An Australian company has built a truck that charges electric vehicles on the spot, no grid required.
Alpine Energy, a Melbourne-based manufacturer, unveiled the MGEN M40 last week — a mobile DC fast-charger that drives to a stranded EV rather than waiting for the EV to find a charger.
It’s a small but meaningful distinction, and one that solves a problem nobody has cracked at scale in Australia yet.
The idea is simple. An electric car breaks down 80km from the nearest charger. A recovery operator dispatches the M40. It pulls up, plugs in and delivers up to 40 kW of DC output — roughly 65 km of range per 15 minutes of charging. Job done.
But roadside recovery is just one use case. Alpine Energy has its eye on mine sites, remote industrial operations, and emergency response — floods, bushfires, cyclones — anywhere the grid is either absent or has just stopped working.
For fleet operators already running EVs in the outback, that’s not a hypothetical. It’s an everyday problem.
The M40 is built into a petrol-electric BYD Shark, with 4G/LTE and satellite connectivity baked in alongside OCPP-compliant telemetry.
Hardware partner Ampernext supplies the battery-coupled DC-DC charging technology at the core of the platform. EXOR Oceania is helping open doors into the mining sector.
Prototypes are heading to operational partners later this year. Alpine is looking for roadside recovery operators, mobile service providers and remote-industry businesses willing to put the system through its paces in the field.
Early participants get prototype access and hands-on engineering support.
There’s validation work still ahead. The M40 is addressing something real — and until now, largely ignored.
