STORE OPERATIONS
Will you have a fleet of electric vehicles some day? More to the point, will your fleet have the juice to deliver?
Orchestrating
energy By Anne Mellano
A
mazon recently announced the order of 100,000 electric vans to be delivered by 2030. For perspective, that’s more vehicles than FedEx currently uses worldwide. The fleet world is increasingly enamoured with electric vehicles, particularly business like the auto parts distribution industry, where quick reliable delivery is a key differentiator. Of the many points of discussion around autonomous electric vehicles and the services they’re expected to deliver, one underrepresented topic is the battery capacity of electric vehicles and the limitations this imposes. Most autonomous vehicles, in the long term, are expected to be electric for several reasons. Electric drive trains require less maintenance than their gas counterparts. The fuel is less expensive than gasoline. And they are easier to refuel without human intervention. But electric vehicle batteries are still subject to variations of range and power that introduce new variables for fleet orchestration.
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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2020
w w w. a u t o s e r v i c e w o r l d . c o m
More than Just Range
Vehicle range is usually the first topic that comes to mind when it comes to electric vehicles. How far can the vehicle travel? But that is a tricky issue because the range is impacted by a number of factors, some of them completely unrelated to sheer distance. As with a gas-powered vehicle, electric vehicles use more power as their speed increases. Autonomous vehicles use energy as they process data, and the computers driving the cars process some 11 terabytes of data per day by some estimates.
