I met a fleet manager with an operation headquartered in western Canada who reflected on the challenges of getting electricity at his office.
They had done the math and found that providing company cars with battery electric chargers made sense as a way to reduce cost. The challenge was that it was actually less expensive for them to power these chargers from an on-site generator running on natural gas versus getting grid power delivered to the facility. Completely eliminating emissions from their office transportation was not possible in this first step and they would need to be satisfied with making some progress toward that goal.
Technology purists love to jump on these types of examples to rationalize that battery electric vehicles do not make sense; invoking the term “greenwashing” as if some game of deception is occurring.
However, as I said, the fleet had done its homework, and the battery electric cars were a net cost reduction for them. The fact that the charging was done through a generator was a reality of the regional economics imposed by the utility in routing electric power in combination with the abundant supply of cheap, local natural gas. The fleet still found that its net emissions were less and their operating costs were less, so it was a tactical win versus doing nothing.
The concept of continuous improvement should be inherent in any commercial operation. The nature of the zero-emission transition is that it is not instantaneous. Fleets need to keep making the improvements they can make as they are possible and as they are feasible. If that means odd combinations of technologies — like my Canadian example — it still is taking steps in the right direction.
The critics of new technologies are constantly looking for factoids to disparage the new versus old. Change for these critics is unacceptable. It is easy to do nothing. It’s easy to complain. Psychologists label this as decision bias — the seemingly natural preference for the known versus the unknown.
Just a few short years ago, it was inconceivable that there would be production battery electric heavy- and medium-duty commercial vehicles. Yet here we are with multiple legacy OEMs and a raft of new manufacturers offering an extensive range of models which CALSTART estimates worldwide at more than 140 models from more than 40 manufacturers. A few years before that, it was inconceivable that a single automotive start-up would successfully be building 1 million battery electric cars per year. Yet here we are with Tesla producing more than that. Add to that Rivian, Polestar, other new vehicle manufacturers, and every legacy car maker that is on the path to producing production battery electric light-duty vehicles.
