From electric fences….to electric trucks

Etrucks’ battery-swap E700 electric tractor unit, built by Chinese truck and construction machinery manufacturer XCMG

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.

Clockwise, from top left: Ross Linton reckons Etrucks should have around 65 electric trucks on the road by the end of 2022.....Blackhead Quarries’ Etrucks dumptruck runs on $8 worth of electricity a day.....the Warehouse Group recently put some light-duty Etrucks on the road...XCMG’s 8x4 electric tipper is sold in China as a Hanvan G7....XCMG recently unveiled this hydrogen fuel cell tipper in its home market

In addition, Linton says, Waste Management has so far been “probably our key customer….they’ve been with us virtually all the way through.” Etrucks supplies it with 10t battery electric trucks – “but we’re working on the next size up too.”

XCMG also has a medium-duty electric truck in China – the E500 – but is not yet building RHD versions.

Linton says of his truck business: “We’re still small – I think we’ll have 15 trucks on the road in NZ by Christmas, but I reckon another 50 by the end of next year.”

The swappable-battery E700 6x4 tractor unit has a 50t GCM, with 360 kilowatts of peak power and up to 2800 Newton Metres of torque. It has a six-speed automated manual transmission.

XCMG – the Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group – already has 2000 8x4 E700 tippers on the road in China (1200 of them in one fleet alone!), with 300 6x4 tractors using the swap system about to begin trials.

The E700 has a theoretical range of around 140kms, running fullyloaded 50% of the time on the highway and up to 180kms in metro applications.

Linton says that the battery-swap concept optimises the usage of the electric trucks and cuts costs – even with the additional expense of at least one extra battery, the charger and the gantry crane needed to swap the batteries (which takes “under seven minutes” to swap, using NZ’s semi-automated system…or less than five minutes using a fully robotised system employed in China). The battery can be fully recharged in two hours.

Etrucks national sales manager Drew Lloyd sums it up: “It’s like a swappa gas bottle. Because you know you can swap a battery in a few minutes there’s no need to carry around another tonne of lithium as (you do) with a (plug-in-to-charge) 500kWh battery.

“You have a smaller battery, only do around 100kms and swap it. That extra tonne of payload is worth more to you too. The other win is that your truck isn’t standing still being charged for a couple of hours – it’s still out there working. The battery can be swapped in about 10 minutes.”

Linton says that Etrucks initially saw the E700’s major target market as carting shipping containers: “Off the wharf is a classic model because most of the containers only go 50kms or less. But there’s also a railhead or inland ports.”

And potential applications for the tractor unit are growing: “We come up with ideas and then other companies come up with even more….and some of it’s pretty clever.”

Linton adds: “We’ve got one customer looking at inter-city – Auckland to Hamilton. Fairly light stuff. But their model is one truck and three batteries – so a battery will be being charged at either end….” Plus the one installed on the truck.

“The other thing is metro-heavy: There’s a lot of heavy trucks that roll past here that don’t have heavy containers on – on rocks and civil infrastructure projects. So we’re pushing hard for that. And in China, their biggest sales for EVs have been 8x4 metro tippers.

“Plus, being NZ, we get interest from milktankers…. That’s a work in progress.”

Linton reckons that he doesn’t see any applications as not “doable” – although range limitations currently count out linehaul and logging….but that hasn’t stopped operators inquiring.

Electric loggers are being used to shuttle-run logs to skid-sites in Canada, he says – and the same opportunity does exist here, in similar settings to Blackhead Quarries’ operation in Dunedin: “If you’re coming down the hill full and going back up empty, it’s much easier, as it’s only the empty range that matters.

“On full regen you’ll regen more power than you use. So if you’re bringing logs down off steep hills then, happy days!”

He says the charger will cost $168,000 and Etrucks has had a quote of $150,000 for a gantry crane capable of swapping the batteries.

Cost-wise, the electric tractor unit comes at a premium – the upfront cost is “a bit over $400,000.”

But under consideration is having a company rent charged batteries to E700 operators, says Linton: “So instead of getting diesel, you go to this company for the battery. They own it, they take care of the depreciation of it, they put the power in it and swap it. Even without (taking account of free) RUCs, that will work out cheaper than running diesel.”

Linton sold his Culverden, North Canterbury farm 20 years ago and then, in 2009, bought Landex, the NZ distributor for XCMG – the world’s third-biggest construction machinery manufacturer.

