This may be the best first large-scale use case for electric vehicles. Companies can better focus on total cost of ownership than with private light duty vehicles. The payback will also be better because of the greater utilization than with private cars. Lastly, there should not be large problems with charging infrastructure because all of these vehicles return to their depots at night.
FYI, as of Q4 Tesla is now selling roughly the same number of Model 3 cars (worldwide) as the entire US commercial van market. The vans also have significantly lower ASP.
The US passenger car market is orders of magnitude larger than the commercial van market. 500k units vs 18 million units per year. $9 billion versus $650 billion in total annual sales.
This is a good point, but isn’t the US skewed towards trucks (both big and consumer) over vans? I’m guessing from my experience living in the US and EU. (And those stats are likely counting consumer trucks into the passenger category). This also explains why Tesla is doing a big truck and passenger truck, but hasn’t announced a van yet - it’s building primarily for the domestic market.
Well, this makes sense, because nobody buys a van every year. It would be more interesting to see the total amount of vans purchased in the country and how many of them are 2010 models, 2000 models, 1990 models, etc.
If an electric van can reduce operating costs by several orders of magnitude, it might make sense for fleet owners to switch over ASAP. Especially if their competitors do it first.
> It would be more interesting to see the total amount of vans purchased in the country and how many of them are 2010 models, 2000 models, 1990 models, etc.
What I quoted was annual new van sales. ~500k new vans purchased per year, growing at about 5% per year.
A massive operating efficiency improvement might draw forward some new purchases / push existing vans into early retirement. Cost savings would definitely not be anywhere near an order of magnitude, but e.g. if TCO could go from $0.55 a mile conceivably to $0.40 a mile that would be very compelling. (Based on 15,000 miles a year, that would mean $8,250 goes to $6,000, saving $2,250)
Note that TCO is including financing, taxes, insurance, depreciation, maintenance, repairs, and fuel. Fuel is about 30% of the TCO, so cutting fuel costs has a large effect. Depreciation on vans (after the first year) is pretty meager.
Cratering resale value of ICE vans in the face of cheaper to operate EV vans will accelerate the transition to EV vans, but there’s still an adoption curve and an infrastructure challenge to face. The market share for EV vans is essentially 0 today.
Although they might not buy regularly a lot of Vans especially now with the huge delivery to end users market. The van is the public's face of the company.
A scruffy delivery person looking hassled as long as not rude or disrespectful to your goods and turn up when expected most don't care about. As they know otherwise they will end up paying more for delivery...
But a smoke belching van will get people commenting from my experience.
At least in the UK people don't care much for the reg number (age) of a companies vehicle. But will size up a companies entire environmental policy on the eco credentials of the final step.
On the other hand, commercial vans are used for, commercial purposes.
They get a lot of miles put them on them. They will need enough range to drive 100-150 miles, sometimes towing a trailer or full of heavy equipment.
Another thing to think about is if you have a van with four workers in it, you have to pay those 4 workers if they stop to recharge on the road. Lots of times you're working on jobsites that are under construction and might not have charging stations, or power at all.
So what you're saying is a van with just 200 mile range would cover the large majority of use cases better than an equivalent ICE van that's more prone to needing maintenance and has less storage space in the same body volume.
They can also probably deliver more packages per hour with how fast electric cars can speed up and regeneratively decelerate through stop signs and delivery destinations.
Anyone with a tesla care to comment on how fast travel is through stop sign filled suburbs compared to ICE cars?
That being said, you really don't want to accelerate forwards quickly because you'll shred tires, and you don't really want to "decelerate" hard either because it's not good for your brake lifetime and passengers don't really enjoy it much.
Electric cars with regeneration are more efficient than ICE vehicles, especially in stop-and-go traffic because when you don't need the power, it's not being used. Most gas vehicles still burn fuel spinning the engine while idling at a stop sign. So while yes, the acceleration may be faster, the real thing that's gained here is efficiency, because you can recapture some of the car's energy whrn stopping the vehicle.
Probably not much different from a car with a manual transmission (especially diesels), where the engine does most of the braking. The brakes on my mk4 VW Jetta TDI easily lasted more than four years[1], and even then only because corrosion killed them[2]. So I don't expect there to be much savings there.
[1] The original clutch was changed at 450000 km.
[2] The brake pads separated from the backing, even though they were only half-worn. Higher-quality pads might have prevented this, but the previous owner installed them.
The regenerative braking only works for light braking. After that it's standard disc brakes. And I don't think flooring it off the line at every block through a residential area is a very safe idea, please don't encourage anyone.
