The Future of Trucking
Back in December 2017, I published an article entitled “Commercial Vehicles go Electric, Autonomous, Connected and Shared.” Things have progressed over the last 2+ years, which justifies a new article on this topic. What is the current state of play?
Passenger vehicles grab most headlines when it comes to the mobility revolution. Nevertheless, trucking is undergoing a profound shift which, by and large, parallels that of personal vehicles. Whereas electrification will happen just as fast for urban logistics as for cars, it will take longer to gain traction for long distance trucking. Autonomous driving will likely emerge faster for specific trucking applications than for cars, leveraging the same overall technologies.
Electrification
The pace of electric vehicle deployment has picked up since Dec 2017. At the same time, the Total Cost of Ownership breakeven points have been brought forward thanks to a faster than anticipated drop in the cost of batteries. This is essential to drive fleet buy-in.
At the pack level, battery cost has dropped from about $1000 / kWh in 2010 to $156 according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which sees a promising path to $100 by 2023–2024 vs. $120 by 2030 anticipated just three years ago. Although this has helped grow the sales of passenger EV to reach about 2.2M units in 2019, electric trucks are…
