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On Thursday, Daimler announced that it would bring its line of short-haul electric trucks to the US. The United Parcel Service (UPS) will buy the first three trucks, and Daimler is also offering eight trucks to New York City-based non-profits, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, the New York Botanical Garden, Habitat for Humanity New York City, and Big Reuse Brooklyn.
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The Fuso eCanter trucks will have a range of 62 miles (or about 100km) and will be sold in Japan and Europe as well. Daimler said it's only planning on producing 500 trucks in the next year, but it intends to start mass-producing the trucks in 2019. It's unclear how much these trucks cost.The trucks have a load capacity of three and a half tons, Daimler said, with a powertrain that draws on "six high-voltage lithium-ion battery packs with 420 V and 13.8 kWh each."
New York City and the Bronx in particular have asthma rates several times the national average. Many blame the high levels of trucking in the city. Shifting delivery fleets to EVs could help.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday September 16 2017, @03:10PM (7 children)
I assume 62 miles is the max they'll get out of them. In cold weather it will be much less. Can they really deliver 3.5 tons of Amazon Goodness (tm) in 30-40 miles?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @04:34PM
Yes. Even using your numbers, 30-40 miles of travel from a local depot inside a city is a lot of ground covered and a lot of potential mass delivered. Is it worthwhile to use such narrow-purpose vehicles? It may well be, particularly if they can directly replace the work done by existing ICE trucks in high-density population centers, and do so at comparable or less "fuel" and maintenance cost. EVs may currently be more earth-unfriendly than efficient ICE vehicles, but reducing vehicular exhaust in high-density city centers is likely a good idea if financially feasible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @04:36PM (2 children)
In dense areas like NYC? Yes. Rural folks, or even folks from less-dense cities like Houston, don't understand just how dense Brooklyn and Manhattan are. There are many buildings with 400+ apartment units in them, with each of those units having an average of 2 to 3 people living in them. You can have 900 people in a single building without much effort. Some of these apartment clusters have 8 or 9 buildings in them. So you can have around 10,000 people living in an area that's the size of 3 football fields. These developments can contain 3 or 4 times as many people as many rural counties have. And these people have needs for goods.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday September 16 2017, @06:52PM
Yep. New York City can go fuck themselves.
San Francisco, L.A., and Boston too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:24AM
And NYC has a population density of ~26,000 people/mile2 and an area of ~305 miles2
Of the 8.5 million people who live in NYC, ~1.6 million live in the ~23 miles2 that comprises Manhattan, and ~2.6 million live in the ~70 miles2 called Brooklyn.
So yeah, electric trucks with a range of 30-40 miles would be great for a place like NYC.
In fact, once freight rail tunnels are built between Port Newark [wikipedia.org] and NYC, IC trucks should be banned from NYC altogether and replaced with electrics.
But I won't hold my breath waiting for something like this [nj.com] to happen, although given all the soot, CO, SO2 and other nasty stuff emanating from all those IC trucks, perhaps I should.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by frojack on Saturday September 16 2017, @06:03PM (2 children)
In a perfectly flat city, no hills, no stop and go traffic, 62 miles might work for some specialized tasks.
It might be perfect for garbage collection on the Botanical Garden grounds, but that's about it.
Every UPS delivery truck does more miles than that before lunch.
This thing is destined to become a white elephant, and a joke.
The claimed savings will never materialize because the range means you will have to have an equal sized ICE-powered truck on standby all the time for out of range destinations, or when the electric truck is down for recharging.
Using Tesla's numbers [tesla.com] the best you could expect using typical electrical sources is recovering 11 to 15 miles of range per hour. So without a commercial charge source at both ends, 30 miles is your safe range.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday September 16 2017, @07:40PM
Why so negative, froj? Do you have a citation for the mileage claim? Did a UPS truck run over your neighbor's yappy dog? I'm just not seeing the motivation.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:06AM
From Ars comments: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10309 [energy.gov] delivery 13000 per year, assume 260 days, 50 miles per day average, meaning somewhere there are trucks that need that or less. There are other comments talking about where UPS has a NY depot and how much it covers: small zone because it's very packed. Then you have the one claiming "I work at UPS" and also saying for his city it would be OK for the trucks there, not for rural. So unless Manhattan is rural now...
You know, maybe UPS checked their own data before ordering three.