The future may be big for electric vehicles
As American car buyers cautiously dip their toes into the world of electric vehicles, pondering issues such as cost, charging times and driving range, big businesses and some government agencies are going in headfirst.
The Antelope Valley Transit Authority, which serves some 450,000 residents in parts of Los Angeles County, wants to be the first transit agency with an all-electric bus fleet. It hopes to ditch all its diesel vehicles by the end of the year and replace them with 80 fully electric versions.
Reducing pollutants is a high priority for Antelope Valley, which includes Palmdale and Lancaster,
because the area has the highest rate of asthma and deaths from respiratory diseases in the county, according to the county health department. “This switch-over makes sense for the environment,” said Len Engel, the transit authority’s executive director.
The same factors that appeal to consumers make an electric vehicle a good fit for commercial applications. Electric motors offer the lowspeed torque such vehicles need, without the roar or exhaust of their diesel counterparts. And while range anxiety could be a concern for the typical car buyer, operators of buses and similar vehicles tend to stay close to home, needing a range of 100 miles or less.
Even as Tesla has promised to apply its passenger-car experience to long-haul trucking, a host of companies are already offering fully electric commercial vehicles to governments and private industries that are looking to turn mail trucks and garbage haulers into vehicles of the future.
McKinsey & Co., the management consulting group, forecasts that electric light- and medium-duty trucks — a group that includes pickups, flatbeds and some trash haulers — could achieve 8 to 34 percent sales penetration by 2030. The wide range depends on market conditions: Fleet owners need parity in the total cost of ownership between a traditional diesel-powered vehicle and an electric one. And municipal air-quality regulations may spur or slow down the adoption of electric fleets.
“Our latest perspective is that U.S. break-even for long haul could be between 2025 and 2030,” said Russell Hensley, one of the report’s authors.
Hensley said two factors were holding back the commercial electric market: a limited number of models and the relative infancy of fastcharging technology.
But businesses and governments are still jumping on board. This month, the Chicago Transit Authority agreed to buy 20 electric buses from Proterra at an estimated cost of $32 million. In May, San Francisco said it would begin buying only electric buses starting in 2025, with plans for an allelectric fleet by 2035.
The Workhorse Group, based in Cincinnati, has signed a letter of intent to sell 500 electric pickup trucks to Duke Energy, with delivery starting this summer. The $52,000 vehicles, made in the company’s plant in Indiana, “will do anything a conventional pickup will do, including towing and hauling,” CEO Steve Burns said.
Duke Energy is committed to making 5 percent of its fleet nonpolluting, said Randy Wheeless, a company spokesman. It plans to distribute its electric pickups — which will have a gasoline backup engine to charge the batteries, a similar system to the one in the Chevrolet Volt passenger car — across the six states it serves.
Workhorse has just concluded a deal with UPS to sell the company 950 electric delivery vans, adding to the 50 that UPS has been testing. And a joint venture of Workhorse and truck builder VT Hackney is one of five finalists in the U.S. Postal Service’s bid to replace its fleet of mail delivery vehicles. The Postal Service is also evaluating gasoline and hybrid vehicles, but typical mail delivery route distances make an electric vehicle viable, Burns said.
The Chinese company building Antelope Valley’s electric buses, BYD, is the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles — everything from forklifts to passenger cars and semi trucks.
The company is building the buses in Lancaster, and has also supplied electric buses to UC and Eugene, Ore., among others. Low operating costs are a main selling point.
“Fuel and maintenance are one-third that of typical equivalent diesel vehicles,” said George Miller, BYD America’s senior sales manager for fleets.
The company has demonstrated its electric garbage trucks to city of Los Angeles sanitation officials and has a deal to sell 20 articulated buses to the operator of Los Angeles International Airport, Miller said.
While maintenance and energy costs are lower, purchase prices are not. BYD’s garbage truck costs $300,000, while its 40-foot bus is about $150,000 more than its diesel equivalent.
BYD is counting on rebates to cut those costs. In California, that could amount to a price reduction between $50,000 and $75,000, thanks to money available from the state’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project.
The Antelope Valley Transit Authority is receiving $46 million in state and federal funding to help buy its 80 electric buses. While some run consecutive multiple routes as far as 558 miles a day, they can be charged wirelessly whenever a route is finished, adding 20 miles of range every 10 minutes. Engel said he expected the authority to save $1 million per year in fuel costs alone.