It's sufficient for nearly all city braking in my experience, sometimes with a little extra planning required, and with the exception of certain emergency braking situations. The only time I generally had to use the brakes were to completely stop below around 4 mph (6 km/h). On a Tesla the brake pedal only activates the standard disc brakes so you know when you're using them.
>They can also probably deliver more packages per hour with how fast electric cars can speed up and regeneratively decelerate through stop signs and delivery destinations.
Is this sarcasm??? Do you honestly think that regenerative braking is harder/faster than brakes? Are you the type of person that is hard accelerating from every stop sign in the suburbs?
> hard accelerating from every stop sign in the suburbs?
If you want to deliver lots of packages without violating traffic laws, then rapid acceleration seems like obvious low-hanging fruit. If the vehicle is quiet and nobody's in the way, then what is the problem?
Acceleration is power intensive, not necessarily energy intensive. You need (1/2)mv^2 to reach a given velocity, regardless of how much time is spent. If rapid acceleration happens to be less efficient, then that's just an engineering problem.
No, harder and faster than coasting to a stop. Granted, full coasting to a stop really only makes sense for red lights but I'm assuming delivery drivers are doing some coasting when coming up to stop signs/yields which is what I do.
The yellow Post StreetScooters are a common view in my region but as I just found out, there are a number of variations possible for other use cases. Interesting...
"In August 1967, the UK Electric Vehicle Association put out a press release stating that Britain had more battery-electric vehicles on its roads than the rest of the world put together... closer inspection disclosed that almost all of the battery driven vehicles licensed for UK road use were milk floats."[0]
Hyundai owns 33% of Kia and Kia owns parts of some Hyundai subsidiaries. Hyundai itself is a massive conglomerate. But yeah, for practical purposes they're the same company.
Won't be surprising when a lot of local delivery vehicles are electric.
In China I noticed many of the vans and trucks of various sizes in cities were electric (which was kinda scary because they are silent, but it makes the city more livable). I probably saw electric trucks almost as often as I see Tesla's in the Bay area.
I think Hyundai/Kia has a good electric car strategy in place. They have taken some of their popular models and offered an electrified versions of them. I bought a Kia Niro EV last year and have been enjoying it. Although not as flashy or exciting as a Tesla (e.g. no self-driving features), they are appealing to those who want an electric car but want something more practical and familiar.
Their chief "strategy" officer promises cheap vehicles even if battery prices don’t continue to fall by setting up "microfactories".
This reminded me of a project I knew from 2016, whose pitch to management was cheaper running costs by splitting a monolithic application into microservices. That did not go well neither for the team, nor management.
Both of these could be true. I have no doubt about your microservices anecdote, but I wouldn't dismiss Arrival's strategy outright because of it.
Arrival may have something in common with Nucor steel and its mini mills.
Legacy steel mills created steel by melting iron. This required a big, expensive blast furnace that was hard to start and stop.
Nucor recognized that it could use a smaller more nimble electric arc furnace to melt scrap steel. The timeline we're discussing was '68 so think Space Race Era. The concept proved successful.
Since then, Nucor has remained successful with its mini mill concept while other steel companies have faced myriad ups and downs. The technical limitations of the mini mill have gradually gotten better as well expanding Nucor's market. [0,1]
Arrival is claiming that:
1) Its "vehicles won’t require things like metal stamping facilities (the vehicles are made of composites) or paint shops"
2) So that it can create microfactories situated closer to its customers
Regarding Arrival's strategy, I see a similarity to Nucor. Arrival recognizes a new reality for how it will build EVs that it thinks will allow it to manufacture differently just as Nucor did with scrap metal and arc furnaces enabling mini mills.
Is this a viable strategy? I don't know. To decide that I'd need to weigh critiques from people with industry knowledge.
Thanks for sharing about Nucor. Learned something new today.
I understand Nucor did 3 things differently.
First it used scrap metal as input and smaller electric arc furnace for melting. Meant it could set shop near scrap source and sell to local construction market saving on shipping costs.
Second, they did away with unions with their smaller employee base and could pay them lesser than their counterparts could pay their unionized workforce.
Third, the mini mill format meant cheaper setup cost and they could pause operations at lower operational and maintenance costs which again their counterparts could not.
This makes sense for Nucor.
For Arrival however, given their target is the commercial van market, I don't see what is backing up their claim to keep the cost of the car low by setting up shop closer to the customer.
I would have loved to see Tesla provide us mail carriers with something like this. Maybe next cycle, those things get terrible mileage, and do a lot of braking that could be regened.
