Can electric trucks do the jobs of diesel rigs? Can the Tesla Semi deliver the range promised. Can a big logistics company find a way to incorporate charging into its daily operations?
Ten fleet depots and a huge variety of electric trucks are being put to the test in the latest “Run on Less” event managed by the North American Council for Freight Efficiency and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).
In the first event in 2017, the emphasis of the initiative was to try and test ways to improve fuel economy (hence “run on less”) through various measures such as more aerodynamic trailers, low rolling resistance tyres, and encouraging economical driving.
In 2021, Run On Less Electric was the first event to test electric vehicles in a range of truck classes from step vans, box trucks and long-haul prime movers. Each participant had one electric vehicle.
This year, “Run on Less: Electric Depot” has a slightly different emphasis. Now the emphasis is on the challenges associated with running larger fleets and providing the necessary charging infrastructure back at the depot to support the fleet. It is worth watching closely.
In this event, 10 fleet depots have had charging infrastructure installed to support fleets of trucks in various classes. Alongside these EV trucks, ICE trucks will continue to do the same work. The energy and fuel consumption of the EV and ICE trucks will be tracked and compared.
Some of the participants include United Parcel Service and their famous brown parcel vans, Frito Lay with smaller delivery vans servicing New York City, and Pepsico running a fleet of Tesla semis for long-distance deliveries across California.
The purpose of this trial is to give companies with a range of different trucking requirements the confidence that EV trucks can work for them, but of course, there will also be plenty of learning that will come from this exercise.
Charging infrastructure for heavy duty vehicles with high duty cycles can be complex. Issues such as grid connection, load management, charging regimes that meet duty requirements, and so on are all concerns that Run on Less is trying to work out.
After one week, some interesting results are already available from the Run on Less live data stream. The vehicles that are probably getting a lot of the attention are the Tesla semis.
There are three in the Pepsico fleet and they are doing big distances. In the first six days, they have averaged 770 kilometres per day. Each of the three trucks has done some trips over 1,000 kilometres with the longest trip being 1,297 kilometres by Tesla 3 on day 3.
On this day, the truck did just five deliveries and spent over 90% of its time at 80 km/h or more. The truck did two big charges and one small charge around midday accounting for 18% of the 24 hour period.
The eCascadia trucks in the Schneider fleet are doing about a dozen deliveries and about 250 km per day on average and returning to base with a comfortably high state of charge. This hopefully reinforces that many of the trucks in our freight system aren’t always doing very long distances and that these can go electric fairly easily.
The UPS parcel vans are doing about 50 km per day and dozens of deliveries. Surprisingly, they are not getting much of their energy from regeneration. The manufacturer suggests that the vans were configured without aggressive regeneration to make the electric vans feel familiar to the UPS drivers and that they are considering adding multi-level regeneration in the future.
These Run on Less trials are showing us a few things already. First, in just six years, the focus has shifted from improving the fuel economy of ICE trucks to running fleets of battery electric trucks. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are conspicuously absent. The role of hydrogen in land transport is rapidly diminishing.
Second, Australia is lagging in decarbonising heavy transport. Hopefully Australian companies can just pick up much of the knowledge that Run on Less generates and run with it. We should not feel the need to do all of this great work all over again.
Run on Less is running until September 30 and live data is available at https://results-2023.runonless.com/.