Van Der Mierden has put a one-off DAF XD Electric into daily collection duty.
Electric trucks tend to arrive in press releases either as demonstrators or as fleet orders. This one arrived as neither. Van Der Mierden Transport of the Netherlands has taken delivery of a single DAF XD Electric finished in the colours and striping of DAF’s 1996 racing truck, and put it straight into daily collection work.
The livery will get the photographs. The specification is what a transport operator should look at. The vehicle is a DAF XD 350 FT 4×2 tractor unit, the model voted International Truck of the Year 2026, running a 350 kW driveline, equivalent to 480 hp, fed by a 525 kWh battery pack. DAF quotes a range of more than 500 kilometres on a single charge depending on application.
Collection work is close to the ideal electric application, and the reason is structural rather than promotional.
Routes are fixed and repeat daily. Distances are known in advance. The vehicle returns to the same depot at the end of every shift, where it can charge overnight on the operator’s own infrastructure. There is none of the range anxiety that comes with long-haul work into unfamiliar territory, and none of the public charging dependency.
That combination is why the first genuinely commercial electric truck deployments have clustered in regional distribution and collection rather than trunking. Over 500 kilometres of range against a route that is known and bounded is not a compromise, it is headroom.
The operator’s view
The truck was specified by DAF Netherlands and delivered by DAF dealer Truckland. Van Der Mierden already runs several distinctive vehicles in its fleet, and became interested when Truckland brought the concept to them.
“With this DAF, we demonstrate that sustainability, operational practicality and a distinctive design go hand in hand,” said Julian van der Mierden, Managing Director of Van Der Mierden Transport. “We deliberately chose an innovative and sustainable electric solution that can be deployed directly in day-to-day operations. Like our customers, we care about nature and the future of the next generations.”
The phrase worth keeping is “deployed directly in day-to-day operations”. A one-off truck that spends its life at trade shows proves nothing. One that runs a route proves something specific about range, charging turnaround and driver acceptance, which is the information other operators actually need.
Van Der Mierden has been trading for more than sixty years and remains family-owned. It began collecting churns from local producers with a horse and cart. Its fleet today consists almost entirely of DAF trucks, running insulated tank trailers across the Netherlands and beyond.
For DAF, the vehicle sits inside a wider commitment: all 34 DAF sales locations in the UK and Ireland are working towards becoming DAF Electric Truck Centres, supporting sales and service of electric trucks and PACCAR Chargers, across a dealer network of 136 locations.
There is a lesson buried in a truck painted like a 1990s race machine, and it is not about paint. Electric adoption in commercial transport has been slowed as much by internal scepticism as by charging infrastructure. A vehicle that people want to look at, doing real work on a real route, is a more persuasive internal argument than a spreadsheet.
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