Test Drive: Chanje Electric Cargo Van
By Jim Park
The Chanje V8070 boasts a 580-cubic-foot cargo space on a 26-foot-long chassis that will haul up to 6,000 pounds of payload – and happens to be electrically powered. Photos: Jim Park
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With my electric-vehicle driving experience limited to electric golf carts on one end of the spectrum and the Class 8 Transpower at the other extreme, I was wide open to a brand-new experience with the Chanje electric van. I have driven comparable-sized delivery vans before, such as Mercedes’ Sprinter and Ford’s Transit, both diesel- and gasoline-powered. I had some baseline upon which to base my evaluation, but the electric powertrain was new territory.
Chanje’s V8070 is billed as a Class 6 truck, with a gross vehicle weight of 16,535 pounds, capable of a 6,000-pound payload in a 580-cubic-foot cargo space. It’s positioned as a last-mile delivery truck, intended for service in cities and urban areas where daily mileage usually doesn’t exceed 60-80 miles. The Chanje has an advertised range of 100 miles, half loaded on a full battery charge. On paper, it’s well spec’d and well positioned to serve the burgeoning package delivery market, or any other application where distance isn’t a limiting factor in the choice of powertrain.
It takes about eight hours for a full charge, but partial charges will restore much of the battery’s capacity in just a fraction of that time. The company claims a diesel-gallon-equivalent “energy economy” of 50 mpg, with a 70% reduction in energy costs compared to diesel.
Chanje says the van was designed from the ground up as a battery-powered electric vehicle, so the basic structure of the vehicle was conceived to accommodate the battery pack, the motors and the rest of the electrics that run the thing. Under the hood, however, is a traditional engine tunnel, which suggests that in some previous incarnation the …Read the rest of this story
