Tesla co-founder electrified about trucks

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Ian Wright and a few tech-minded buddies got together about a decade ago bent on creating a fast and cool electric car. They called the company Tesla Motors.

Wright left soon after Elon Musk took Tesla's financial steering wheel in 2004, but now he's back and determined to electrify a slow and ungainly automotive beast: the commercial truck.

While the idea might sound crazy, Wright's logic and math are intriguingly simple.

"Besides the fact that modern cars are already very clean, your average Toyota Camry driver only uses about 600 gallons a year, while a garbage truck will use 14,000," says Wright, a soft-spoken New Zealander with a passion for sports cars.

"It makes the most economic sense to focus energies on a sector where you can displace the most fuel," especially true now that gas has plummeted to under $50 a barrel, says Wright. "When you switch a garbage truck to electric power, you're saving about $50,000 in fuel and $30,000 in maintenance a year."

Companies gradually are buying Wright's pitch. His electric powertrain start-up, Wrightspeed, last year contracted with FedEx to retrofit 25 of its medium- to heavy duty-trucks with battery-powered engines that can be recharged through regenerative braking or by small turbines fueled by natural gas or propane.

More recently, Wright got the green light from The Ratto Group, a Bay Area garbage and recycling company, to convert 17 of its garbage trucks.

In California, such decisions are being spurred by changes to the state's strict California Air Resources Board standards. Certain high-polluting older and heavier commercial trucks had to be off the road by this past Jan. 1, and by 2023 nearly all trucks and buses will need 2010 model year-or-newer engines.

In anticipation of increased demand for his services due to CARB's guidelines, Wright announced Tuesday that he is moving his 23 staffers from a 30,000-square-foot plant in San Jose to a 110,000-square-foot former Pan Am airplane hangar in Alameda, near Oakland. He anticipates the company's staff growing tenfold by 2018.

For Lou Ratto, letting Wrightspeed revamp a group of 2003-2007 garbage trucks was "an opportunity to take myself out of the air-quality conversation," adding that while he's been keen to buy the latest in green trucks, "it's been a struggle" to keep up with CARB requirements.

"What I love about this option is that it's true recycling, because we can maximize the life of the truck's bodies while getting a cost savings and environmental benefit," he says. "As for Ian, his Tesla background speaks for itself."

Wright himself doesn't drive a Tesla. He's actually more of a Maserati and Caterham 7 guy, and after leaving Tesla tried to fund his own supercar, the Wrightspeed X1.

But he has nothing but praise for Musk's stewardship of the company he dreamed up with Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and J.B. Straubel.

"What Tesla has achieved in terms of changing people's perceptions about electric cars, from golf carts to vehicles that compete with Mercedes and Porsche, is beyond my wildest dreams," says Wright. "That said, we're going after high polluters, and in that sense our economic proposition could allow us to scale bigger than Tesla."

Wright is talking about the 2.2 million medium-duty trucks consuming some 35 billion gallons of gasoline a year, as well as those noisy garbage-swallowing banes of urban and suburban existence.

Beyond the savings on fuel and frequent brake replacements — Wrightspeed-equipped trucks mainly use regenerative braking to stop — Wright promises a reduction in noise during those early morning pickups.

"Most of that racket is the engine revving up to allow the truck's hydraulics to compress the garbage, but that will drop drastically with our engines," he says.

The most modern garbage trucks can cost a city upwards of $500,000. Wright says he can retrofit a truck with his cost- and noise-reducing engine for "a huge fraction of that price," typically under $200,000. "What you'd save on fuel and maintenance over the next four years would get that money back," he says.

Wright is convinced that electric power ultimately will make a bigger splash by cleaning up the world's commercial vehicles than it will by ferrying around average citizens in often pricey machines.

He should know. Wright tried hard to get Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in his wildly fast X1, which was an electrified version of the already blistering British sports car, the Ariel Atom. He turned many heads but opened few wallets.

"The market for the X1 just wasn't big enough," he says. "But when you're talking about saving (companies) tens of thousands of dollars a year on one vehicle alone, you're able to pay for the technology you're developing. And now you're talking."

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