This Isn’t What You Think Logistics Looks Like

When most people picture a career in logistics, they think of motorways, warehouses, and early starts. Driving a truck, maybe. Loading a van. Those jobs exist, and they matter. But they’re a fraction of the story. At TwentyForty, a freight innovation platform that grew out of a 90-year-old family haulage company in Cambridgeshire, the work looks completely different.

Try drag racing an electric truck, for starters.

Quarter-Mile in a 42-Tonne Truck

Last summer, we took a 42-tonne electric truck to Santa Pod Raceway, the UK’s home of drag racing, and lined it up against a diesel. Quarter mile, head to head. We weren’t trying to set a speed record. We wanted to push the truck to its limits and capture what was happening under the skin: torque curves, energy consumption, and how the battery behaves at full tilt. We rigged it with cameras, hooked up the telematics, and filmed everything.

The amount of data that comes from a modern electric truck is staggering. The kind of information that used to be reserved for motorsport engineering is now sitting in the cab of a vehicle delivering pallets to a warehouse in Bedford. Most operators don’t even know it’s there.

That’s a normal week at TwentyForty.

Freight Influencer? Basically, Yeah.

Logistics has its own content creators. Not in the brand-deals-and-ring-lights way, but people building audiences, putting out regular content, and shaping how an entire industry thinks about what comes next.

The Loading Bay is our media platform. Podcasts, video, editorial. All about what’s happening in freight and logistics right now, not what some consultant reckons might happen in ten years. One recent podcast featured the founder of a drone company building fixed-wing aircraft that can carry 20 parcels up to 100 kilometres on less power than a kettle. Another sat down with the team behind an autonomous truck platform preparing to operate on UK roads. These aren’t concepts on a whiteboard. They’re real companies, building real kit, and we’re the ones having the conversations with them.

The person hosting those conversations and producing the content didn’t come from the media. They came from logistics. They run trucks. They know the difference between a curtain sider and a box body. And they’ve built a media platform that reaches fleet operators, policymakers, and technology companies across the UK and into Europe. Call it what you want, but that’s influence. It just happens to be about freight, not fashion.

Working on The Loading Bay means scripting, filming, editing, interviewing, running social channels, and working out what content lands and what doesn’t. You’ve also got to know enough about the subject matter to hold your own when talking about battery chemistry, aviation regulation, or grid infrastructure. It’s a media job rooted in an industry that moves everything you use.

Electric Trucks on Real Road

TwentyForty grew out of Welch Group, a fourth-generation family logistics operator with three depots across Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire. Welch Group was one of the first SME operators in the country to put electric HGVs into commercial service. It started with a 19-tonne Renault E-Tech in 2023, the first fully electric HGV in Cambridge. Then came 42-tonne electric tractor units hauling full pallet loads on real network duties.

That hands-on experience is the foundation for everything TwentyForty does. When we talk about electrification, it’s because we’ve done the driver training, adapted the routes, built the charging infrastructure, and worked out what holds up in live service. There’s solar on the depot roof, battery storage on site, and an HGV charger in the yard. The stuff you learn running this kit every day, in all weathers, on real customer deliveries, is stuff you can’t get from a textbook.

Drones, Autonomous Trucks, and Government Programmes

The range of work that falls under TwentyForty is broad. The team is involved in government-funded innovation programmes worth tens of millions of pounds, working alongside names like M&S, Eddie Stobart, and Kuehne+Nagel. There are research partnerships with universities studying how the freight industry gets to zero emissions. There have been trips to Brussels to collaborate on European research projects covering long-range electric truck demonstrators, autonomous freight, and logistics networks that combine road, drone, and waterway transport.

Back at the depot, the work includes running trials with technology startups, building energy infrastructure, and hosting workshops that bring together people from twelve different sectors to work through the practical barriers to decarbonising freight. There’s a project exploring how electrified freight depots could play a role in balancing the national electricity grid. And someone needs to film it, write about it, produce podcasts about it, and turn it into something that helps other operators understand what’s coming.

Careers You Didn’t Know Existed

None of this needs an HGV licence. The roles that make it work span research, project management, media production, data analysis, policy, energy, engineering, and communications. There are people writing funding applications for government innovation competitions. People building websites and automating workflows. People pulling apart telematics data to figure out how electric trucks perform in different conditions. People hosting podcasts that shape how operators, manufacturers, and the government think about the future of freight.

Logistics is changing quickly. The sector sits at the centre of some big challenges: decarbonisation, automation, energy transition, and supply chain resilience. The people working on those problems need skills that didn’t exist in this industry ten years ago.

And because it’s still logistics, still practical, still about making things work in the real world, there’s very little fluff. Nobody’s in a glass office writing strategy documents about the future. They’re in the depot, in the truck, in the studio, getting on with it.

A Sector Full of Surprises

The food on your table, the phone in your pocket, the stuff that built the room you’re sitting in. It all moved through a supply chain that someone planned, managed, and kept running. The industry behind that is now one of the most interesting places to build a career, if you know where to look.

If you’re into technology, sustainability, media, data, policy, or just solving problems that matter, logistics has a place for you. It probably looks nothing like what you’d expect.

TwentyForty is an operator-led freight innovation platform accelerating the future of freight. Find out more at twentyforty.uk