CCJ

May 2018

Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal

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30 commercial carrier journal | may 2018 Electric company Chanje goes all in on plug-in power with V8070 medium-duty panel van BY JASON CANNON A fully-electric powertrain is all the buzz in commercial transportation these days, but it remains somewhat of a unicorn, with few production units actually on the road. Electric vehicle startup Chanje changed all that recently, offering me a test drive of its V8070 van around Brooklyn, N.Y. e company's flagship vehicle is the first electric medium-duty panel van designed and built from scratch and targets the final-mile delivery industry. Historically, if you wanted to go elec- tric in the last-mile space, you needed to retrofit a fossil-fuel model. Chanje's V8070 cargo van takes the aermarket out of the equation, and Bryan Hansel, the company's chief executive officer, hopes to capitalize on a waning global appetite for fossil fuels. "All the trends in diesel are going in the wrong direction," Hansel says. "ey're more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain." Hansel says the company's electric motors have significantly fewer moving parts than a fuel-fired engine, resulting in a mainte- nance cost that is reduced by upward of 70 percent. For maintenance, Chanje is lever- aging Ryder's 800-location-strong footprint. e two companies already are training part of Ryder's 6,000-tech- nician force on how to service the V8070's dual-electric motor. Taking it for a spin Getting behind the wheel, the van's push-button start was an interesting feature more befitting a luxury car than a commercial van, but it works, and it's cool. When you push the button, it's much like turning on a computer; it takes about five seconds for the van to boot up and offer the driver a display of all its vital signs. I pressed one more button to disengage the van's electric park- ing brake, and I was on my way. A cobra-head shifter is mounted just to the right of the driver, and shifting from park to reverse or drive is a pretty normal process. Even in the absence of an engine, the van still creeps forward at an idle pace when you li your foot off the brake, a feature that also helps prevent the van from rolling backward from a stop. Without a running engine, the 16,535-lb.-GVW van is noise- free – a feature I'm sure the crowded streets of Brooklyn could appreciate as I whizzed around the crowded blocks, sharing the road with numerous loud transit buses and refuse trucks. e V8070 offers a 30-percent grad- ability, meaning the van can launch from a dead stop up extraordinarily steep hills. Hansel say in on-road test- ing in San Francisco, the company was unable to find a hill the van couldn't scale. at's pretty impressive; I've been to SanFran several times and have found many that I can barely walk. Grades tend to be a weakness of elec- tric vehicles, which are high on torque but oen don't offer the gear ratios for both steep climbing and highway speeds. To get one, you usually have to sacrifice the other, but the V8070 has both. Chanje's van is capable of speeds up to 80 mph, giving the van plenty of power at the top and bottom end. My first right-hand turn in Brook- lyn took us to the foot of a steep grade. I plowed my foot into the accelerator, the torque from the dual rear wheels bit the asphalt, and we crested the hill easily. T E S T D R I V E : C H A N J E E L E C T R I C P O W E R T R A I N C A R G O V A N Chanje's flagship V8070 is the first electric medium-duty panel van designed and built from scratch and targets the final-mile delivery industry. The all-digital Chanje instrument cluster offers a wealth of vehicle status information. A 10.4-inch Android-based touchscreen display with LTE connectivity controls most of the van's features.

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