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from the I-wonder-who-delivers-the-parts? dept.
UPS will work with partner Workhorse, a battery-electric transportation technology company, to develop and deploy a fleet of 50 custom-built plug-in electric delivery trucks with zero emissions.
The goal is to make trucks that cost as much to buy as do traditional fuel-based delivery vehicles — even without taking into account subsidies. The Workhorse-designed vehicles will be all-electric, and are designed to run on a single charge throughout a normal delivery day and then charge back up overnight.
Workhorse says they'll have a 100-mile range, which is a good fit for in-city routes, and the trucks will first enter testing in urban areas in various parts of the U.S., including Atlanta, Dallas and LA. The test will lead to fine-tuning, which will lead to a larger fleet deployment targeting 2019.
Source: TechCrunch
Also at The Verge, Reuters and Cincinnati.com
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @08:28PM
Then they will not use it to deliver to you. 50 trucks? That is a small trial run for a company the size of UPS.
Using your same thought experiment. Take that same distribution center how many businesses and homes are in say a 25 mill radius of that hub? That is that much less fuel they need to buy.
From my location there are 4 hubs within 30 miles of my house (I am in the middle of them). That covers about 3 million people.
100 does seem quite low. They should make the battery pack larger. A day truck LTL runner will probably hit somewhere between 250-500 miles in one day. For UPS I would suspect the delivery trucks have a much lower mileage as the drivers also have to stop frequently and load/unload.
This is along the lines of 'what if we'. Companies this size run trials like this all the time. I would be very very surprised if this is their first time running electric trucks. It is more along the lines of what is the logistics of electricity. What happens if they break down. etc etc etc.