Developing an intuitive understanding of truck range, battery size and charging is essential for electrification. It’s important if you’re trying to figure out if your can replace your F150 with an electric F150. We all grew up with an understanding of gallons of gas or diesel – what the trucks looked like, what they smelled like and how many, how often, and how much fill ups cost. A lot of us understood these things because we experienced them. When I was a teenager, I ran out of gas and it was a real problem. When I was in my early twenties I sometimes “just put $20 in the tank” because I was short on funds but needed to get somewhere and knew $20 would make it happen. When I started driving trucks I figured out if I had a truck with a 100 gallon tank I could hypothetically make it to DC without stopping. Now I’ve got to get to that full understanding of range, fuel cost, and capacity all at once without all the mishaps and drawn out learning I had with ICE vehicles. Maybe you’re the same. We’re going to discuss some of this with real life examples to make it easy.
I’m going to make some hypothetical assertions here, like a medium duty box truck will get 1 mile per kwh, or consumes 1kwh/mile. I’m saying that but a real box truck NEVER gets 1kwh/mile. It gets 1.13 or 0.97 and that’s only an average over a trip. It also gets better mileage with a slow driver, and worse when it gets cold, and even worse with a SWEATY fast driver in the cold (sweaty drivers fog up the windows and the AC/defogger uses energy). For the sake of getting a rough understanding of these things I’m going to keep it simple.
Charging speed
Level2 charging tops out at 19.2kwh, though most are slower (your average public charger is maybe 7.2kwh). These are typically chargers run off single-phase electrical panels, like what your office or home have. There’s a variety, and depending on your charging plan, you can get one slower than 19.2, but that’s a good place to start. The 19.2 chargers will typically need an 80+ amp breaker, and will cost a little less than a grand. Installation by an electrician will vary greatly.
DC charging runs for 50kwh to an unknown top end. Most Ev-go or chargepoint chargers you run into are going to be 50kwh-100kwh units. Most Tesla superchargers are 150-250kwh. These generally require a big connection to the grid, may incur demand charges, and probably cost a shocking amount of money to install. There’s some variety out there, but if you start your expectations in the 6 figure range for price and fractions or multiples of a year for timeline you’ll still be shocked at the reality of it, but you might be able to keep a straight face.
My experience with DC charging is that you don’t usually get the full rated speed. I’ve seen my 100kwh truck max out at 61kwh on a 100kwh charger. A Tesla typically only approaches the top 150kwh (or higher) max speed at the very center of the battery and it’s a lot less the closer to the ends you get. Max-output times hours doesn’t equal the charge you get.
These things will all change, but right now that’s a good place to understand where we are.
Truck Batteries
Also measured in kwh, this is how much energy the batteries on the truck can hold. This generates some questions that will be truck specific: how many of those kwh can I use? Will the truck charge them to the top? Will it let me run it all the way down to 0? Would I even want to do either?
Tesla says you can have the whole battery on their car (with the exception of some software limited Model S cars). But they recommend you don’t actually charge to 100% all the time, or discharge down to 0%. They suggest (and it varies on who and when you ask apparently) 20%-80% and to use the ends for “special occasions” or something like that. This is just an example. On any given truck you’re going to want to find out how this is handled.
How big are these batteries?
Let’s take a look at a list:
- VW E-golf: 38kwh
- Tesla Model 3 long-range: 75kwh
- Ford E-transit 68kwh
- My own 16′ box trucks: 138kwh
- Kenworth K270E: 100kwh or 200kwh
- Nikola Tre: 733kwh
- Tesla Semi: 900kwh (hypothetically)
Some of these batteries are pretty big, which is great and should mean good range, high weight capacity or both. But those big batteries can take a while to charge. At a top end L2 charger it would take 46 hours to charge the Tesla semi bottom to top. At a supermarket L2 charger it would take FIVE DAYS.
Consumption
These trucks also have significant consumption. Again, here’s a list with some cars thrown in for reference.
