A recent three-week demonstration coordinated by the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) showed battery electric trucks operating successfully across a variety of depot environments, the Council said. The event, called Run on Less Electric – DEPOT, tracked 22 battery-electric trucks across 10 depots from September 11-29. In total, 291 electric trucks were operated at the depots during the demonstration.

“Through Run on Less Electric – DEPOT we were able to show that adopters of battery electric vehicles have demonstrated that they work at scale in various segments of the trucking industry including vans and step vans, medium-duty box trucks, terminal tractors and heavy-duty regional haul,” NACFE Executive Director Mike Roeth said.

NACFE said early findings from the first week were validated over the full three weeks, according to Roeth. Key takeaways included:

• Small depots are ready for electrification now and electrification at large depots is gaining momentum;
• There have been big improvements in trucks and chargers since Run on Less – Electric in 2021;
• The industry needs cost and weight reductions to improve the total cost of ownership;
• Range can be extended with multiple charges per shift at the depot and en route;
• It’s still taking too long for power delivery and infrastructure to be installed, which is driving portable/temporary charging;
• The diversity, passion and capability of the people involved is helping to scale the adoption of electric trucks.

The Council said the run provided good news around uptime as all 22 of the studied trucks performed as expected with some exceeding expectations. For example, the Tesla Semis deployed at PepsiCo’s Sacramento Beverages depot completed 410 miles on a single charge and 1,076 miles in a single 24-hour day, enabled by fast 750 kW charging at various points during the day. Also, the depots did not experience any significant loss of power or uptime of the charging systems during the 18 days.

All trucks were tracked using Geotab technology capturing total miles driven, miles per day, deliveries per day, battery state of charge, use of regenerative braking and other metrics, NACFE said.