Our first electric cars may be trucks, John Voelcker reminds us:
It turns out that urban delivery trucks offer very good ”duty cycles” for electrification. They cover a fairly predictable area — usually about 160 kilometers (100 miles) or less each day — and they return to the same base every night, meaning that the costs of high-voltage charging stations can be concentrated into a central location.Britons of a certain age still remember the three-wheeled electric milk floats that delivered their morning pints throughout London. The company that made them, Smith Electric Vehicles, still survives today, and it’s preparing to launch mid- and large-size electric delivery trucks into the U.S. market. Smith will be closely followed by a new company, Modec Ltd. While Smith now modifies Ford trucks, Modec has designed its own from the ground up. Each company plans to set up a U.S. assembly plant to avoid the notorious ”chicken tax,” an import duty of 25 percent that has been levied for 45 years on light- and medium-duty commercial vehicles imported into the United States. (The notorious tax stems from a trade dispute over U.S. exports of frozen chickens, then a brand-new concept, to Europe.)
Modec’s William Doelle shares some hard lessons learned from pilot programs:
- Plan for much longer and much costlier infrastructure installations than you could possibly imagine;
- Do not let fleet mechanics work on any of the high-voltage components;
- Do not expect fleet mechanics to have any understanding of safe electrical practices;
- Similarly, do not trust the fleet’s in-house electricians! Modec was forced to replace a $6000 high-voltage charger, which had to be air-freighted from the UK, when a man he called ”Sparky” hung it on an outdoor chain-link fence, exposed to the elements, without considering that tropical rainstorms might pose a problem to a 300-volt indoor device;
- It is crucial to create very clear, explicit, well-illustrated manuals that cover every possible contingency.