As I wandered the streets of Toronto with my dog, I came upon a friendly crew unloading furniture in an electric delivery truck. What a brilliant idea, as last-mile delivery is rarely a thousand kilometre haul, leverage the strengths of the electric power-train and give the neighbours a break, not to mention the corporate bean counters, lets explore these points in more detail.
The use case here is a delivery truck, whose role is to deliver purchases to customers. The central warehouse might be in the “burbs”, with customers located throughout the city. A chat with the crew of the delivery truck, suggested somewhere around 100 km daily mileage, some might go a little further perhaps 200 km (source), some a little less 50 km (source). Much of that in city traffic. Further, the delivery truck will likely overnight at the central warehouse.
Given the relatively low daily mileage, sitting at the warehouse, and mainly city driving, electric power makes a lot of sense. Why not make use of the overnight hours, and charge at super cheap overnight rates? This might yield a 10c/km fuel cost advantage as we discussed earlier. There may also be some convenience benefits, maintenance is likely less, further the truck crew just plugs it in at the end of their shift, no need to waste time going to the gas station. Further, if the employer is forking over for health insurance, there are health benefits for the delivery crew (source).
As discussed in detail earlier, electric cars are more expensive than their gasoline powered equivalents (source). Some of that is driven by range, namely to be “competitive” say in the eyes of a “youtube” car critic, a car maker might feel compelled to offer a 500km range. This requires either an herculean efficiency drive, or a large battery both of these are expensive. But for our delivery truck, half of that 250 km, is ample. This cuts costs, and might actually make the electric delivery truck much more competitive (source). There is some discussion that this might actually be the case over at Ford commercial (source), where growth has been much better in their commercial division.
Electric car adventures 