Production Freightliner eCascadia Launched
After 4 years of trials with key customers - Freightliner launched the production version of their eCascadia yesterday at the ACT Expo.
The long range version goes 230 miles with a 438 kWh battery (usable capacity) and charges from 0-80% in 90 minutes on a 270 kWh charger. https://freightliner.com/trucks/ecascadia/ https://www.ccjdigital.com/alternati...tric-ecascadia https://img.ccjdigital.com/files/bas...compress&w=700 |
Whoever cropped that photo disrespected the Old Town sign.
A 438 kWh battery would make quite a fire. |
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Looks very interesting for local freight. Does it recharge on CCS? If not, why? CCS already has some 350 kW capable chargers out in the wild. I would have thought they would at least be capable of maxing that charging rate. Any idea what their production capacity is? EDIT- Looks like a proprietary charging system, so you must purchase the Freightliner charging solution. What a missed opportunity. Then again, it was only recently CCS was capable of such fast charging, so this was being developed long before. |
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GCW is 65,000 for a single rear axle / 82,000 for a dual rear axle Tractor weight is 16,350 - 21,800 depending on configuration. Target markets for BEV trucks are Drayage, local delivery (things like beverage and food delivery trucks) and regional point to point. Charges on standard CCS. Frieghtliner will sell you a charger but you don't have to use theirs. Freightliner got around the old limits of CCS when this was in development 4 years ago by designing it to use two CCS plugs. |
230 miles is the long range version? And 6 hours to charge it (90 minutes is for the 194 kWh version)? Oof!! I presume all of those miles are only available in the summer on a new battery too.
That would still work fine for some of the hyper local port haulers & fuel carriers, but buying an class8 EV with that little range is a lot of risk for a small fleet - it seriously limits your pool of customers. I had a buddy who hauled containers from Oakland to Fremont for a certain Solar/EV company. Then that company moved much of their production to Reno. 230 miles of range would have worked fine for the original contract, but wouldn't be sufficient for the modified contract a few years later... |
At 10 cents per kWh, the EV truck costs about 20 cents per mile in "fuel". An 8 MPG diesel rig might be 50 cents per mile.
Running on electrons is at least half the fuel cost. Should be much less maintenance too, increasing the uptime of the rig. I'm curious what the maximum regen capability is, and what percent of braking is accomplished with regen vs friction brakes in typical operation? I would guess that a truck could avoid friction braking altogether when descending a steep grade of say, 6% fully loaded. |
Oh I can't wait for EV trucks. There is so much wasted fuel idling (especially at night for long haulers), running PTOs, warming up, slow-speed maneuvering in parking lots/industrial parks, etc.
On flat ground, our dry vans needed about 100 horsepower to go 60mph which would be about 0.8 miles per kW. I wonder why Freightliner is only getting ~0.5 miles? |
Oh, and are these trucks compatible with refers?
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It is 90 minutes to recharge any of the battery sizes 0 – 80% (Spec below from Freightliner’s website). However I doubt too many of these trucks will be fast charged instead of charged overnight. These aren’t for small fleets. These are for the UPS, Fed EX, Ryder, Penske, Sysco, Coca-Cola of the world that operate huge fleets and track every route and truck and know their usage. There is a Sysco video on Youtube with them testing a preproduction eCascadia with the small battery and single axle. They say it can handle more than 50% of their routes on one charge. (Sysco has a 14,000 vehicle fleet) Quote:
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Something from the spec sheet I find surprising is the warranty. 5 years / 300K miles for the large battery but only 150K miles for the small battery. https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...7&d=1652213325 |
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It could be completely due to the battery being 10 years old with 170k miles on it, and being nimh chemistry.... but it is a noticeable difference in driving characteristics after towing. I would think that the battery being able to accept at least 270kw and the motor being able to generate 400+kw, mountain decent will be much more controllable that with a diesel truck. |
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270 kW is 362 horsepower of regen. That's gotta be way more than enough to use regen alone on any reasonable grade and load. |
Is that power rating continuous or like the peak 30 second or so power most EV sellers like to quote?
Pulling 80k lbs uphill takes a lot of energy. |
That is probably an aerohead question, has too many math squiggles for me, but off the top of my head I would say the level of regen is inadequate for 80k# on the grapevine. Should be continuous, rather pointless for a three minute rating.
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There are many locations around here were the small single axle truck is dock to stock barely touching surface streets 16 hours a day moving things around facilities and yards up and down the same half mile stretch of road.
These make a lot of sense in the case your buildings are stretched over a mile |
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This is exciting! How fast can they crank them out? We have a lot of diseasel trucks running around here on short routes, idling all the time, etc. Like Old Dominion... Short routes with lots of stops. Perfect for that, and the CCS rates aren't bad either!
Is this pretty much just California only right now? |
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I'm sure California makes up most of the orders but they are other states with electric truck programs and California, Oregon and Washington state are doing a combined program to build HD truck chargers every 50 miles along I-5 |
Sysco (the food delivery company) announced an order for 800 eCascadias to be delivered from 2022 to 2026
https://www.thetruckersreport.com/ne...scadia-trucks/ |
Almost 1% of their fleet
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Freightliner is Daimler Truck's North American brand. In the rest of the world they sell other electric trucks like the eActros. The trucking industry is conservative - they will test for a complete life cycle before making large purchases. List of US truck fleets by size: https://www.ttnews.com/top100/private/2021 |
Using BEV trucks for long haul is kinda stupid.
We have had a more efficient, faster, proven and reliable alternative for decades now. Electric trains No battery, no range limit, no charging time, higher topspeed, can go anywhere nonstop. For the short haul to and from the trainstation, electric trucks/vans make sense though. |
It’s certainly nothing like the 16mpg streamliner Semi illustrated on this site many years ago
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Nobody is making BEV trucks for long haul routes. |
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https://i0.wp.com/transportgeography...24%2C631&ssl=1 Each rail line has the right to use other companies' rails, but it requires coordination. And railroads don't have the right to deliver on each other's lines. They either have to hand it off or negotiate the right to deliver on someone else's turf. On a major freight lane things go relatively smoothly so it doesn't take too long. An express train from LA to NYC takes 3-4 days vs 2 days for a team truck. But if you're on a more obscure route things likely haven't been negotiated/scheduled in advance so a 2 day trip might take a week or 2... |
Hoping these end up being a huge success and we see the diesel trucks replaced by EVs.
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