A lot of the buzz around business truck electrification seems to deal with Class 8 models. Who’s ordering them? Where is the infrastructure to charge them? Aside from a couple of lesser-known players like BYD and Nikola, the sphere belongs to the legacy players like Daimler Truck, Volvo and Paccar.
That leaves a clearer field for startups and electric chassis corporations within the Class 3-5 range. Of those, Class 5 model step vans weighing between 16,001 and 19,500 kilos are attracting plenty of recent entrants. These trucks can carry as much as 10,000 kilos of cargo, move easily in traffic and — despite their boxy appearance — maneuver reasonably well.
That may get even higher when Ree Automotive begins constructing its four-wheel steering model with a Proxima body from EAVX, the latest division of J.B. Poindexter, also the parent of Morgan Olson.
Legacy chassis come from the likes of Ford Motor Co. and Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp., a Daimler Truck North America subsidiary. A lot of the van bodies carry the Morgan Olson or Utilimaster name.
Room for other electrification players
“We stepped back and checked out the market,” Workhorse Group CEO Rick Dauch told me on the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in May. “You take a look at Class 3 and below, that’s where the large boys play. You go to Class 7-8, that’s where the large boys play up there. The Class 4-5-6 area of interest is ideal for us. That’s the work truck.”
Workhorse is selling a Class 4 chassis cab modified from Canada’s GreenPower Motor Co. while it prepares a ground-up Class 5 for production later this yr and its own Class 4 entry a couple of years from now.
Dauch isn’t alone in seeing the center classes — especially Class 5 — as fertile ground. It doesn’t hurt that those products have to account for 1 in 10 recent truck purchases in California in 2025 with a whole transition to battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell power by 2035.
“Almost every city has got to convert just about all of their work trucks,” he said. “Almost every city has 30 or 40 work trucks depending how big they’re. They’re going to turn into electrified.”
Repowering existing chassis
Motiv Power Systems doesn’t offer a ground-up electric chassis. It electrifies three chassis it gets from Ford and one from FCCC. Motiv continues to enhance its product, transitioning from batteries utilized in the BMW i3 to packs product of lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries from startup Our Next Energy.
“We’re getting 78 kilowatt-hours per pack where we had 42 before. It should have the ability to support more charging cycles and reliability needs to be the identical or higher,” Motiv CEO Tim Krauskopf told me on the ACT Expo.
Co-development of a motor and controller with Japan’s Nidec Corp. provides torque comparable to a Detroit DD15 diesel with boosting driving range by 20% or more.
Motiv also occupies the Class 3-5 space. Class 3 electric conversions provide one of the best bang for the electrical buck, but their lack of payload capability limits their value, Krauskopf said.
“There are some Class 4s that may barely move 2 tons because their batteries are so heavy,” he said. “And so that you trade off between range and what class you find yourself being in. So we just say 2 to six tons payload.”
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Not ‘much of a stretch’
On the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis in March, the Shyft Group followed the 2021 reveal of its Blue Arc Class 3-5 electric step van with a prototype of a Class 5 crew cab model. Think room for a business landscaping crew of six with power ports to charge tools like Weedwackers.
![](https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/02/060223-TT71-Blue-Arc-crew-cab-1200x675.jpg)
“It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from our Class 5 walk-in van to a Class 5 cab only,” CEO Daryl Adams told me. Shyft will resolve whether to take the crew cab from concept to production later. The Class 5 version of the Blue Arc step van is planned for the primary half of 2024. It is going to also use LFP batteries from ONE.
Adams said Shyft developed its own electric chassis since it couldn’t find one to purchase that it felt was robust enough to last the standard 15-year lifetime of a step van.
Shyft’s nine consumer-facing brands include Utilimaster.
What in regards to the mojo of Rizon?
At the same time as some corporations see potential in electrifying trucking’s middle classes, a couple of startups have already come and gone.
“With the rates of interest being as high as they’re [and] the associated fee of just running a business, I feel next yr you’re going to see a big drop-off,” Adams said.
XL Fleet, one in every of the startups that focused on repowering vehicles to run on electricity, is now a part of Adams’ Shyft Group. Bollinger Motors is now 60% owned by Mullen Automotive, itself in precarious financial condition. Mullen executed a 1-for-25 reverse stock split in May to get its shares safely above Nasdaq’s listing requirements.
Then there’s the approaching return of Daimler Truck to the Class 4-5 medium duty space with its Rizon-branded versions of the Mitsubishi Fuso eCanter. DTNA leads the market in Class 6 and eight.
Krauskopf doesn’t sound concerned.
““The shopper base is saying they don’t understand how they’re going to get enough trucks to satisfy rules just like the Clean Fleet Rule,” he said. “We’ll flat out be manufacturing as many as we are able to.”
![](https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/02/060223-TT71-Rizon-high-res-1200x675.jpg)
Briefly noted …
Add the medium-duty MD Electric from Mack Trucks to those eligible for California’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP). The MD voucher is value as much as $85,000 per truck.
Einride has signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Arab Emirates to offer digital, electric and autonomous technology across a 342-mile freight mobility grid that would deploy 2,000 electric vehicles, 200 autonomous vehicles and eight charging stations.
Nikola’s big shareholder vote on doubling the variety of outstanding shares is next Wednesday. But the corporate is pressing ahead with sustainable trucking efforts like one with flatbed hauler PGT Trucking and steelmaker Nucor.
![](https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/02/052523-Nikola-PGT-Nucor-1200x546.jpg)
Schneider will cut the ribbon next Wednesday on its recent truck charging depot in El Monte, California, with 32 direct-current fast-charging ports to support greater than 50 battery-electric Freightliner eCascadia trucks.
Autonomous trucking software maker Kodiak Robotics has hired 40-year automotive safety veteran Steve Kenner as vp of safety.
Isuzu Industrial Truck of America has named Matthew Mesick because the company’s first director of electrical vehicle strategies.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. Click here to get Truck Tech via email on Fridays. And tune into Truck Tech on FreightWavesTV on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. EDT. Next week’s scheduled guest is Andrew Smith, founder and CEO of Outrider, the startup that’s automating distribution yards and, unlike many more moderen corporations, attracting investment.
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