We are well into completing interviews with the fleets and OEMs that will be participating in Run on Less—Electric. It’s been very exciting for the NACFE team to begin to delve a deeper into the process these fleets went through in embarking on their journey with electric vehicles.
NACFE has always prided itself on having its feet firmly planted in the real world, so going into these interviews, we were prepared to acknowledge that adding electric vehicles was likely to be fairly disruptive. I mean, it’s not like switching from one make of truck to another, or changing a long-held vehicle spec. This is a move to a completely new powertrain that comes with a completely different way of “fueling.”
Before we met with the fleets, we prepared a list of questions to ask each of them. We made sure to include questions that focused on some of the challenges with deploying electric vehicles like:
- What was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome to add EVs to your fleet?
- What is one thing EV manufacturers could have done better to make the decision-making process easier?
In addition to our prepared questions, we asked several unscripted questions to get them to talk about the challenges they faced in the process of adding electric vehicles to their fleets. We know there are challenges, and we did not want other people to think we were sugar coating the process of integrating EVs into fleets. Our goal was to present the good, the bad and even the ugly of EV deployment.
So, I have to say I was taken by surprise at how enthusiastic the folks we spoke with at the fleets are about their decision to move forward with EV deployment. “Bring it on” was a phrase we heard more than once during the fleet interviews. That is not to say there have not been hurdles to overcome and problems to solve, because, of course, there have been. But those hurdles, issues and problems have not dampened the enthusiasm of these early adopter fleets for EVs. They are all in—warts and all. They are excited about being pioneers of trucking’s future and even bumps along the way are doing nothing to change that “kid in a candy store” enthusiasm.
That enthusiasm is just one of the many things we at NACFE love about this industry and especially about the industry’s willingness to move into a new direction for a better future for all of us.
We still have more interviews to complete and will be sharing the fleets’ stories with you later this summer and throughout the Run. We sure hope hearing the excitement of the participating fleets will spur you to consider making the leap to electric vehicles. After talking to the Run on Less—Electric fleets, I can promise you that you won’t regret it.
Michael Roeth has worked in the commercial vehicle industry for nearly 30 years, most recently as executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. He currently serves on the second National Academy of Sciences Committee on Technologies and Approaches for Reducing the Fuel Consumption of Medium and Heavy-Duty Vehicles and has held various positions in engineering, quality, sales and plant management with Navistar and Behr/Cummins.
