Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/959367
86 commercial carrier journal | april 2018 EQUIPMENT: ELECTRIFICATION Cummins Engine Business president, says he thinks electric-battery vehicles will be most viable in passenger-bus and urban- delivery segments. Last year, Cummins debuted its Aeos Class 7 electric vehicle concept, specifically targeting urban markets with operating ranges of up to 300 miles. The bottom line Preferred operating conditions aren't the only use-case where traditional and electric powertrains vary wildly. In gas and diesel operations, the larger you scale the equipment, the less expensive it gener- ally becomes to operate because you can buy in volume. For electric vehicles, the opposite is true, Nordh says. "Your building has the capacity to have a single charger, no problem," he says. "It probably costs you a couple thousand dollars [at most] to install a decently fast charger. However, if you want to put 30 vehicles on that same site, now you're fac- ing an issue with building infrastructure." Nordh says it would be uncommon for a single facility to have the electrical capacity to charge 30 vehicles. "Potentially even the utility company doesn't have enough power going to your building, so they're going to start upgrading things," he says. "Suddenly, you're talking about mul- tiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars just to be able to charge these vehicles." Maintenance matters Zero tailpipe emissions aside, one of the attractions of electric powertrains is a perceived reduced maintenance cost. e expectation is that these trucks will re- quire less maintenance since they feature fewer moving parts and require fewer fluid changes. Clarity on just how much savings an electric truck can provide isn't quite as clear since there are so few of them on the road in a commercial setting, Nordh says. An inability to sell the maintenance benefits with hard data likely will slow adoption until those figures begin to firm up, he says. "I don't think that it's going to be the availability of the product and the technology, because I think that's coming along fairly quickly," Nordh says. "I think it's going to be the proving-out of the maintenance costs. ere's a lot of predic- tions being made about the reduction of costs, but nobody has the data yet." Even though electric trucks likely will reduce costs by a measureable degree, they still will require an occasional repair, and that will be a sophisticated process. "Maintenance on the electric vehicle requires a higher-skilled labor but a lower number of hours needed to maintain the vehicle," Nordh says. "When there is something that goes wrong with an electric vehicle, you have a very signifi- cant diagnosing exercise, and you need experienced technicians to do those diagnostics." Regardless of how oen an electric vehicle is serviced, parts must be available on demand, and not every corner parts store has electric components sitting on the shelf. "ey're not going to have inverters," Nordh says. "ey're not going to have spare batteries when those fail." Tesla last November presented a completely reimagined truck interior for its Semi that includes a center-mounted seat, more in the style of a cockpit. On each side of the driver will be large touchscreen displays to house various applications and displays. This rendering shows the interior of the Nikola One tractor. A large touchscreen tablet will display information such as battery level, range and mapping, as well as cabin controls. Screens are mounted on each side to display feeds from cameras.