December 26, 2018 Vol. 15 No. 25

With the end of 2018 very near at hand, this is the moment when folks like me wrap up the year and talk about its highlights. I’ll be no different.

You could legitimately call 2018 the year of the BEV, or battery electric vehicle. The buzz was constant, but for the most part it was a lot of very serious enthusiasm and a ton of engineering effort without a whole lot of wheels on the ground commercially. Many trials, many demo units, and much momentum.

I’m being a little unfair in saying there aren’t many wheels on the ground and working because, for example, Orange EV’s commercially-deployed fleet of pure electric terminal trucks are in active use across the U.S., and recently surpassed 211,000 ‘key on’ hours and 675,000 miles. For terminal trucks used mostly in-yard and at lower speeds, these numbers are significant. Customers confirm that these trucks really work, the manufacturer says. Orange EV’s commercially deployed fleet is now in its fourth year in northern climates, seemingly oblivious to the cold and snow.

As well, BYD has quite a few fully electric trucks on trials and many buses working now, and the class 4 Fuso eCanter is already commercially available. J.B. Hunt Transport Services recently added five of the plug-in electric Fusos to its final-mile fleet. Fuso is a real player, well proven, from a strong manufacturer. I would be willing to bet that Hunt adds more of them. These first five eCanters will be used for home deliveries in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., and the greater Houston area.

	The eLion8 is a tandem-axle class 8 truck or tractor with custom-built frame and cab, all electric, coming this year

The eCanter has a range of only 80 miles max but it’s well suited for inner-city delivery applications, according to Hunt. The trucks feature a one-to-two hour fast charge option with a DC charger. Operating costs for the eCanter can be as much as $2000 lower than diesel for each 12,000 miles driven, the carrier says.

“The eCanter demonstrates that the future of electric trucks is very possible and is no longer a prototype but a real truck delivering real goods daily,” said Justin Palmer, president and CEO of Mitsubishi Fuso Truck of America, Inc.”

AND THERE’S A QUIET LITTLE COMPANY in Quebec that you’ve probably never heard of — Lion Electric, born in 2008, which already has some 150 battery-electric class C school buses in daily operation across the continent. The Lion 360 has been built since 2015 and is doing well by all accounts. Earlier this year the company showed off an all-electric 26-ft. minibus, the eLionM. It’s a 160 kWh vehicle, custom-built with a low-floor for the paratransit, transit, and urban segments. It features a range of 150 miles on a single charge. The electric motor offers up the equivalent of 200 hp.

Lion also has a heavy-duty truck coming. This past fall the vertically integrated company introduced its eLion8, a tandem-axle class 8 truck or tractor with custom-built frame and cab. Said to be ready next year, it will come with several wheelbase offerings, air or leaf-spring suspensions, and a variety of power options, all of them plug-in electric. Top speed will be up to 105 km/h.

Using lithium-ion batteries up to 480 kWh, the truck will develop as much as 470 hp and a whopping maximum torque of up to 2580 lb ft.

The company is looking to build a second manufacturing plant in the U.S.

THEN THERE’S THE FREIGHTLINER eM2. Earlier this month Penske Truck Leasing accepted the keys to its first electric eM2. The big boys are in the game.

“Electric commercial vehicles present a real opportunity to advance the ideal of emissions-free mobility while improving our customers’ real cost of ownership,” said Daimler Trucks North America president and CEO Roger Nielsen.

The post AN ELECTRIC YEAR appeared first on Today's Trucking.

The eM2 is the first unit in what will become known as the Freightliner Electric Innovation Fleet, looking to test battery-electric vehicles in real-world operating conditions before entering series production. And the rollout involves more than trucks. Penske has committed to installing 20 high-power charging stations across five California locations this month, setting up support for nine more eM2s and 10 e-Cascadias that will begin service along the west coast of the U.S. in the coming year.

With a range of up to 230 miles, the medium-duty eM2 is intended for local distribution, pickup and delivery, food and beverage delivery, and last-mile logistics applications. As with the eCascadia, full commercialization is planned for 2021.

Earlier this year, DTNA formed the Freightliner Electric Vehicle Council composed of 30 customers with strong use-cases for electric trucks, including Penske, to further drive its sustainable transportation program. The company is working with the council members to ensure a holistic approach to launching electric trucks. Members of the customer council benefit from co-development of deployment strategies for battery electric vehicles including applicable use cases, current legislation and requirements for facilities, charging infrastructure and service support.

Daimler is first but obviously not alone among established manufacturers in the race to bring commercialized electric trucks to market. All of them have  scheduled further tests and some launches throughout 2019. We’re told that Navistar, for example, will launch one in 2019 or 2020, using technology developed jointly with Traton (read Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles) in Europe.

