Delivery customers applaud quiet, clean electric trucks
Beneath the glam of this city’s Mag Mile shopping district and its towering downtown buildings is an underground network of delivery streets and docks. In these darkened recesses where the wind doesn’t blow, the skyscrapers belch hot air and delivery trucks spew exhaust — except for one truck, a step van delivering hot dog and hamburger buns.
It idles noiselessly enough for passers-by to mistake it for being off, even with LED lights bathing the cabin.
The driver, Sean Sullivan, a 34-year veteran with Alpha Baking Co. in Chicago, shuts the gate in back, stomps up the aisle and takes his seat. He shifts the lever on the instrument panel, and the truck begins moving. There’s no sound other than the stacked crates jostling with the suspension on Chicago’s unleavened roads; no engine heat radiates from the firewall; no sweetly metallic taste of diesel in the air.
Sullivan considers himself one of the lucky few who get to drive the five electric medium-grade trucks in Alpha’s fleet of 52 other diesel trucks.
“We want to lessen our footprint as a company,” said Paul Nosalik, logistics manager of Alpha. “It’s the right thing to do. We’re not as dependent on foreign oil, not polluting, and we feel comfortable delivering to schools and nursing homes in the early morning.”
Most deliveries to residential areas shouldn’t be made until after 7 a.m., Sullivan said, but the silent electric truck enables earlier deliveries.
“I think it’s amazing,” said Joseph De Vito, an Alpha customer on Sullivan’s route who owns Busy Burger. “I don’t see why every (delivery truck) isn’t electric.”
More step vans and medium-grade trucks are going mainstream, thanks to Ohiobased Workhorse, maker of electric step vans, pickup trucks and other electrified delivery vehicles.
“We focus on helping people deliver things,” said Steve Burns, CEO of Workhorse.
The publicly traded company sold two step vans to UPS, which then ordered 18 more, then 125, then an additional 200 last year.
The step van is technically a plug-in hybrid vehicle with a 60 kWh battery pack giving it a 60-mile range that can be doubled with a backup 2-cylinder gas generator, same as the BMW i3 electric car.