EVS 23: World's Largest Electric Truck Coming to U.S.
By John O'Dell December 4, 2007
Cover the green car beat for a bit and you could start thinking it's all about the cars. True, there are a lot of them, but they share the roads with an awful lot of commercial trucks and buses. And most of those, on a pound-for-pound basis, are more problematic– pollutionwise – than our cars.
There are efforts afoot to green up the truck fleet, with hybrids and clean diesels and compressed natural gas all playing a role.
And soon there will be battery-electric trucks, thanks to the efforts of a British company, Tanfield Group, and its Smith Electric Vehicles Group.
The company started building and selling big – we’re talking 25,000 pounds empty – all-electric commercial trucks in the U.K. early this year and has added a second line of smaller, Dodge Sprinter-sized electric trucks and expanded its market into mainland Europe and Scandinavia. Smith is on track to deliver 250 trucks this year, says spokesman Dan Jenkins.
Starting next spring, Smith hits the U.S. with its Newton model, a 12.5-ton, van-bodied truck that will be built for the North American market at a factory in Fresno Calif. The smaller model, called the Edison, isn't slated for the U.S. The company broke the news at the annual Electric Vehicle Symposium conference being held in Anaheim this week.
The idea's a great one: a big delivery truck – Smith calls it the world’s largest high-performance electric truck – that can travel up to 150 miles at 50 miles an hour on an overnight charge, costs 75 percent less than a comparably sized diesel to operate (11 cents a mile versus 45 cents), can haul a payload of up to 15,800 pounds, and does it all without tailpipe emissions or that lovely diesel clatter that’s such a delight to the ear at 6 a.m.
The company believes there’s huge potential in the U.S., where the market for Class 5, 6 and 7 intra-city delivery trucks is about 200,000 a year. Smith hopes to have a 5 percent share, or 10,000 trucks a year, by 2010.
"This is where environmentally friendly trucks can make a big difference in helping clean the air," Jenkins said of Smith's concentration on the short-haul, intra-city market where big diesel delivery trucks make multiple stops and can spend hours each day idling and spewing soot and other pollutants.
At a $150,000 starting price the trucks aren't cheap, but lower fuel and maintenance costs mean they pay for themselves in about five years, Jenkins said.
The economics are better in Europe, where fuel prices are considerably higher than in the U.S., and where government policies favor vehicles with low greenhouse gas emissions (the Newton has none.)
"But the average fleet keeps trucks this size for 10 years, and we figure amortization at five years, so there's a lot of earning potential," Jenkins said.
The base truck is powered by four sodium nickel chloride battery packs from Zebra that are half the size and weigh as comparable lead acid batteries and deliver twice the power. Smith provides an option of up to six of the 278-volt batteries for buyers who need maximum payload and range.
The direct-drive electric power train features a proprietary 120-kilowatt induction motor and has four moving parts, versus about 1,000 in a comparably sized diesel system.
Smith's facility in Fresno is a former Tanfield scissors-lift factory. That business is being shifted to a plant in Kansas, Jenkins said, to make room for the big truck operation.
The 70,000-square-foot factory presently has capacity for 1,000 trucks a year.
Smith plans to invest up to $30 million and add 500 new jobs at a new U.S. facility – site still uncertain -- as it boosts annual capacity to 10,000 trucks over the next two years, Jenkins said.
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Having green trucks like this will go a long way in cutting emissions!
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