The Electrics Are Coming

Mercedes-Benz is 20 select European customers pre-production electric e-Trucks to run in real-world fleet conditions.

Photo credit: Mercedes-Benz 

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It’s called the eTruck. Built by Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz division, and it was wheeled out at the IAA Commercial Vehicle Show in Hannover, Germany, last year. And this week, the automaker announced it is supplying an extremely exclusive group of customers with the first 20 pre-production models to run them for a year as a sort of real world Beta test in German cities.

At first glance, the eTruck looks like a fairly conventional European truck design, but underneath there’s some pretty interesting advanced engineering. The truck is fitted with 212 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery packs, allowing for a range of around 124 miles per charge, according to Mercedes-Benz. The powertrain is centered around front- and rear-mounted electric motors, providing a combined 335 hp and 737 lb-ft of torque. Payload capacity is rated up to 12.8 tons, with a permitted gross vehicle weight of around 25,000 lbs. and a GVWR of up to 50,000 pounds – not bad for urban delivery applications.

And that’s not Daimler’s only electric vehicle effort: The company also owns a significant share of Mitsubishi-Fuso. And reports indicate that an all-electric version of the company’s medium-duty Canter cabover trucks — fittingly called the eCanter – is set to get a similar real-world test run in Japan and North America soon.

Of course all of this comes on the heels of the introduction of the Nikola One Class 8 electric tractor a few months ago.

All this begs the question: Are electric trucks about to become a “thing?”

The short answer is yes. In some ways, EV technology seems to be mirroring autonomous technology – most strikingly in that the timeline for production and adoption is accelerating at a pace far faster than …Read the rest of this story

Source:: http://www.truckinginfo.com/blog/truck-tech/story/2017/02/the-electrics-are-coming.aspx