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: 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