Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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22 commercial carrier journal | january 2018 A long way to go before long-haul batteries? BY JASON CANNON E lectrification has hit trucking like a tidal wave, with notable debuts last year of tractors from the likes of Cummins, Mitsubishi Fuso and Tesla. But just like their diesel counterparts, electric trucks don't make the same sense to all concerned transportation segments. To date, electric truck manufacturers have targeted local routes. Julie Furber, ex- ecutive director of Cummins' electrification business development, said the near-term battery-powered outlook for long-haul applications isn't rosy. "For a line-haul truck application, we think a fully electric vehicle does not make sense economically because of the weight needed to supply battery power," Furber said. Cummins' 100-mile range Class 7 Aeos tractor was designed to serve as a demon- strator vehicle for vocational applications, urban delivery, port drayage and terminal container handling. "To get significant range extension and reduce the charging time, you actually need chemistry that probably hasn't been developed yet," Furber said. "Even if we give a lot of credence to improvements in energy density, if you take the current level of energy – the current battery chemistry that we have available today – to get 600 miles on a single charge would take about 20,000 pounds of battery." Other experts have their own doubts. "I'm not sure I buy the model of no distri- bution, no service centers, none of that to make it work," said Rusty Rush, head of the nation's largest truck dealership network, Rush Truck Centers. "It may work on the consumer side of cars, but I don't think on the commercial side it fits." Hybrids and infrastructure e jump to truck electrification isn't likely to be a fast one, and Furber predicts hybrids will offer a method to test the waters. "If you want a cost-effective solution, I think it'd be a hybrid with a smaller engine, and when it gets into a zero-emissions zone, a no-idling situation or a stop-and-start situation, it can run fully electric," she said. is past November, a Mack Pinnacle prototype equipped with a proprietary and fully integrated plug-in hybrid-electric driveline participated in a zero-emissions eHighway demonstration near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. "It's probably not going to be in the truckload space anytime soon," said Michael McRoberts, chief operating officer of Rush Truck Centers. "It's going to be last- mile stuff, and even then, it's going to be a (small) share." Nikola Motor Co. will deploy hybrid technology on the fuel cell-powered tractor the company expects to debut in 2019. Company founder Trevor Milton said combining the electric powertrain with a hydrogen power supply relieves range anx- iety associated with most electric models, offers drivers a way to refuel quickly versus recharging and allows for zero emissions. "I have a hard time in the next 10 or 15 years really seeing it on the truckload, the over-the-road, because there's just a lot of things on my mind, whether it's infra- structure, whether it's payload," Rush said. "ere are a lot of things involved that I think are headwinds, but at the same time, it will be a part of offerings that we will learn how to deal with as dealers." Nikola and Toyota both are in the pro- cess of developing a hydrogen infrastruc- ture, and Furber said similar work will have to be done for electricity. "No matter how fast you can charge, you have to be able to stop somewhere and charge," she said. "at charging infrastruc- ture does not exist, and it's not clear to me whose responsibility it is to put in all those charging stations." New faces, new ideas One of the positives of innovation is that it brings many nontraditional players and outsiders into the market, and that has happened with electrification in trucking. Furber said many universities have ongoing battery chemistry and density pro- grams in place, while some companies not otherwise associated with trucking have applicable technologies to bring to market. Many fleets have embraced the shi toward electric trucks, with Tesla hav- ing secured roughly 200 orders since its November debut and orders for the Nikola One tractor piling up by the thousands – each customer attracted to the trucks' zero-emissions possibilities and their per- ceived reduced cost of ownership. Tesla said it will be among its own first customers for the company's electric Semi, using it to shuttle freight from Hawthorne, Calif., to its Nevada Gigafactory. "eoretically, maintenance costs should be lower," Furber said. "ere's fewer moving parts and fewer things to go wrong. ere's no doubt we expect the maintenance costs to be lower, but we don't know how much lower yet." in focus: ELECTRIC TRUCKS