Landex spent most of the years since selling what he terms XCMG’s “yellow gear – loaders, rollers, graders….that sort of stuff.”

But he was also well aware that the Chinese manufacturer had

been building trucks for about 20 years – and that “the quality was going up in leaps and bounds. So we sold some diesel trucks to Fiji and places like that – but none to NZ.”

None, that is, until he included an article in his monthly newsletter to customers – about XCMG building an eight-tonne, four-wheeler electric truck: “And the phone went nuts from various people….in the industry that were dead keen to find an OEM that was going to do EV trucks. Because at that stage all you could do was conversions.”

There was enough interest to prompt him to fly to China to talk to XCMG execs. He secured an agreement to sell the electric trucks here and started Etrucks.

Having E300 Etrucks here on show at EV World three years ago “just showed that we were serious – and some of the bigger players started taking notice of us.”

So did Blackhead Quarries’ GM Tony Hunter – the result being that Linton and Hunter “jumped on a plane up to China and drove the truck….and then drove a couple of trucks around a goldmine. We went back to the factory and Tony said: ‘Let’s give it a go.’ ”

Linton says that the XCMG trucks are well specced: “The braking and suspension is Wabco and ABS8, the cab is R29 rollover rated.” They have Fast tiptronic transmissions.

“In comparison to the Chinese trucks you see on the road here – they’re about 30% cheaper than the XCMGs. So these are some of the top-end trucks in China.”

A downside has been, he concedes, that they are heavy: “Our 8x4 water cart weighs 18t empty, with a 14t cab/chassis. But it doesn’t matter for that application as it’s on port.” When it needs to drive on the road between facilities, it runs empty.

XCMG has worked on reducing the weight, via air suspension, disc brakes and lighter chassis rails – “so our tractor now is 10,600 and our 8x4 is 12-tonne. Both are 1-1.5 tonnes heavier than they should be, but compared to other EVs that are carrying around 500kWh of lithium (batteries), we’re pretty good.”

Linton says that in getting to this point with the XCMG, Etrucks has invested a lot of time and money – and made some mistakes…. “but we’re learning as we go.”

The transmission in the first E300, for instance, wasn’t configured to cope with steep hills, so that needed adjustment.

“I’ve been in machinery for a while and I know what a pump is…. but the learning curve has all been with the help of understanding customers.”

The key to growing the market for the Chinese trucks is, he says, supporting Etrucks’ customers: “We’ll only have 15 of these in the country by the end of the year, so how do you support them? What we do right now is part source – we just buy another one, because we don’t know what’s going to break on them and there’s not much on them that you’re going to fix here. If it goes wrong, we get another one. I guess the world’s going that way anyway.”

Lloyd adds: “From the drive motor back, you can go to a Pit Stop and get it serviced basically. But from there on – that’s where the electrical side is, so you need the diagnostic technicians that we have.”

An onboard diagnostics plug on the trucks means that data can quickly be downloaded and sent to XCMG in China for analysis and

Right & opposite page: In NZ, the battery on the Etrucks E700 can be swapped in under seven minutes, using a semi-automated system. A fully robotised system used in China does it in less than five minutes

advice.

Etrucks’ presence at Fieldays was an exercise in educating people about the E700 – and worked well: “Because of the electric vehicle ‘freebate’ announcement we ended up with I think seven politicians on the site. They wanted a positive story and there we were with great big trucks,” Linton says.

In terms of battery life, he says the expectation is around 3500 cycles – and at the end of that each lithium ferrous phosphate battery can be repurposed as storage for solar power systems on commercial buildings. In that setting, he adds, “there’s probably another 10-20 years in it.”

Linton expects to soon have compliance signed-off for the one battery-swap E700 tractor unit so far in NZ and has another undergoing the compliance process in China. The next step will be to put a trailer behind the first unit and allow operators to drive it.

Looking into the future, Linton believes “metro delivery is going to be EV all day long,” with fixed batteries. Heavy-duty metro tippers can turn to swap-battery electric and inter-city “is going to be a dollar each way. My guess is that hydrogen (fuel cell vehicles) will probably take the lead.

“And as for linehaul – hydrogen all day long, at least until the battery technology gets better.”

And, by the way, Linton doesn’t mind whether it’s a swapbattery or hydrogen fuel cell future: XCMG has both – having recently launched a hydrogen-fuelled heavy-duty 8x4 tipper. T&D

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