Heavy Duty EV Demonstrations for Freight & Mobility Solutions

Proof of Concept in New Communities & Fleets

Project Overview

Clean Fuels Ohio, in collaboration with numerous local and national partners, is pleased to present the Heavy-Duty EV Demonstrations for Freight & Mobility Solutions project. This project is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Vehicle Technologies Office Award Number DE-EE0008889.

Project Purpose

Led by Clean Fuels Ohio, this project is designed to prove the operational and financial effectiveness of med-heavy duty Electric Vehicles (EVs) in new fleets and communities. Today’s world is ruled by data and fleet operators and decision makers are looking for better analysis and data to drive vehicle replacement and purchase decisions. While light-duty EVs are scaling in terms of both commercially available options and market penetration, medium-heavy duty EVs have yet to be successfully demonstrated by diverse and replicable fleet partners.

This project is designed to fill critical data gaps around Class 4-8 EV datasets, including enabling commercially available data loggers to better capture and report meaningful performance metrics. Through diverse partnerships, the project will utilize commercially available EVs, EVSE, equipment, and facilities, as well as leverage app-platforms to ensure seamless technology deployment and demonstration. This project is designed to showcase significant return on investment that will lead to Class 4-8 EV adoption in various fleet applications across the country. In addition, this project will gather OEM and end-user data to inform the creation of operational and financial performance models to assist fleet decision making and adoption of heavy-duty electric vehicles.

Approach and Objectives

This project will seek to demonstrate the viability of medium/heavy duty electric vehicles (EVs) in key sectors including logistics, freight and goods movement, and as new mobility solutions for low-moderate income communities as well as address critical gaps in data and analysis to enhance fleet decision making and EV adoption. This project’s real-world demonstrations are designed to showcase Class 4-8 EVs in freight and mobility operations, and with vehicle platforms that have tremendous potential for wider adoption both within freight and transit operations, as well as in numerous a wide varieties of fleets serving markets including utility, telecommunications, government, delivery and more. These opportunities to scale EV adoption are critical for energy security and sustainability, and this project is designed to provide the real-world proofs needed to demonstrate the operational and financial performance of Class 4-8 EVs for a wide range of fleets operating across the nation.

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Heavy-Duty Electric Vehicle Demonstrations in Ohio

Class 4 EV Local Transit Van

Vehicle Model: Ford Transit 350 Passenger Van with Lighting eMotors Electric Powertrain 86 kWh battery
Fleet Partner: Columbus Yellow Cab
OEM Partner: Lightning eMotors
Upfit Partner: Bus Service Inc.
Status: Deployed and In-Service as of Q2 2021
Location: Columbus, Ohio

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Class 6 Local Delivery EV Truck

Vehicle Model: 2014 Freightliner M2 with SEA-Drive® 120b Power-System and 138 kWh battery
Fleet Partner: Two Men and a Truck Columbus
OEM Partner: SEA Electric
Upfit Partner: W.W. Williams
Status: Deployment in Q1 2022 due to delays from COVID-19 pandemic
Location: Columbus, Ohio

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Class 8 EV Terminal Truck/Yard Hostler

Vehicle Model: T-Series Electric Terminal Truck
Fleet Partner: DHL Supply Chain
OEM Partner: Orange EV
Status: Deployed and In-Service as of Q2 2021
Location: Dayton, Ohio

Enabling and Speeding the Adoption of Medium-/Heavy-Duty Electric Vehicles

This project is designed to prove the operational and financial effectiveness of medium-heavy duty Electric Vehicles (EVs) in new fleets and new communities. The project features four major areas of activity designed to enable and speed Class 4-8 EV adoption:

1. Real world deployments of Medium-Heavy Duty EVs by highly visible fleets in key vehicle segments with compelling stories:

The direct demonstrations in this project focus on freight and goods movement and mobility solutions, including: 1) DHL Supply Chain (Class-8 EV for Transfer Truck); 2) Two Men and a Truck (Class-6 EV for Local Delivery); and 3) Columbus Yellow Cab (Class-4 EV for local transit connecting low-income residents to employment sites). Beyond compelling stories, these specific demonstrations are designed to showcase EVs in vehicle platforms with opportunities for adoption across the largest number and widest range of use cases in freight, service, and mobility fleets.

2. Improved Medium-Heavy Duty EV Datalogging and Reporting Capabilities, led by partner Sawatch Labs working in conjunction with EV Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) involved in the three demonstration projects:

Sawatch Labs will work with OEMs to provide software and signals engineering to ensure data can be captured, cleaned, and reported with useful visual displays by the commercially available Geotab telematics platform.

3. Operational & Financial Performance Analysis Tools Informed by OEM, End-User Data on 427 real-world deployments of Class 4-8 EVs in fleet applications nationally:

This robust data set will be used to iterate variables and inform the creation of Operational and Financial Analysis modeling tools for any fleet interested in the class 4-8 vehicle platforms demonstrated and showcased in this project.

4. Analysis of Key Fleet Prospects and Distribution of Replication Resources:

Project team in partnership with Clean Cities coalitions from across the country will identify fleet stakeholders with similar vehicle operations, share case studies, and perform individualized analysis to demonstrate how the pilot vehicles can be adopted by additional fleets to improve economic and environmental performance.

By performing these four major activities, this project team will demonstrate the operational and financial viability of class 4-8 EVs in new fleets and new communities.

Project Team & Partners

Implementation

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Technical Analysis

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Sawatch Labs, founded in 2017, is an electric vehicle analytics firm with a deep expertise in fleet electrification, sustainability, energy modeling, duty cycle characterization, telematics, and fleet safety. Sawatch’s role in this project will be to provide operational and cost modeling for both electric and diesel medium-/heavy-duty vehicles through their existing analytics platforms and new tools they will develop through the data collected from this project.

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Scale and Replicability

This project will create a case studies and other tools to demonstrate the feasibility and financial viability of scaling medium-heavy duty EVs into fleets as solutions for freight and goods movement as well as new mobility solutions. Clean Cities coalition partners who will work with similar fleets in their territory to provide analysis, case studies, and planning to replicate pilot projects.

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Download Project Summary Here

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Please contact Tim Cho, Projects Manager (tim@cleanfuelsohio.org) for any inquiries.