AT AN ECANTER

New Technology

AT AN eCANTER

ELECTRIC TRUCKS ARE ALMOST HERE AND NOW IN AUSTRALIA. DAIMLER HAS THE FIRST PRODUCTION VERSIONS OF ITS ECANTER LANDED, BUT IT MAY BE A LITTLE WHILE BEFORE COMPANIES WILL BE ABLE TO GET THEM INTO THEIR FLEETS AND OPERATING HERE. WE TOOK A DRIVE IN THE FIRST PROPER ECANTER TO HIT OUR ROADS.

Even if you want to buy a new electric eCanter, there are two reasons why you won’t be able to.

Firstly Daimler Trucks Australia may be actively marketing series production eCanters but they won’t be for sale, they will only be available on an operating lease basis. This means that the eCanter will only be available on a six-year operating lease with a fixed price for the life of the truck with your fleet, and the price will vary depending on the potential workload and other factors. At the end of six years you hand the truck back and, hopefully all things being equal and you have had a happy experience, you lease another one.

The notion behind this is that it takes away all of the worries of adopting new technology, if anything goes wrong with the electric truck, it is fixed under the all-encompassing lease.

That means that transport operators can accurately pin-point the cost of the truck and maintenance to pitch for contracts with green leaning customers, safe in the knowledge your profits won’t slashed by expensive repairs.

The other reason you won’t be able to buy one, or for that matter lease it just yet, is because of the fact that Daimler Australia, initially at least, will have a limited access to them, but more about that later.

It is clear that creating electric trucks is a complex task, far more difficult and challenging than electric cars. That is clear from the troubles that old mate Elon has been having with the Tesla electric trucks, and why the best and brightest in the Daimler empire are now fully engaged in making the electric driveline work more efficiently and effectively.

The challenges are vast, from gaining sufficient range, to the weight of the batteries and the thermal issues that are inherent in having batteries and electric motors.

You can pile more batteries in to give more range but it soon becomes selfdefeating, because the more battery weight the more energy you need to move the truck. The more power you feed in the more heat is generated and then there is the issue of ambient temperatures and the effects they have on battery performance. Batteries don’t perform all that well in really cold conditions or in exceptionally hot weather.

Never fear, the legions of boffins around the globe are working on solutions for all of those challenges and evidence of the results they have come up with so far are revealed in the first series production eCanter.

A couple of years ago when we had the chance to drive a pre production/test version of the eCanter, we were impressed but things have moved on since then and the production version is a seriously impressive thing to drive.

Another reason why Daimler is only offering the truck for lease and not for outright purchase is that it enables the company to install software and tech upgrades as the boffins perfect them.

AS the first gen eCanter this truck is fairly conventional in that it is powered by a lithium ion battery pack feeding electricity to an electric motor, centrally located in the truck, driving the axle in a similar way to an internal combustion engine truck.

The next gen eCanter will likely have a motor integrated into the axle, in other words an eAxle, which helps cut down on mechanical losses and reduces overall energy use.

The other challenge that any early adopter of electric trucks faces is the charging infrastructure, which is something exercising plenty of serious minds around Australia and across the world.

Governments and private companies are moving at various speeds to establish charging stations in the public realm, but for a commercial ‘last mile’ light duty delivery truck like the eCanter the real demand for charging will likely be at home base or the warehouse the truck is operating from.

Daimler Trucks Australia is working closely with Australian recharging specialist, JetCharge to provide customers with charging solutions and systems to suit specific needs. JetCharge has a number of solutions to help operators with the most efficient way of charging their vehicles in an ever changing electric vehicle and tech landscape.

So it was that we turned up at DTA’s Sydney offices in Huntingwood, in the middle of Western Sydney’s manufacturing and warehousing heartland, to grab the Fuso eCanter for a proper spin in our home town, exploring some of the routes and areas where a city delivery truck would find itself plying its trade every day of the week.

