From Garbage Trucks To Buses, It’s Time To Start Talking About Big Electric Vehicles First, to achieve disproportionate impact, you must target a disproportionate contributor to the problem. While medium and heavy trucks account for only 4% of America’s 250 million vehicles, they represent 26% of American fuel use and 29% of vehicle CO2 emissions. If you are looking for a way to address more problem (foreign oil dependence, climate change, air quality, you name it) with less solution, big vehicles are it. If you want to have outsized impact, don’t convince a Prius driver to go electric, electrify a garbage truck. Lumbering fleets of conventional trucks and buses require a lot more maintenance and consume a lot more fuel than passenger cars. Conventional garbage trucks can require brake replacements as often as every 3 months, while the regenerative braking enabled by an electric battery can significantly decrease such wear and tear while saving fuel. Speaking of fuel, an average American driver burns 525 gallons of fuel a year. A garbage truck, by comparison, may only get 2-3 miles per gallon, and may consume 14,000 gallons a year, roughly 25 times more fuel than an average American car, and up to 70 times more than a lightly used, efficient car like mine. With 25-70X more fuel consumed per vehicle, the per vehicle fuel savings opportunity between big and small vehicles is no contest. Electrifying big vehicles simply makes more economic sense. Wrightspeed, one of the early leaders in the nascent big electrics market, develops hybrid electric drivetrains for trucks and buses. They claim that between fuel and maintenance savings, their hybrid electric drivetrains can offer ~$60,000 in savings per year per truck. See http://bit.ly/2laL5BY
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