The market for electric medium- and heavy-duty trucks is in its infancy. Manufacturers such as Daimler and Navistar International Corp, as well as electric car maker Tesla Inc and a host of other new entrants, are racing to overcome the challenges of substituting batteries for diesel engines as regulators crack down on carbon dioxide and soot pollution.
“The game has started,” Daimler Trucks Asia chief Mark Llistosella said in an interview on Thursday. The Fuso eCanter is a relatively small urban delivery truck, but Llistosella said larger, Class 7 electric trucks are coming and hinted that Daimler will show a larger electric truck at the Tokyo Motor Show next month.
Daimler said at a news conference in New York on Thursday that UPS will deploy three of the eCanter trucks, while four New York based non-profit organisations will get a total of eight electric trucks. The trucks have a range of about 100km between charges.
Daimler is leasing the trucks to UPS, Llistosella said, because within about two years “we know there will be a next level of technology” that will produce batteries with longer range, lower cost and lower weight.
Battery costs that are currently about US$180 to US$200 a kilowatt-hour could drop to about US$100 a kilowatt-hour, Llistosella said. “This is the main lever” to move electric commercial trucks to higher sales volumes, he said.
Daimler is limiting sales of the eCanter to about 500 vehicles for the first two years of production, in anticipation of the improved batteries, Llistosella said. “The market demand is much higher.”
Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso unit began building eCanter trucks at factories in Portugal and Japan earlier this year.
Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk tweeted on Wednesday that the Silicon Valley company would show off a prototype of an electric semi-trailer truck on Oct 26 in Hawthorne, California.
“Worth seeing this beast in person,” Musk tweeted. “It’s unreal.”
Reuters reported last month that Tesla’s semi is expected to offer a range of up to 480km, far less than the 1,600km for some diesel-powered counterparts that US long-haul truckers use.
