![]() With 1.3 million electric vehicles on the road in 2020, and with lawmakers pushing for more adoption, fleets have been looking at Class 7 and Class 8 vehicles carefully - kicking the tires and doing the math.īut will the coronavirus crisis - and the resulting plunge in diesel prices - cause fleets to suspend their plans? Right now, some fleets are starved for freight business. It'll be several years before these OEMs are able to deliver their electric trucks at any kind of volume that would rival their diesel truck business.Despite the pandemic environment, states and fleets push forward on electric tractors. Now Rivian looks like the big bet for Ford. And Rivian has been using Ford F-150s as mules (test cars) for the startup's battery and powertrain tech. The company makes the best-selling pickup truck in America, the F-150, and has announced vague plans to make a hybrid version and (more recently) an all-electric version of the F-series trucks.īut as Ford has waited to see how the market unfolds, startup XL has built a business off of converting Ford's F-series trucks to both hybrid and battery-electric. ![]() In addition to the funding, Ford and Rivian say they plan to make an electric vehicle together (which probably will be some kind of truck).įord, like Volvo and Daimler, largely has sat on the sidelines of electrification in years past. Meanwhile, Ford announced this week that it's investing $500 million into an electric pickup truck startup called Rivian. They are interested in evaluating this technology," said Keith Brandis, vice president of partnerships and strategic solutions with Volvo Group, in an interview with GreenBiz. "We've seen a surprising amount of demand from customers. Daimler hopes to start manufacturing production electric trucks in a Portland, Oregon, factory in 2021. ![]() Volvo already makes electric trucks and buses for the European market and plans to commercialize them in North America in 2020. The trucks, Volvo's first in North America, will be used to move goods at ports and distribution centers in southern California. Volvo Trucks is working on building 23 heavy-duty electric trucks using a $44.8 million grant from the California Air Resources Board for the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Can batteries move such a heavy load far distances and meet the needs of shippers?īut Daimler isn't the only heavy-duty truck OEM to start embracing battery electric. While delivery vans seem to be moving steadily toward battery power, the big question mark has been the class 8 heavy-duty trucks. market, and Ford alone sold over a million of its F-series pickup trucks in 2018, or one every 30 seconds. They move millions of units per year in the U.S. Particularly in the United States, these things are rockstars. Then there are pickup trucks, which are bought by companies and also consumers. Companies buy tens of thousands of these trucks per year in the United States. Shipping companies that move goods in urban areas, like UPS and Amazon, buy medium-duty trucks (class 4 to 7) like the Sprinter vans made by Mercedes-Benz (a division of Daimler). ![]() Volvo, Navistar and Paccar are also big players in this class 8 truck market. Daimler Trucks - the largest commercial heavy-duty truck maker in the United States with its Freightliner brand - sells hundreds of thousands of heavy-duty, class 8 trucks to shipping companies, and companies with large hauling fleets every year. Daimler Trucks, which will have customers testing 50 or so electric trucks and buses on roads in the United States by the end of this year, "is committed" and "this is our future," Nielsen said. The beginning of the post-internal combustion engine era for commercial vehicles is here.In a world where these OEMs merely have been dabbling with numerous technologies such as natural gas, renewable diesel, fuel cells and even propane, the declaration was bold and definitive.
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