VOLVO IS CLOSE to bringing an electric truck to the game, as it already has across the pond. Volvo Trucks North America recently announced that it will  commercialize an electric version of the regional VNR tractor by 2020, placing the first test units on the road next year.

Volvo Trucks North America president Peter Voorhoeve was quick to stress that electric trucks are not a novelty, either. “This is a serious segment,” he said, noting how the costs of diesel and electric vehicles are drawing ever closer together. “There’s a lot of scientists trying to predict where the cross point of diesel and electric is, and it’s not that far away.”

“What we knew about batteries 1-1/2 years ago is not valid today,” added Magnus Koeck, Volvo’s vice-president of marketing and brand management.

Volvo Trucks will begin testing an all-electric truck with two California-based fleets in 2019, with plans to bring a truck based on the technology in Volvo’s existing European FE Electric to the North American market by 2020.

“We see BEVs in the short-term future being utilized for drayage and dedicated routes,” said Bill Bliem, senior vice president of fleet services for one of the test fleets, National Freight Inc., or NFI. Early last year, the company began exploring the potential of electric-powered class 8 tractors, particularly for drayage operations.

	A Freightliner eM2 was delivered to Penske Leasing this month, set for full production in 2021.

“ONCE BATTERY COSTS and weight decrease, BEVs’ total cost of ownership should be at or below the [total cost of ownership] of a diesel tractor,” said Bliem. “With the subtraction of an internal combustion engine and transmission, the different levels of autonomy can be attained more efficiently as well.”

The larger project, in concert with the California government, will deploy 23 class 8 Volvo battery-electric trucks and 24 zero-emission forklifts, along with 58 heavy-duty fast chargers and other related equipment

“This is an excellent opportunity to show the end-to-end potential of electrification,” said Peter Voorhoeve. “From solar energy harvesting at our customer locations, to electric vehicle uptime services, to potential second uses for batteries, this project will provide invaluable experience and data for the whole value chain.”

AN ‘ELECTRIC’ TRAILER was among the most interesting bits to be seen at last fall’s IAA commercial vehicles show in Hannover, Germany. It’s the prototype of Wabco’s first electric trailer “developed to maximize operating efficiency and lower fuel consumption.” Named ‘eTrailer’ — oddly enough — it’s equipped with its own electric motor and its associated control system, forming the company’s first attempt to connect truck and trailer vehicle controls.

The eTrailer prototype uses an intelligent electric motor control to recuperate electric energy during braking, which can then be reutilized as motive power or to operate onboard electric auxiliaries.

If you connect the eTrailer to a truck equipped with Wabco’s intelligent braking and stability control systems, operating efficiency of the truck-trailer combination will be further enhanced, the company says. In fact, the claim is that the eTrailer could deliver fuel savings up to 20% on short-haul routes and up to 10% for long hauls in a truck-trailer combination.

As of today, a tractor-trailer equipped with efficiency-related technologies from Wabco’s portfolio of industry-leading innovations can increase fuel economy up to 20 percent while reducing emissions. These WABCO innovations include technologies such as OptiFlow aerodynamics for trailers, OptiDrive automated manual transmission, OptiRide electronically controlled air suspension, c-comp clutch compressor, FuelGuard electronic air processing unit, and OptiPace predictive economic cruise control.

NACFE HAS BEEN ACTIVE in defining the pros and cons of electric trucks this past year, focusing on both medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The North American Council for Freight Efficiency’s ‘Guidance Reports’ are valuable to fleet owners attempting to wade through the morass of new and existing technologies, providing unbiased conclusions based on research by well qualified experts. I believe there will be five electric reports in all, the next one will deal with charging issues.

In NACFE’s first BEV report, ‘Electric Trucks: Where They Make Sense’, research found that the transition in specific market segments will be drawn out over decades, sharing space with traditional diesel and gasoline powertrains and also competing with other new technologies like fuel cells.

The rapid pace of battery energy density improvement will spur increases in BEV efficiency that likely cannot be matched by evolutionary changes to the internal combustion engine, the report said. These competing technologies are at different points in maturing… with the greater potential going to the newer BEVs.

	Russian dandelion is a viable alternative to the rubber tree in building tires, says Continental. Who knew?

Electrical charging infrastructure will take time and capital to build, according to the report, which went on to say…

“There are new business opportunities for the charging infrastructure that may accelerate this, such as utilities or third parties providing the charging stations to factories and warehouses. The lack of current infrastructure is not a detriment to BEV adoption. Rather it is an opportunity for market growth. Infrastructure generally always follows product innovation. New technologies spawn development of improved infrastructure. That development encourages product market penetration, a recurring cycle seen in many new technologies.

