The charging conundrum faced by commercial electric trucks

buy more time

Daimler owns the Freightliner and Western Star brands and has delivered about 100 electric eCascadias to date. O’Leary said he has customers who request hundreds at a time. He said he would respond by offering 25 and asking clients to push orders so he could devote more time to infrastructure development.

“It’s great that the acceptance is so strong. People who have them love them, but they need to figure out how to claim them,” he said.

Some agree with O’Leary’s assessment.

Adam Buttgenbach, Director of Fleet Engineering and Sustainability at PepsiCo, which is testing electric trucks, said:

“If you go to the power company and tell them you need this much power, they’ll say, ‘Good, come back in two years,'” Buttgenbach said.

Peter Voorhoeve, president of Volvo Trucks North America, said companies should plan to build charging infrastructure about a year before they plan to deploy electric trucks.

Volvo Trucks works with customers to install home-based charging stations for people traveling the route back to base at the end of each shift. We are also working with our California dealers to install chargers that can corridor the major trucking routes of Interstate 5. Five stations are expected to be operational by the end of this year.

UPS has accepted delivery of the first 10 eCascadias. This is part of a slow approach, which will ultimately require tens of thousands of zero-emission trucks of various sizes to meet increasingly stringent environmental regulations.

“I think everyone wants to know what the real infrastructure will look like in the long term, so at UPS we’re going small,” says Maintenance and Engineering of UPS’s fleet of transportation vehicles. Anthony Marshall, Vice President, said. “We’ve been playing with these electric trucks to make sure charging and everything else works.”

different organizations

Rakesh Aneja, head of eMobility at Daimler Trucks North America, said part of the problem was that the transition to electric trucking required different organizations working together, something that hadn’t happened before. says.

Truck makers such as Daimler, charger providers, customers, utility companies and construction companies building high-voltage systems will follow, he said.

“Just getting everyone on board with the multi-stakeholder timelines and critical paths was a daunting task,” says Aneja.

Another hurdle is the typical timelines of the power companies supplying the electricity.

“They don’t start working until they get confirmation of a firm order from the customer. By then, it’s too late from a timeline and process standpoint,” says Aneja.

All of these will be resolved, but it will take time, said Henrik Holland, global head of mobility at Prologis. Prologis is a large warehousing and distribution company working with fleets and manufacturers on advanced transportation systems, including both electric and autonomous trucks.

“As more electric cars and trucks hit the roads, we need to make sure the public and private sectors are working together to invest in the necessary infrastructure,” said Holland. increase. “As countries transition to electrified transportation systems that help reduce emissions, new and innovative solutions are emerging to help expand energy options, including a rise in solar power, energy storage and fuel cell technology. will.”