Tag Archives: logistics

Major Commercial Euro EV Truck Order

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This is a serious commitment to electric logistics

By Gary S. Vasilash

DB Schenker has been around since 1872, moving things first between Vienna and Paris, then, with time, around the world. Clearly the company knows what it is doing to have existed for so long.

It is not unusual for a logistics company to announce that it is buying some electric trucks. Generally the number announced is not all that large. After all, when you are being depended on by someone to get whatever from here to there within a set period of time, you don’t want to depend on some technology that is still somewhat new.

It is one thing for someone to have an electric passenger car.

It is entirely another for a company that could be moving critical goods to put it on an electric 16-tonne electric truck.

Note the clever cab design of the truck–high visibility for the driver to make driving in city centers (or “centres”) easier. (Image: Volta Trucks)

So it is notable that DB Schenker has announced that it is purchasing 1,470 such trucks to transport goods from distribution hubs to city centers from Volta Trucks.

Volta Trucks?

A Stockholm-headquartered company established in 2017. An objective of the founders is to “decarbonize last-mile logistics and to make city centre environments safer, more pleasant and sustainable places to live and work.”

And to do so with the development of commercial vehicles like the Volta Zero.

DB Schenker will be working with Volta to develop a 12-tonne variant of the Zero, as well.

The logistics company will test a prototype of the Volta Zero during the spring and summer of 2022, then the learnings from that will be rolled into the production trucks.

It will utilize the vehicles at 10 locations in five countries.

Cyrille Bonjean, executive vice president, Land Transport at DB Schenker said, “The large-scale partnership with Volta Trucks allows us to significantly increase the pace of electrification of our fleet and invest in greener transport solutions, brings us closer again to our goal of carbon neutral logistics.”

How Autonomy Will Really Start

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Why Ford, Argo AI and Walmart are going to be making a difference in the implementation of the tech

By Gary S. Vasilash

Although many people think—or imagine—that autonomous driving is going to occur from a company like Tesla, which will allow people to do whatever while their vehicle chauffeurs them to wherever, in point of fact, that is not going to be the case for a variety of reasons, not the least of which that sensors and processors are expensive, and even though there are some people who are willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money for something that claims to be “full” but is really more than half empty, OEMs are going to need to have assurance that there are going to be many more than a few who are willing to buy the tech.

But while consumers might not opt to spend the money, commercial carriers are likely to if they can determine that the tech is going to provide them with an economic advantage.

Ford, Argo AI and Walmart are driving autonomous tech forward. (Image: Ford)

Which makes the announcement by Ford, Argo AI and Walmart about the retailer using vehicles from Ford (Escape Hybrids) and self-driving technology from Argo AI to launch an autonomous delivery service for the “last-mile” in Miami, Austin, and Washington, DC, all the more significant.

These are mass-manufactured vehicles that are going to be put work by the world’s largest retailer in urban settings doing driving that will conceivably provide an ROI to Walmart, if not immediately, then at some point in the future.

Tom Ward, senior vice president of last mile delivery at Walmart U.S., said, “This collaboration will further our mission to get product to the homes of our customers with unparalleled speed and ease, and in turn, will continue to pave the way for autonomous delivery.”

The way this will work is that the Walmart online ordering platform will send information to the Argo AI cloud-based infrastructure, which will then calculate the necessary scheduling and routing.

The point is that this is all predicated on business processes.

And that’s what is going to make actual autonomy a real thing long before something shows up in your driveway that will take you from somewhere to somewhere else while you sit in the back seat eating a hot dog and watching Netflix.

Know that this is something of a journey as Ford and Argo AI have been testing their tech on city streets since 2018, the same year that Ford and Walmart ran a test in Miami. It takes time, effort and consistency of purpose.

The technology needs to be developed, tested, validated and verified.

It is not the consequence of an over-the-air update that follows a tweet.

General Motors Embraces E-Commerce

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The Cadillac LYRIQ, which is to become available in the first half of 2022, certainly looks promising as an electric, luxury SUV, one that may help the brand, which, let’s face it, has been struggling in the market for the past few years—here’s something that is not well known: although Acura is generally considered to be having a tough time of it in the U.S. market, in 2020 it outsold Cadillac, 136,983 vehicles to 129,495 vehicles; Acura also outsold Cadillac in 2019.

The Cadillac CELESTIQ, an electric sedan that takes luxury to levels that Cadillac hasn’t had on offer for, arguably, ever, combining hand-crafted materials with technology, such as a four-quadrant glass roof that allows individual selection of the level of transparency, is another arrow in the quiver of a transforming brand. Although it is still a concept vehicle, it is unlikely that General Motors would draw as much attention to it as it has (it was part of Mary Barra’s CES 2021 keynote) were it—or something damn close to it—not going into production.

That said, even though General Motors is investing $27-billion in vehicle electrification and automation, the most important launch, revealed during Barra’s presentation, is of a vehicle that none of us will individually own:

The EV600, an all-electric, purpose-built light commercial vehicle.

The LYRIQ and the CELESTIQ may be sexy, but logistics is where it is at and will drive the proliferation of electric vehicles in a way that it will take the consumer market a long time to catch up to.

The GM EV600, a purpose-built electric delivery van. The company has even started a logistics support business, BrightDrop. (Image: GM)

The owners of fleets of commercial vehicles—like FedEx, which GM worked with on the development of the EV600 (and the EP1, an electric rectangle on wheels that has a capacity of 200 pounds and a top speed of 3 mph)—do the math when it comes to vehicle acquisition. If it is going to be to their financial advantage to get EVs, then they’re not going to worry about things like available infrastructure, because they’ll build their own. They’re not going to have range anxiety, because they know precisely where their trucks are going and when.

(And it probably doesn’t hurt that it provides a green sheen to their brands by going EV.)

Consider:

–Amazon, which owns a piece of it, is having Rivian build electric delivery vans that are to be on the road next year at a number of about 10,000, perhaps going to 100,000 by 2030.

–Ford has announced the 2022 E-Transit delivery van that is going to be available later this year, and emphasized the benefits of the electric propulsion system vs. its own internal combustion offerings (with the scheduled maintenance of the E-Transit being an estimated 40% less over eight years/100,000 miles).

–And there are start-ups like Arrival, which companies including Hyundai and UPS have invested in.

Sure, we pay attention to LYRIQs and CELESTIQs.

But consider this: in an industry that seems to be shedding operations, General Motors has established a new business, BrightDrop, that is dedicated to delivery, not only vehicles like the EV600 and EP1, but even logistical software services.

This is a non-trivial commitment—and likely to be a prosperous one, as Mary Barra and her colleagues know that commercial companies do the math and need a whole lot less persuading to go electric.–gsv