Electric Range for Delivery Trucks

Why longer range may make best business sense

With battery costs dominating the price of electric vehicles, there is a common tendency to buy vehicles with just enough battery to cover a desired route or average daily miles.   For example buying a EV with 80 miles max range when the average route size is 65 miles/day (a typical class average for medium duty trucks).  But automotive battery cell prices have dropped significantly, and longer range packs become more affordable.   So what might be a good electric range ? 

There have been studies monitoring the daily driving of delivery trucks.   For class 4-6 medium duty delivery trucks, 50-64% of trips were 60 miles or less.   Adding a reserve of say 15 miles, suggests that a 75 mile range electric delivery truck could be well utilized.   However, there are a large number of daily trips which this vehicle could not be used for.  This can complicate the deployment planning for these vehicles within fleets.   Increasing the range to 100 miles would cover 81-86% of trips, and 150 miles would cover 95% of trips.  From an economic standpoint, the longer the daily drive, the great the operational cost savings offered by electric over diesel.  However, this benefit reduces sharply if the vehicle is not used on long trips every day.  Hence  there will come a point of diminishing economic returns from increasing range, because the vehicles are mostly doing short trips. 

There are at least three additional benefits of longer range battery packs.     

• The actual electric range will depend on a number of factors including ambient temperatures which impact heating and cooling loads and the level of hill climbing during the route.   This means there will be a variability in daily miles, and a longer range vehicle will not have concern about it fulfilling routes well within its reserve range.·     

• Battery life should improve.   Batteries age depending on the energy usage (throughput) compared to their capacity.  A battery which is not fully drained every day because it has longer range, will have lower daily energy throughput and hence longer life.·     

• The battery capacity and hence electric reduces as the battery ages.  Having a longer initial range will ensure that an acceptable range reserve is maintained as the vehicles ages. 

The appropriate electric range will depend on specific fleet needs and the day to day variability of their routes.   The chart below provides a quick comparison of a 75 mile range versus 115 mile range delivery truck.  Details on this analysis can be found in our report ‘ The Business of Electric Delivery trucks”