With several commercial vans and an increasing number of straight trucks already headed to market, the pickup and delivery segment is doing its part to usher electrification into commercial trucking.
The logistics here are pretty simple and duty cycles perfectly mitigate many electrified concerns. The range on most electric commercial vehicles is under 200 miles, which is well below the daily needs of an urban delivery driver. Since many PU&D fleets cube out before they gross out, added weight from the batteries is no big deal, and they’re all going to return to base making the lack of an expansive charging infrastructure a non-issue.
If you designed the perfect use-case for an electric truck with currently available technology, it just might be a medium duty beverage application running routes in an urban area – kind of like the Peterbilt Model 220, outfitted with Spicer’s central motor direct drive driveline, that I took for a spin around Atlanta last week. Dana’s electric driveline is designed to be a drop-in turnkey solution. Mine just happened to be dropped into a Pete cabover.
When you tilt the cab forward, the battery management cradle rests where a diesel engine would be normally. Among the last remnants of that engine is the radiator, which now cools the motor and inverter – two components that get hot as electricity flows through them.
Anchored by a TM4 Sumo MD HV2600-6P high-torque/low-speed reluctance-assisted permanent magnet motor and CO200 inverter, Spicer’s electric system pumps out 155 kilowatts (kW) of continuous power and 265 kW at-peak. That’s electric jargon for more than 200 hp, with 355 peak horsepower available, and a little more than 2000 lb.-ft. of torque. The rest of the driveline is pretty conventional, featuring an SPL 100 driveshaft and Spicer S130 single reduction medium-duty single drive axle – both of which would commonly be found in a traditional spec for this truck.
The star of the electrical show is Dana’s TM4 motor, which is one the most validated commercial vehicle electric drive systems available. Dana Senior Manager of Commercial Vehicle Product Planning Harry Trost says more than 12,000 vehicles, mostly busses in China, have been equipped with the motor and have logged more than 360 million miles.
Electric Truck up-and-comer Lion Electric Co., will include the TM4 Sumo HD direct-drive motor, BCI20 charger and inverter, and the Neuro vehicle controller in its Lion8 Class 8 truck along with Spicer DS404 drive axles and SPL 250 driveshafts.
