All medium-duty trucks are electrifiable, but not all will be easy

Three electric medium-duty box trucks participated in NACFE’s Run on Less – Electric tests last fall. We learned a lot from those trucks and from doing some additional research around that market segment. Our report, Electric Trucks Have Arrived: The Use Case For Medium-Duty Box Trucks, was just released and gives more details on the trucks in the Run and our findings.

What we believe is that 100% of that market segment will embrace electrification, although some applications within the duty cycle will be easier to electrify than others that have more complex operations. When the simpler box truck portion of this market segment electrifies—about 380,000 trucks in the U.S. and Canada—it will result in the avoidance of 7.86 million metric tonnes (MT) of CO2e annually.

See also: Michelin, Benore Logistic test electric last-mile delivery truck

But the thing about medium-duty trucks is that some are used to haul freight, and some are considered vocational trucks. Basically, these trucks come in a variety of flavors, including basic box trucks, box trucks with lift gates, trucks with stake bodies, box trucks with scissor lifts, refrigerated box trucks, tanker trucks, dump trucks, bucket trucks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, fire trucks, snowplows, salt spreaders, and concrete mixers. I am sure there are more applications that I am missing.

Unlike other trucks that are purchased complete from a single manufacturer, some medium-duty trucks have a chassis from one manufacturer and a body from another with integration of the two provided by a truck equipment manufacturer or truck dealer. This complicates the electrification of this market segment. And the more complex the application—the more significant the body’s duty cycle is—the more challenging the move to electric power can be.

That does not mean that fleets should not begin the electrification journey with medium-duty trucks. One of the findings in our report is that medium-duty box trucks are a great application for electric trucks given the short distance they travel and their return-to-base operations. The vast majority of medium-duty box trucks are not driven long distances and are home every night. They are an ideal portion of the overall medium-duty truck market for electrification.

However, more complex Class 6 and 7 trucks such as snowplows, refuse trucks, and fire trucks will require significant efforts which will delay the timing of their electrification. The good news is that as more medium-duty trucks become electric, the industry will be generating a great deal of new data that will help OEMs, fleets, and battery producers develop and integrate more sophisticated interfaces and vehicles.

Medium-duty trucks—both those that haul freight and those used in vocational applications—are ready to be electrified. It will just take a little longer for some of them with more complex bodies to get there, but fleets using medium-duty box trucks should have confidence in bringing battery-electric units into their fleets.

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 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.