- Tesla Model 3: .25kwh/mile
- Ford E-transit: .55kwh/mile
- My own 16′ box trucks: 1kwh/mile
- Nikola/Tesla semis: 2kwh/mile
If you’ve done your googling you’d know Tesla is claiming 1.7kwh/mile but I’ll believe it when one of my employees gets that on a Friday afternoon before a World Cup game.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN????
Here are the things you’re going to want to look at when you’re evaluating real vehicles doing real routes.
Can I DC fast charge en-route realistically?
Let’s break it down. You’re in a 16′ box truck, you have 138kwh of battery and you get 1kwh/mile. You want to go 200 miles in a day, and you don’t want to go below 15% of battery to be safe. So you’ve got 117 of effective range and need to pick up another 83 miles of range on the road, so 83kwh. If you can find a DC fast charger that’s rated at 100kwh AND WILL DO THAT 100 THE WHOLE TIME, you’d need to park the truck for 50 minutes. If you left your warehouse at 100% you’d get back at 15%. Is sitting for 50 minutes alright? Here’s a list of concerns/thoughts:
- If the driver needed a 30 minute break anyway, it’s really only sitting for 20 minutes
- Is the cheaper cost of fuel (both from your home charger and from the DC charger) worth the cost of paying your driver to sit for 20-50 minutes?
- Was the charger out the way of the route? Do you need to factor in more mileage?
- The charger was rated at 100kwh, but did it actually deliver that for the whole charge? Maybe the wait was longer.
So there’s some gotchas there. DC fast charging on the road isn’t the panacea it’s sometimes made out to be. Don’t think of it like a diesel station, at least not yet. Someday we may be rolling around in megawatt trucks with multi-megawatt chargers everywhere, but that ain’t today.
A metric I find useful is this: how does the consumption per hour compare to the charging per hour? How many hours can I drive per hour I charge? At 1kwh/mile and 100kwh chargers (let’s round that down to 60kwh, effective) that looks like: 60miles/hr = 60kwh/hr. So we’d be charging an hour for every hour we drove. Clearly the key here is leaving home with a full charge, charging overnight, and then using DC to bridge the gap on trips over the range of the truck (or using DC in case there’s a miscalculation and you get in a jam, or if weather throws your consumption off).
Can I get by with L2 charging at my warehouse?
The 138kwh 16′ box truck will charge 0%-100% in 8ish hours on a 19.2kwh charger, so that’s a go over night. Depending on your hours of operation you could probably handle a 11kwh charger even and if you’re not using the full range (and you won’t be).
The 900kwh Tesla semi will take at least 2 days to charge on L2, if it’s empty.
A 200kwh Kenworth K270E would fully charge overnight in around 11 hours, so that’s good to go for daily runs of 100miles (assuming 1.5kwh/mile and not trying to run down to 0 every day).
Tesla cars manage this, what would it take for a truck?
Let’s compare the stats:
The Tesla Model 3 long range: can do 260 miles on a charge (assuming we’re not going to 0 or 100%, and we’re driving briskly), so 4 hours of driving. It then takes 30 minutes to charge. So 4 hours driving, .5 hours charging.
With a 16′ box truck that does 1kwh/miles, if you did 4 hours of driving, you’d have used 400kwh, so you’d need an average speed of 800kwh of charging to match the Tesla. Battery size just determines the times between charging. So with a 138kwh pack, that you’re not using all of, you’d go 2 hours and charge for a quarter of an hour at an average of 800kwh. So, to make even small box trucks have parity with the most common of electric cars, we need megawatt DC charging. Supposedly they exist, I’ve just never seen one.
I hope this helped and put some of the basic stats of these trucks in perspective. I’ve based this on my own experiences owning: Egolf, Tesla Model 3 long-range, and two Hino 195 box trucks with the SEA-drive 120a drivetrain. I’ve based some of the article on published or guessed stats of other trucks. I’ve tried to keep it simple. All of these ranges are dependent upon driver style, weather, and truck spec (especially wind resistance, and therefore height of cargo).