Electric cars and electric lorries are usually discussed as the same story at different sizes. They are not. The gap between what a car draws at a fast charger and what a forty-tonne truck needs to turn around in a driver's legal break is roughly a factor of ten, and a factor of ten is not a bigger version of the same thing. It is a different connector, a different standard, a different grid connection, and increasingly a different part of the service area. Anyone who drives a motorway will see the consequences well before they drive an electric truck.
The numbers, side by side
The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is being developed by CharIN, the industry consortium behind CCS, through a task force formed in March 2018. Its ceiling is 1,250 volts DC, with 1,500 V capability noted, at up to 3,000 amps, for a maximum of 3.75 megawatts.
Hold that against the car world. A good public fast charger delivers 150 kW; the fastest commonly deployed reach 350 kW. MCS at full specification is about ten times the latter, and roughly what a few hundred homes draw at once.
The physical interface reflects it. The MCS connector is triangular, with two large DC power pins, four communications and detection pins and one protective earth pin, and later revisions added larger pins and protective sheaths specifically for safety at these currents. Communication runs over ISO 15118-20, with the physical layer using Single-pair Ethernet.
It is also now genuinely standardised rather than proposed. SAE J3271 was published in March 2025, and IEC 63379 version 1.0 followed in February 2026. The design itself was selected in May 2019 and version 3.2 adopted in December 2021, so this is the end of a long process rather than the start of one.
The target is Class 6, 7 and 8 commercial vehicles: trucks and buses, with the same interface eyed for electric aircraft and marine use.
Why a truck cannot simply charge for longer instead: a driver's rest period is a legal quantity, not a preference. If the vehicle cannot take enough energy inside that window, the schedule breaks and the load arrives late. Charging power for freight is not a convenience feature. It is the thing that decides whether the route is operable at all.
What the law is requiring
The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation sets out heavy-duty obligations alongside the car ones.
Heavy-duty vehicles must be able to reach charging with a minimum output of 350 kW every 60 kilometres along the core TEN-T network, and every 100 kilometres along the wider comprehensive network. Charging hubs must deliver a total power of at least 400 kW and include at least one point with an individual output of at least 150 kW.
These phase in from 2025 onwards. The published summaries do not cleanly separate which threshold applies in which year, so we are not going to assign dates we cannot verify. The direction and the magnitudes are the reliable part.
For scale, the estimate commonly cited is that roughly 50,000 heavy-duty chargers will be needed across Europe by 2030, of which about 35,000 would be ultra-fast.
Why this changes the service area you use
Here is the part that reaches ordinary drivers, and it is mostly about electricity rather than parking.
Power is not fungible on a site. A service area has a grid connection of a certain capacity. Adding megawatt-class charging is not a matter of installing more posts; it usually means a substation-scale upgrade, and where that upgrade is slow or expensive, the available power gets allocated. The car chargers and the truck chargers are drawing from the same supply.
Trucks need different geometry. A parking bay that a car can reverse into is useless to an articulated vehicle with a trailer. Heavy-duty charging tends to require its own area with drive-through access, which competes for the same land as the car park.
Occupancy behaves differently. A car charger occupied for twenty minutes is a short wait. A megawatt bay occupied by a vehicle mid-session, with a driver on a mandated rest, is a much longer block, and there are far fewer of them per site.
None of this is an argument against electrifying freight. It is a reason the motorway stops you use will look different within a few years, and the change will be driven by the electrical supply rather than by anybody's preference about layout.
If you drive an electric car
- Do not expect to use a megawatt bay. Different connector, different vehicle class. This is not a faster option that happens to be reserved. Your car physically cannot take that plug.
- Expect fast-charger provision at truck-heavy stops to be uneven. Where a site has invested its grid capacity in heavy-duty charging, car provision may be the constrained half.
- Read a site's headline power carefully. A "400 kW hub" under the regulation may mean 400 kW shared across the site, with a single point guaranteed at 150 kW. Total site power and per-vehicle power are different claims.
- Expect the newest sites to be the good ones. As with the car-payment rules, the obligations bite hardest on new build, so recently completed TEN-T sites are where the modern equipment is.
The data problem, one level harder
Everything difficult about knowing whether a car charger works is worse here, and worth stating plainly rather than glossing.
Heavy-duty charging sites are few, new, and inconsistently recorded in open map data. The tagging conventions that describe connector types were designed around cars, and a site's real constraints for a truck (whether the bay is reachable with a trailer, whether the full power is available when two vehicles are plugged in, whether the drive-through is blocked) are not fields in any database.
And the cost of being wrong is asymmetric in a way it is not for a car. A car driver who finds a charger occupied loses twenty minutes. A truck driver who arrives at a blocked megawatt bay may lose the rest of a legal driving window, which is a lost shift rather than a delay.
We do not have a solution to that, and we would rather say so than imply one. What we can do is the same modest thing we do everywhere: show what someone actually observed, with the minute they observed it, and leave the space honestly empty where nobody has. For infrastructure this new, a report from this morning is not merely better than a static database entry. Quite often it is the only information that exists.