brand new development in actual use, which we call Boost Charge Technology. With special batteries in the belly of the charging station, we can concentrate the comparatively low energy from the normal low-voltage grid in such a way that we can also charge a large consumer such as an eTruck in a very short time.”