We chose a test route that would take us on a route replicating a delivery run. By chance we had the need to pick up a part for a son’s vehicle, to drop off some wheels that needed sandblasting, and to pick up some household items for Mrs Road Tester, all in Sydney’s outer Western suburbs, which we figured was a fairly true reflection of the work an eCanter would be asked to perform.

Indeed when we stopped at the vehicle parts place, the bloke behind the counter thought we were his regular delivery drop, because as he mentioned, his usual delivery driver had been talking about swapping his diesel Canter for an electric one.

That would be fine but thanks to global demand, low initial production numbers and the widely reported silicone chip shortage across the planet, you will be hard pressed to get your hands on an eCanter in Australia for quite a few months, so that green oriented delivery driver, will have to wait a while.

Even then it is likely there will probably be only about 60 eCanters allocated to Australia in the first year, and given things are what they are, those will most likely go to larger fleet operators like Australia Post, Toll, Camerons, Linfox, Coles etc. That’s not something that Daimler has expressed, more something we have speculated, for a number of reasons. Firstly even on a full operating lease, these aren’t going to be cheap, in fact possibly two or three times what an equivalent diesel Canter costs. It’s just like Plasma TVs were prohibitively expensive when they first arrive on the scene, but now we all have flat screens and they cost $600.

Secondly the likes of those major operators and companies are the ones that will have a reason to spend that extra money on electric trucks. It will be important for those companies to present an image that they are working to reduce carbon emissions and to present a ‘green’ perception. So buying electric trucks, even if the purchase price is much higher, will be a cost of presenting a good image to the public, shareholders and customers.

The third reason will be that larger fleets will be the best positioned to install charging infrastructure to enable the operation of these trucks.

Part of the payback, apart from being lifted to a new moral highground, will be that service costs will be next to nothing, particularly compared with diesel trucks. There’ll be no oil changes, no filter changes, and lets not forget, no diesel bills. As well as that, if companies line the roof of the warehouse with solar panels or erect wind generators and install batteries, then the cost of charging would be negligible.

So with those matters out of the way, let’s take a look at how this series production eCanter performs in its chosen environment.

It was hard to miss the eCanter, thanks to the extensive ‘wrapping’ it had been given, which gave it a vivid blue paint scheme that left us in no doubt that this was an electric eCanter and that it was the first production electric truck on Australian roads.

Climbing aboard the eCanter is little different to the conventional diesel model and generally the cabin appears little different from those models.

Plug the toggle style key into the slot

on the dash, press the start button… and nothing happens. Well not exactly, but unlike those rattly, smelly, noisy diesels, the only thing that does happen is the dash lights up and a Ready light flashes on the instrument panel. When all the gods of electricity are in unity and the Ready light stays solid , you can select D and silently glide away through the front gate of Daimler’s Sydney office.

The gear selector is very much like one in a car or light truck, with a stubby selector stick that can be slotted down from P for Park to Neutral, and then Reverse, with the Drive position across on the left hand plain.

It has the feeling of driving a big golf cart, the accelerator pedal has some resistance but the silence and the instant urge are the things that immediately make an impression on you.

The gauge on the green LCD readout between the round speedo and ‘Eco’ or power use gauges, indicates that we have a predicted range of around 110km.

That green indicator screen seems a little primitive and ‘1990s’ like and kind of strange in such a high tech machine. One would have thought a more advanced LED readout, or ‘glass cockpit’ as aviators call new age digital instruments, would have been far more appropriate in a truck of this ilk. Anyway that may come with the next iteration.

As a competitive bastard, this writer found himself challenging that range indicator and trying all that we could to prevent it from dropping and even increasing the range. Given the energy that is fed back into the batteries from the eCanter’s regenerative braking system then that is actually not that hard.

As we said the controls and cabin layout are not significantly different from other Canters, with the same switches and controls, but one thing that is different is the wand that delivers the equivalent of an exhaust brake. Of course there is no exhaust and instead that wand delivers different levels of braking force. The two positions deliver not only some very efficient auxiliary braking but also that valuable battery replenishment. The second tier of the retardation can readily pull the truck to almost a total halt, in fact you find yourself manipulating the wand to give a bit more coasting to get you the last few metres to the red light or stop sign, without touching the brake pedal.

