As a resident of Alberta Canada, home of the third largest oil reserves on the planet, I know quite a few truck owners that tell me they will never want an EV Truck. Alberta has a tiny population with a massive land mass. We have just 4 million people spread over 640,000 kilometers and alot of that is mountain. This is truck country and I know from first had experience that truck owners equate electric vehicles with weakness. So why in world would real truck guys want to get rid of their gas / diesel engines?
1 – Hard Core Usability:
When you remove the gas engine, you also remove the air intakes and that EV’s can go through alot of water and mud with damaging your engine.
2 – Torque:
Electric vehicles have waaaaay more torque than gas or diesel vehicles. Most EV trucks will not have traditional transmissions so they will be able to rock climb like no production truck has ever been able to before.
3 – Cargo Capacity:
Electric trucks will have perfectly flat floors reaching all the way into the cabin for extra space. This is because EV trucks will still be “body on frame” designs or what EV designers call “skateboard”. Your truck power-train will be attached to a frame that will have the body on top of it.
4 – Plug In for Tools:
Contractors that actually use the trucks as trucks can plug their tools directly into the trucks battery systems. This will eliminate the need to have big gas generator bouncing around the back of the truck taking up space, adding weight and getting damaged by the elements.
5 – Plug In For Fun:
The majority of truck owners seldom use their truck as it was intended, but they will use it for things like tail gate parties and camping. Those activities will be much enhanced with a quiet, zero smelly emissions from the tail pipe, plug in directly from the trucks battery
6 – Maintenance Cost:
Consumers are slow to comprehend the massively reduced maintenance scheduled that an EV truck offers, but companies with fleets are not. Companies usually don’t care about the purchase price of a truck. What companies care about is the total cost of ownership and maintenance is the number one cost in that calculation:
- EV trucks don’t need oil changes
- Brakes don’t wear out because EV’s use regenerative breaking 80-90% of the time
- Most EV’s will not even have traditional transmissions that needs its fluid changed every 50,000k’s
- EV trucks don’t need air filters cleaned or even expensive timing belt changed at 100,000 kilometers
- EV’s save not only the cost of maintenance, but also the downtime that maintenance causes and the labor cost to manage that downtime (keeping track of the schedule, driving the truck to a shop…)
7: Fuel Cost and Fuel Pain:
Even if electricity is expensive in you part of the world, it is waaaay cheaper than gas or diesel. … And before you go off on the “but it takes too long to charger” line of thought, remember that new chargers can charge a big EV battery in 20 minutes or less and that unlike gas stations, EV chargers are going to be everywhere from job sites to office buildings. It is also highly likely that EV’s will simply use batteries that get swapped out at a building that looks a lot like your old gas station… in fact they likely will be your old gas station:
8: Manufacturer Need:
Ford, GM, RAM, Toyota and Nissan NEED to sell EV trucks so they can meet ever increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, environmental requirements and competitive advantage.
9: Longevity:
To both increase strength and keep weight down, EV Trucks are going to be made from more composite materials and less steel. Steel rusts and scratches while carbon fiber and aluminum to not.
10: Branding:
This is likely the most important of our ten reasons truck owners will flock to EV’s. Truck companies are not going to brand their EV trucks as wimpy hybrids. They are going to use words like “Boost”, “Power” and “Charger”. Watch this 20 minute video with the FCA RAM power-train designer and you will him explain their amazing mild hybrid power-train but he will not even use the word hybrid. Learn about RAM’s “eTorque” here:
Take another 10 minutes to listen to what Ford and others have coming in the next 18 months:
1 Comment
Mr. Coggin · December 17, 2021 at 1:02 pm
Also, I believe there are some factors that will keep your motor insurance premium decrease. One is, to know that most EV’s have a pile of safety tech and so buyers will likely see their insurance rates go down if they buy an electric truck.