Despite the incredible technological gains made over the last decade, alternative-fuel vehicles are still not ready for real-world fleet operations, industry experts told show attendees at ACT Expo in May
By Jack Roberts
The 2004 Advanced Clean Transportation Expo (ACT Expo) wrapped up in Las Vegas on May 23 with an odd mix of enthusiastic tension in the air.
The show floor was jam-packed with the latest in alternative fuel vehicles and technology. Booths and aisles alike were crowded with industry insiders checking out all the new gear or lining up outside the Las Vegas Convention Center for test-drives in a wide array of new trucks.
But, for the first time, there was also a decided tinge of pessimism in the air.
This is nothing new. I’ve reported on an undercurrent of doubt simmering beneath the surface at past ACT Expos. There’s been a justified feeling of pride coming from OEMs and technology developers. What these companies have accomplished over the past decade is nothing short of incredible. Working from scratch, they have perfected entirely new, zero-emission propulsion technologies for commercial vehicles and brought them to market in a truly astounding effort. And in record time, too.
So, the trucks are ready to go to work—in select applications. But there’s still no infrastructure support to speak of. And the trucks are wildly expensive.
At the end of a high-profile press conference, I was chatting with a friend and an industry insider about the mood at the show when he absent-mindedly patted the gleaming Class 8, alt-fuel tractor we were standing next to and casually said, “You know, this is probably a half-a-million-dollar truck, right here…”
And that’s a pretty big problem.
Increasingly, trucking industry insiders are starting to state some hard truths about trucking’s push toward zero-emissions. And there’s a growing sense that the goal—starting in earnest in 2027 and essentially calling for a complete transition of the entire fossil fuel-powered commercial vehicle population in North America to zero-emission propulsion systems inside of a decade—isn’t going to work as planned.
Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) work well in short-haul applications, but they can barely handle regional- and long-haul routes. And while hydrogen fuel cell trucks look like they’ll be able to reasonably handle longer routes, the trucks aren’t available yet. They’re prohibitively expensive. And, as I mentioned, the infrastructure to support them is largely nonexistent.
Don’t forget that currently, the plan calls for private fleets to largely assume the costs of buying these new trucks and installing infrastructure themselves. Current estimates put the price tag at around $1 trillion to pull this off. And there is very little money coming in from incentives or grants to help these companies pull off such a massive transition.
Not Ready for Prime Time
Some particularly important speakers at ACT Expo drove these points home during the show.
The first was J.B. Hunt President Shelly Simpson, who bluntly told attendees that zero-emission vehicle technology simply “isn’t ready for prime time.”
Speaking at the opening session on May 21, Simpson told the standing-room-only crowd that fleet electrification is currently prohibitively expensive, and the trucks themselves are uncompetitive and inefficient.
Acquisition costs are up to three times that of a diesel, she noted. There are payload penalties between 4,000 and 12,000 pounds, and charging time and frequency renders them very unproductive compared to diesels.
J.B. Hunt President Shelley Simpson told ACT Expo attendees that the amount of energy used to fast-charge a single Class 8 electric truck is equivalent to the power used by 600 residential homes.
A major problem, Simpson said, is that too few people really understand the scale of what is being proposed in a massive transition to electric trucks.
“In order to fast-charge a single electric truck, you would need the same amount of energy it takes to power 600 homes,” she noted. “To put that into perspective, the fast-charging infrastructure needed to support J.B. Hunt’s entire fleet, if it was all electric, would be the same as that required by 1.4 million households, or about 1% of the U.S. population. I wonder how many families would be willing to give up their electricity just so we could charge our trucks?”
While vehicle technology and infrastructure issues are worked out, Simpson urged the trucking industry to seek out other ways to reduce emissions while using diesel-powered trucks. These include more intermodal transportation, increased use of natural gas, renewable diesel, increased vehicle aerodynamics and other solutions.
Cost Parity Problems
Simpson’s comments were echoed by the keynote speaker the following morning, on May 22. Ryder System CEO and Chairman Robert Sanchez, who called attention to Ryder’s experiences with the higher-than-anticipated costs of operating battery-electric trucks.
Looking at diesel versus electric in light-, medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles, Sanchez said that while Ryder expected to see cost increases for adopting BEVs instead of conventional diesel trucks, they were shocked by the magnitude of those costs, which he noted are a major barrier to widespread fleet adoption.
“The problem is not lack of interest,” Sanchez explained. “We have many customers who asked about the cost benefit of converting to EVs. We found that there was significant barrier to conversion in the total cost of transport (TCT).”
Robert Sanchez, CEO and Chairman of Ryder System said that Ryder estimates cost increases of 94% to 114% to convert heavy-duty trucks to EVs and 56% to 67% to convert mixed fleets of 25 vehicles, depending on the state.
TCT, Sanchez said, includes the cost of vehicle, fuel or electricity, driver wages, as well as other factors that go into transporting the same load the same distance and achieving the equivalent delivery times.
And based on those figures, Sanchez said Ryder found that it takes two battery-electric trucks and trailers to deliver the same average load currently being moved by a single heavy-duty diesel truck, at more than double TCT.
“I think most of you would agree that this is a tough sell,” he added.
And the trucks are simply more expensive to operate, Sanchez reported.
Looking at Class 8, in Georgia, Ryder found it costs a fleet about $291,000 to run a diesel-powered truck. In California, it’s about $334,000 per year.
But given current BEV range and payload limitations, Sanchez said Ryder determined it would require nearly twice the equipment and more than twice the labor compared to a diesel truck for fleets to deliver the same loads.
So, for that same fleet in Georgia, an electric truck would take $622,438 to deliver the same loads.
In California, the cost to deliver those same loads with electric trucks would ring in at $648,712.
Overall, Sanchez said, Ryder’s analysis estimates cost increases of 94% to 114% to convert heavy-duty trucks to EVs and 56% to 67% to convert mixed fleets of 25 vehicles, depending on the state being operated in.
Eventually, Sanchez said, he believes the cost parity between diesel and alt-fuel trucks will close. But in the meantime, he urged regulators and the trucking industry at large to pursue other means of reducing vehicle emissions. These include electric, natural gas, hydrogen, hybrid drivetrains, and carbon capture, as well as continuing to advance diesel emissions technology.
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