First Time at the CV Show: Trucks, Charging and Unexpected Optimism

Attending my first CV Show felt a bit like being dropped into a completely different world; one made up of vans, trucks, charging infrastructure, fleet operators, and a genuinely surprising amount of enthusiasm.

I’ve been working at Paua for just under two years now, firmly stationed within the comfortable confines of my home office, managing CPO relationships and data.

So this was the first time I was truly unleashed into the wild: three full days at the Commercial Vehicle Show.

Complaint number one: my chair at home is significantly better than anything they had at the show!

Once I recovered from the shock of sitting on industrial-grade conference seating for several days, I started to properly take in the scale of the event.

The venue itself was overwhelmingly large. There were actual trucks and commercial vehicles everywhere; which sounds obvious in hindsight, but seeing full-sized vehicles parked inside an exhibition hall still felt a little surreal. It was one of those moments where your brain briefly goes: “Wait… how did they even get this in here?”

‍The place was so massive that it genuinely took me all three days, mostly through strategic “I’m just going for a quick walk” escapes from our stand, to cover the whole floor. And I’m still convinced I missed half of it.But honestly, it was brilliant.

One thing that stood out more than anything else was the people. I met approximately fifteen truckloads of them, and almost every interaction was positive. That’s not always something you can say about industry events. Sometimes conferences can feel transactional, conversations that start and end with sales pitches and LinkedIn requests.This didn’t feel like that.Maybe some of that is down to the influence of The EV Café and the wider EV community, but there was a genuinely welcoming atmosphere throughout the show. People seemed excited to be there.

Not just the sales teams either, engineers, operators, fleet managers, infrastructure people, everyone. There was a real willingness to share knowledge, feedback, and lived experience openly. Conversations quickly moved beyond the surface-level “what does your company do?” into honest discussions about the realities of electrifying fleets, charging challenges, operational headaches, and where the industry is heading next.

Working for a payments platform like Paua, you spend a lot of time thinking about charging infrastructure, roaming, reliability, and driver experience. But being at the show made it clear just how interconnected the commercial EV ecosystem has become. You can’t really talk about vehicles without talking about charging. You can’t talk about charging without discussing uptime, fleet operations, software, energy, or driver behaviour.It’s all connected, and events like the CV Show make that very obvious very quickly.

I also left with a much stronger appreciation for just how early this industry still is.

There’s huge momentum, but there’s also a refreshing honesty about the challenges ahead. Nobody pretends everything is solved. And strangely, that made the conversations feel even more optimistic.People are building things. Testing things. Learning quickly. Sharing what works and what absolutely does not.

For a first CV Show experience, I couldn’t really have asked for more, apart from perhaps a better chair and this time wearing an apple watch so I can fill up those circles in record time...