Bob Lutz, former head of the team at General Motors that developed the Chevy Volt, is now pursuing electrification of trucks. In an interview just published in the Seattle Times, he explains why he thinks the big advance in electric vehicles in the next few years will be in larger trucks. It's economics, stupid. Lutz is on the board at VIA Motors, which will soon start production of extended-range electric trucks, cargo vans and passenger vans using power trains similar to the Chevy Volt. Lutz explained, regarding the somewhat disappointing sales of Volts, "We started at the wrong end. The whole automotive industry made the intellectual mistake of thinking EVs were all about maximum range, so we all started with small vehicles that are basically very economical anyway. Yes, you do save fuel. You can use a smaller battery, but it makes less sense to take a 40 mpg vehicle and make it electric than it does to take a full-size pickup or SUV, which in town realistically gets 11 to 12 mpg. If you take that to 100 mpg, now you’re really saving money and saving a scarce natural resource and reducing CO2 emissions drastically."
More below the squiggle.
Lutz says, "The realization came to me suddenly late that the right place to electrify is at the heavy end, with full-size pickups and SUVs, which America loves but which are a somewhat endangered species with fuel-economy regulations." Big electric trucks "make instant economic sense because the fuel saving is so large that you will more than get back your monthly lease price."
But wait, there's more. Big trucks also can be used to export power. They have power outlets, and if there's a power outage, you can start your electric truck and plug in. The truck is a super powered emergency generator.
VIA Motors is converting Chevy Silverado pickups, luxury SUVs and full-size vans to electric "range-extended" vehicles (i.e., the gas turns on and runs the electric power system once power stored in the battery is depleted), rather than building any vehicles from scratch. VIA Motors expects initial sales to be primarily in fleet sales, then it will move on to retail. The total market in the U.S. for pickups, SUVs and vans is over 3 million units, according to Lutz, with almost a quarter of that market being full-size trucks. That makes full-size trucks the single-most-popular category of vehicle in the U.S. Lutz points out that if only 10 percent of that market becomes electrified, that's 300,000 trucks on the road using electricity instead of gas for the first 30 miles of driving every day.
It also would make all those truckers driving them big trucks examples of the move to electric. What an image makeover. I can see the future TV ads for big electric trucks. Ram Tough!