A giant Kia Soul
And fair play to Amazon who obviously can't wait to make their entire fleet including heavy trucks pure electric. Refreshingly, without greenshouting all about it.
Oh I'm sure there'll be some press release about it
I hope they start focing their delivery contractors to use electric vans soon where possible. The parcel vans around here don't seem to have any gears above 2nd 😬
Pretty much all Amazon delivery vans here in Dublin are now 100% electric and thankfully also are the ones from An Post. There is substantial progress here.
How far do you reckon the An Post/Amazon vans are getting per charge? They cover a relatively small distance but would be stop/starting all day long. Would ya get a days worth of delivery out of them in an urban area? Or are they rotating them after 4 hours?
Stop start is ideal for an EV as you get back [insert some large percentage here] energy at stop that you spent at start.
They get a full days driving out of them. I spoke with a few drivers who confirmed this. Urban driving is ideal for EVs as you get regen braking and also the maximum speeds are low - high speed is the achilles heel of EVs as it kills the range, particularly in a vehicle with poor aerodynamics
An Post use the Renault Kangoo EV. If this article is anything to go by, its a 33kWh battery with a range up to 200km....of course it would be less depending on payload and speed. About a 5 hours charge time due to 7kW onboard AC charger.
The weight has almost no affect to the range (on an BEV) as long as the tyres are correctly inflated. The only exception is if you transport something heavy on a top of a mountain, in which case the regen would be affected by the lighter vehicle on the return leg. Don't know if there are such routes in Ireland.
I spoke to my postman about the van before Christmas and he said that he finishes his rounds at around 60% but they are made charge the vans every night to 100%.
He also said that the heaters are useless in them and turn off once you get out of the van. His van had been sent to someone who installed a new heater that stayed on and all the others in town were getting the same done to them.
At steady speed weight is less of a factor but as weight increases your going to use more energy during acceleration, this is somewhat mitigated by the extra energy available during regeneration. The round trip between acceleration and regen is much less efficient than a steady cruising speed, so you will see some reduction in range when carrying a heavy payload.
Was chatting to the Amazon delivery driver only yesterday actually. 37kWh in the van - good for 140kms handily which suited his route down the ground.
Leaves van at depot and is refilled for next morning every day.
I've noticed An Post also rent a few diesel vans, big Mercedes sprinters. Fair enough they need the extra vehicles sometimes, but it's still a bit of a cheat when they say they're 100% electric
I thought the commitment is to be 100% electric by 2030 and to have zero emission delivery vehicles in urban settings by 2021. In any case a bit like the much berated 'self charging' phrase, ''zero emission' vehicles are also a bit of a cheat until we have 100% renewable generated electricity
Wouldn't call it a cheat, removing tail pipe emissions from cities will save millions of lives.
But yeah, of course we will need to make the grid much more renewable than it is now. And soon.
Looking at how some people in this country try to privatise the space in front of their house with traffic cones and all kinds of other obstructions, I am not sure allowing them to install a cable gully or anything else is such a good idea.
People may well try to do that. However, it shouldn't be used as a stick to beat law-abiding citizens looking for a safe solution to a problem that is about to become very common and which has been easily dealt with in other countries already.
Is it really so common in other countries? The link above talks about a cable gully trial by one local authority in the UK. I haven't seen them installed anywhere so far.
Oh, you're right. But there are other solutions being tried such as the chargearm. See here:
https://chargearm.com/
They also have electric Mercs. Our local DPD van is electric as well. I think it is Nissan
Practical solution, but would never be accepted by Councils here given our BS compo culture/industry in this country.
That looks amazing.
... and expensive!
Well it's to be expected when they list the cars they are targeting.
The design language should filter down to the "cheaper" models though.
I'm thinking truck, lets say a Volvo fh Electric 6x2 truck, 46 ton unit, towing a timber trailer, lets say there is no weight issue, in adding a generator of up to 1 ton on to the trailer, could that truck then work, and charge itself, on the move, but mostly in down time, example loading in a forest would take an hour,.
Technically possible?
lets say a 100 kva lpg generator
VW starting a pilot scheme with EV grid integration
Very light on the details about that pilot scheme. But they rightly stress the huge importance of V2G in the renewable energy revolution. Fair play to VW, hope they can roll this out to the public very soon. A quick google shows that only the largest (77kWh usable) battery ID (MEB platform) range cars already have a bidirectional AC charger on board?
I'd say more theoretically than technically, yes it is possible. You have the battery as a buffer of energy which you replenish with the REX. Not that this truck will go very long distances.
As fun fact did you read about the truck that doesn't need to be charged?
Here in Athlone they are all electric too, they finish the day with 60% SOC but policy is to charge back to 100% every night which I disagree with from a BMS perspective but what do I know
They should be labelled "zero tailpipe emission" vehicles, having said that I've driven around 542kms this month on zero emissions as power fed from house PV panel generation
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