If you drive with the retardation on the top level, simply backing off the accelerator provides enough slowing power to drive without touching the brakes pretty much at all.

The test truck was very much targeted as a city delivery truck and was equipped with a single-speed reduction gear with a relatively low final drive which enables rapid acceleration and a top speed of 80km/h.

The test truck had about 1.5 tonnes of load onboard so it was short of its 7.5 tonne GVM and that meant that combined with that low final drive and the instant and substantial torque from the electric motor, the eCanter absolutely blasts off from a standing start, if that is your desire.

The reality is you don’t have to drive this truck like that, it is a fantastically relaxing and easy truck to live with while just

driving it normally.

A day at the wheel of the eCanter is a doddle, and any driver who is fatigued after an eight-hour shift in this truck must be doing something wrong.

So the big question that most people ask when you start talking electric, is what about the range?

Range anxiety is a major factor for most people with electric vehicles, however the reality is even in a last mile delivery environment, most overestimate the distances they actually travel in a day.

Even after all our running around we covered a shade over 80km in our rambles and according to the predictive gauge, there was still 46km of juice left in the batteries.

As we said before, with the early adopters that will take up electric trucks, their depots and warehouses will be equipped with chargers that will enable these trucks to be replenished overnight or between shifts. In time there will be networks of rapid chargers that will enable a quick charge while the driver has lunch or a break, so range should not be an issue.

Of course the other thing to remember is that this is eCanter 1.1, and as Daimler engineers and boffins refine every part of the batteries, motors, axles and software, that range will inevitably be increased.

While the current eCanter (see what we did there, our first electricity pun!) can be charged overnight, it does also have a rapid charger plug that can be used to part recharge the battery in around one hour.

While the production version of the eCanter that we drove is ostensibly the same as the pre prod model we steered a couple of years back, there are in fact many differences under the skin.

A lot of work has been put into the thermal control and auxiliary systems to improve efficiency and performance.

As we said, temperature is the enemy of battery efficiency, either at really cold or really hot ambients. Obviously in Australia high temps are the major issue, except for Melbourne and Hobart we suppose, but Daimler has gathered data from around the World, in various places with trucks running with fleets in real life conditions.

The cooling systems for the battery packs includes a big radiator not unlike the radiator you would expect to see in a diesel truck. There is coolant piping all around the area that would normally be the engine bay and in fact there are two separate cooling circuits, with their own header tanks.

With no internal combustion engine the eCanter lacks a vacuum circuit so no booster for the brakes, which is overcome with an electric pump. The next move will be to deliver full electric brakes which we understand could be in the next gen eCanter.

One of the things that the Daimler Trucks erstwhile PR man keeps reminding us of is, that unlike some other electric trucks available in Australia now, the eCanter has the full safety suite included in its package.

That means that there is ABS/EBD braking, as well as autonomous emergency braking, ASR, ESP and lane-departure warning, so as well as being a safe bet for zero emission endorsement, the eCanter is also a very safe truck.

It is easy to drive, quiet, clean, efficient and very capable of handling last mile/day delivery work in city environments. Now all we have to do is wait for more eCanters to become available so Daimler can start leasing them to those big fleets, we feel certain there will be plenty signing up to add them to their delivery arsenals.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Power source: AC synchronous electric motor couple to a single-speed reduction drive Power: 135kW Torque: 390Nm Batteries: Six Daimler liquid cooled lithium-ion battery packs (total 360V, 82.8kWh) Range: 100km-plus (depending on conditions and application) Brakes: Electric two-stage regenerative braking system and electro-hydraulic brakes with two-calliper discs Suspension: Front leaf springs with hydraulic dampers and stabiliser bar rear leaf springs with hydraulic dampers Steering: Ball and nut electro-hydraulic power steering GCM: 7500kg Payload: 3000kg