Wrightspeed



Proterra

Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes-Benz

Proterra

Nikola Motor Company

Nikola Motor Company

Out of all of Elon Musk's recent "Master Plan Part Deux," the part that really caught our eye was a short paragraph about a Tesla semi. Much of the rest—solar, autonomous driving, ride-sharing—wasn't exactly unforeseen. But the idea of a heavy duty Tesla electric vehicle took us by surprise and left us scratching our heads. Tesla isn't the only company going after this market; Wrightspeed, Proterra, and BYD are already building heavy duty urban electric vehicles, and Mercedes-Benz is about to enter the fray. The Nikola Motor Company (no connection to Tesla Motors) already has 7,000 orders for a zero-emission heavy duty freight hauler that won't be revealed until December. To find out if our confusion over the Tesla Semi is unwarranted, we spoke to some of the big players in the heavy duty EV market.

Even though heavy duty vehicles only account for about eight percent of US carbon emissions (light duty vehicles make up roughly 20 percent), Wrightspeed CEO Ian Wright says electrifying that sector makes more economic sense. In fact, Wright doesn't think the economics work in favor of electric passenger vehicles. "A Nissan Leaf is twice the price of a Versa and you only save $800 a year," he told Ars, "that's a 20-year payback time."

Wright goes on:

For argument's sake, the cost delta [between a diesel heavy duty truck and an electrified one] is about $150,000. However, you're talking about a vehicle that burns 14,000 gallons a year. So you can save so vastly much more fuel and brake maintenance as well that you're looking at a three-to-four year payback. The scaling properties work in your favor. It costs more to build [a heavy duty] powertrain, but you save so much more in fuel that the economics are compelling. Which is why [we should] do that and not cars; I think people just don't bother to do that calculation.

Wrightspeed recently won a contract to supply the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington with electric buses, and Wright told us his company is also in talks with Mack Trucks to supply an electric powertrain for that company's LR chassis. But Wrightspeed's vehicles—like those from Proterra, BYD, and soon Mercedes-Benz—are optimized for the stop-start grind of urban life, not cruising along the highways at 70mph. And remember, the relationship between speed and drag is non-linear, so you need more energy to move an EV at highway speeds than the 25-35mph of city life.

Proterra CEO Ryan Popple thinks the Tesla Semi could actually be more of an internal project, enabling the company to operate a zero-emissions supply chain. Popple told Ars:

A fairly reasonable idea would be to move battery packs from the Gigafactory downhill to the assembly plant in Fremont, California. The reason I say that could be viable is they're fundamentally transporting battery packs. They could build battery packs and put them into a truck that's optimized for the shipment of those packs, charge them with solar as a way of validating the pack, and transport them at maybe 50 or 60 percent state of charge. Going from east to west in California is generally fairly easy—6000 feet of elevation certainly helps if the elevation is going in the right direction!

But Popple, like us, is skeptical that a long-haul freight electric vehicle makes sense.

In terms of a long-haul semi truck that could pull 80,000-100,000lbs of cargo you're looking at around a megawatt of energy storage. We're moving buses that, with human beings, weigh 40,000lbs. We have a hyper-efficient drivetrain and we're using a city duty cycle, and we're looking at variations of our product that will require between 250-350kWh of energy storage. It would suggest you're going to need two-to-three times the amount of energy storage buses carry if you really want to be in the business of moving freight.

The forthcoming Nikola One class 8 truck will use a gas turbine generator to charge a 320kW battery pack, something the company claims will enable unparalleled range for an electric vehicle. According to Nikola CEO Trevor Milton:

Nikola has engineered the holy grail of the trucking industry. We are not aware of any zero emission truck in the world that can haul 80,000 pounds more than 1,000 miles and do it without stopping. The Nikola One requires only 15 minutes of downtime before heading out for the next 1,000 miles

(How one burns compressed natural gas and still ends up zero-emissions isn't entirely obvious from Nikola's supplied information.)

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its own electric heavy duty vehicle, the Urban eTruck, at the end of July . As the name suggests, like those buses and garbage trucks it will be focused on cities. The base spec eTruck's 212kWh battery pack gives it a range of 125 miles (200km). As for Tesla, we'll have to wait until 2017 to find out whether the Tesla Semi was just an afterthought, an internal project tied to the Gigafactory, or if the plan really is to build and sell a range of electric freight carriers.

Listing image by Wrightspeed