“Commercial battery electric vehicles must be reliable to gain market confidence. The experiences in this decade have largely been with small volumes of vehicles produced by smaller manufacturers. These early entrants have experienced typical learning-curve issues with new product introductions. Reliability of the new BEV technologies will improve through OEM experience with increasing numbers of vehicles on the road. The large OEMs will enter the market with production BEVs providing long-term stability for fleets considering BEVs. New OEM entrants such as Tesla, Thor, Chanje, and others will speed innovation through competition for market share.

“Maintenance and service cost reduction is an open question at this time. The industry is still at the early stages of development where designs have not yet matured through significant field experience. Preliminary indicators from automotive experience show that these costs are average or slightly better than typical internal-combustion alternatives. Feedback from medium-duty electric truck operators suggests that after separating out early failures, these vehicles have lower maintenance costs than diesel over the long run.

“COST IS ALWAYS A CRITICAL FACTOR in fleet technology decisions. The net costs/benefits of BEVs require more effort than traditionally limited ROI calculations. Multiple factors need to be included, from the straightforward such as grants, incentives and taxes, to hard-to-dollar-quantify items such as emissions credits, brand image, liability costs, disposal costs, indirect costs, driver/technician retention or attraction, potential customers and other opportunity costs/benefits buried in overhead or ignored in traditional ROI calculations. There are also new business model innovations related to costing delivering energy to the vehicle.

“BEVs will not be a solution for every market or every lane. Mixed fleets (that may include diesel, natural gas, and hybrid) optimized for specific routes and duty cycles will likely be the norm through 2050. Early adopters will be in the urban delivery class 3 through 6 segments where operations are characterized by fairly stable route definitions between 50 and 100 miles per day, loads tend to cube out, and vehicles run one shift per day and return to the same base location. Longer ranges and heavier weights in classes 7 and 8 are possible in specific operations, but will not be viable in all roles.”

Roy Horton, Mack’s Director of Product Strategy, summarized this well in a Heavy Duty Trucking interview in December 2017, the NACFE study noted.

“Mack believes the earliest adopters of electrification will be operations with the chance to charge at a home base and not depend on general infrastructure for fuel.,” Horton said. “That includes refuse, local delivery, and public transportation fleets. Next would be applications with fixed routes where infrastructure is established but longer ranges are less of a concern. That opens opportunities for local distribution, regional haulers, and select vocational segments. Long-haulers would be the last to use the trucks, drawing on power from secured infrastructure.”

“Electric trucks are not a fad,” said NACFE executive director Mike Roeth in a recent conference call, expressing surprise at how quickly the industry is developing them. “We aren’t sure what the actual adoption rate will be, but it’s clear that this technology is here and will increasingly be deployed in real-world fleet operations in the near future.”

AND A NOTE ON RUBBER. Yes, a long way from electric trucks, but this is a cool story to my mind and I didn’t want to let it go without a mention.

Earlier this month Continental officially opened a research laboratory named “Taraxagum Lab Anklam” in Germany. It’s the base for research on extracting Russian dandelion as an alternative raw material source to the rubber tree in the tropics. If initial test results indicate viability, the tire maker is planning to introduce dandelion rubber into serial production within 10 years.

Who would have guessed that?

At the lab’s opening, Nikolai Setzer, member of the Executive Board of Continental AG and head of the Tire division, said, “We are the first tire manufacturer in the world to invest such a significant amount in industrializing dandelion rubber. We see Russian dandelion as an important alternative and complementary to conventional natural rubber… allowing us to meet rising global demand in an environmentally compatible and reliable way.”

In the medium term, around 20 employees with backgrounds in agricultural sciences, chemistry, and production and process technology will work on plant cultivation as well as developing, setting up, and operating machines for processing Russian dandelion.

“We have been working to understand the molecular basis of the rubber biosynthesis in the dandelion plant for many years. This biological understanding has now brought industrial use within reach. With the new test laboratory, Continental has broken new ground that makes this transfer concept highly visible,” said Dirk Prüfer, Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the University of Münster.

Continental has been conducting research into replacing natural rubber from the tropics with plants that can be grown at moderate climates since 2011. The first sample of a premium winter tire featuring a tread made from pure dandelion rubber was brought onto the road in 2014. The first truck tire with a tread made from Taraxagum then followed at IAA 2016.

THIS NEWSLETTER IS PUBLISHED every two weeks by Newcom Media. For the most part it’s a heads-up notice about what’s going on with trucking technology. I also write here about interesting products that may not have had the ‘air play’ they deserved within the last few months, and maybe about issues that warrant attention in my occasionally humble opinion.

I should remind you that, with the odd exception, I don’t endorse any of the products I write about in this e-newsletter, nor do I have the resources to test them except on rare occasions. What you’re getting is reasonably well educated opinion based on almost 40 years in trucking.

If you have comments of whatever sort about The Lockwood Report, or maybe you’ve tried a gizmo I should know about, please contact me at rolf@newcom.ca

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