FEATURE
Etrucks’ battery-swap E700 electric tractor unit, built by Chinese truck and construction machinery manufacturer XCMG
From electric fences… to electric trucks Story Dave McLeod & Wayne Munro ORMER FARMER ROSS LINTON HAS GONE FROM milking cows, to importing construction machinery….to now pioneering the introduction of electric trucks in New Zealand. With little fanfare, Linton’s Etrucks operation has been importing battery-electric trucks from China for the past three years. And at Fieldays in June, the company gave a new XCMG heavy-duty electric 6x4 tractor unit, which uses a battery-swap system to extend its working range, its first public showing…anywhere in the world. (See Fieldays coverage on Page 81). Etrucks already has two heavy-duty battery electric trucks in operations here – an 8x4 water cart, which works at Eastland Port in Gisborne… And a 50-tonne TFT125 6x4 dumptruck, which has been working
for over a year at Blackhead Quarries’ steep Logan Point site in Dunedin. The dumptruck uses 201kW of power going up the 1.7km quarry road (with a 9% gradient) to the working face at the top of the quarry, at about 20km/h…. As it returns down the hill, loaded at around 30t, driving at 12km/h it regenerates 176kW of power. Linton says that the quarry truck uses just $8 of electricity a day – “and that compares to a diesel truck on the same run that uses $90 of fuel a day.” Light-duty battery-electric Etrucks are doing metro deliveries for the Warehouse Group. The E300 models are electric four-wheelers or six-wheelers with GVMs ranging from 6t to 10t, four-speed auto transmissions and a 200km range at 50% loading. Truck & Driver | 91
