Tesla Motors Battery Pack in Commercial Vehicle

Couldn't they make it a bit more aerodynamic?

It looks like a barn.

Trying to look like the ubiquitous Fed-Ex delivery truck, so they warm up to the idea of buying them out of familiarity?

Ease of ingress/egress while carrying packages and ease of fixing body work cheaply/simply may win out over aerodynamics in this case. If it just gets used for 15MPH average speed doing deliveries in town it may not matter much.

It just occurred to me that EV's are ideal for delivery vehicles...lots of sitting still (no battery use beats idling!), starts and stops (regenerative braking), and a relatively fixed daily range.

Guess I just didn't think much about it before...maybe I'm just slow!

I think there should be a Presidential mandate that all Post office delivery vehicles should be electric by the end of 2012.

vfx said:

I think there should be a Presidential mandate that all Post office delivery vehicles should be electric by the end of 2012.

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Converting the mailing fleets (and others) to pure electrics could save the government, and taxpayers, millions in gasoline and engine maintenance/repairs, not to mention the environmental benefits of going pure electric. Since the Postal Service is a government company a federal mandate wouldn't be necessary, as far as I know.

I just want to get the ball rolling. If the announcement was made the EV parts makers, battery suppliers, motor builders etc. would have a guaranteed high volume customer so prices would plummet immediately.

The frustrating part is that the "post office" has been running Electric vehicle test programs in different areas and with different administrations for the last 20 years. You never hear about the results but I'm betting they always get cold feet because it's best to go big and that's a tough sell. That or they start the 2 year test program with one group and it's finished with another.

Todd Burch said:

It just occurred to me that EV's are ideal for delivery vehicles...lots of sitting still (no battery use beats idling!), starts and stops (regenerative braking), and a relatively fixed daily range.

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Another big win for EVs (and hybrids) in this case is regen braking and low end torque. For highway vehicles doing constant high RPM cruising, electrics have less benefit over gas, but for stop and go urban cycle driving, electric acceleration and regen is so superior. Also regen is more helpful with big delivery vehicles because you spent more energy to accelerate that big heavly load, so you really do want to recapture some of that energy when you need to slow down.

Another use that would be perfect for an electric chassis would be as a garbage truck. (Trash truck?)
I was watching one the other day, the hydraulic arm picks up the bin, puts it back down, the driver gunns it up to 10 Kph, then hits the brakes and comes to a screeching halt, then repeats.
With electric drive and strong regeneration the savings in fuel would be substantial in a low margin business.
The problem is initial cost and the inertia of business to doing something different.

All the city based vehicles that spend a lot of their day parked including fire trucks too.

Tesla Freightliner step-in fleet van

Tesla draws on tech world’s expertise as it looks to electrify the automotive industry


Contains this teaser.

[Tesla] also has a deal with Freightliner to develop powertrains for a step-in fleet van.

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Battery pack deal previously mentioned here:

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/news...a-motors-battery-pack-commercial-vehicle.html

For some reason, I like this picture better.

Yes, it appears you added a Tesla logo to that picture.

TEG said:

Battery pack deal previously mentioned here:

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/news...a-motors-battery-pack-commercial-vehicle.html

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Sure enough. I'll leave it to the mods to combine or delete now that we have the Freightliner name.

TEG said:

Yes, it appears you added a Tesla logo to that picture.

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You are correct , sir.

It looked to me as if the Freightliner logo was photoshopped so I thought it a challenge to add something (for illustrative purposes) that seemed at least as natural.

The U.S.P.S. is part of the executive branch, so they work for the President. Mandating an immediate 100% changeover to BEV delivery trucks would represent a significant waste of existing resources. It's probably better to engineer a retrofit, and then gradually phase in the BEV replacements on an as-needed basis. It's not like they'll need training, considering how easy the Tesla Roadster is to drive.

vfx said:

The frustrating part is that the "post office" has been running Electric vehicle test programs in different areas and with different administrations for the last 20 years. You never hear about the results but I'm betting they always get cold feet because it's best to go big and that's a tough sell. That or they start the 2 year test program with one group and it's finished with another.

Click to expand...

Around here, they had some sort of test program which involved shutting the ICE off at every mailbox, then using the starter to resume the ICE for the short trip to the next box. This seems to mimic a hybrid, at least in the ability to reduce waste due to idling, except that it is fully manual rather than computer-controlled. I even toyed with shutting off my ICE at every stoplight after I rented a hybrid and noticed that I only used 2 gallons of gas in 2 days. But I can't imagine what sort of reliability problems they had when the starters went from being used two or three times a day to thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of times per day. Only the federal government could run such an elaborately boring field test - and I'd really like to see the results!