This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: What driving an alternative fuel vehicle is actually like.
DETAILS: Truck driver AJ Savas started with a diesel truck and now drives electric trucks powered by Einride’s intelligent freight operation platform at Oatly. The Utah-based driver shares the experience of driving an alternative fuel vehicle with FreightWaves reporter Kaylee Nix.
KEY QUOTES FROM AJ SAVAS:
“[Oatly] did bring me off of over-the-road, so I get to be home every day with my family, which is amazing. Not a lot of truckers get that opportunity. Now I work about 15 days out of the month and I get the rest of the time off. I get to spend that with my kids and my wife. That’s really just changed the game entirely, because I was over-the-road, and I was gone for eight to 10 weeks at a time, so that was hard for everybody.”
“I do run an electric semi. I work 12-hour shifts, and it’s very impressive what it can do. It’s really nice because it’s quiet, and our support team with Einride has been amazing. … It was kind of hard to get used to at first going straight from a diesel into an electric because you’re going from this really loud diesel that pulls and jerks in different directions to this really smooth and quiet truck that, even when you turn it on, I couldn’t tell it was on. It’s that quiet.”
“Right now we have three trucks [and] we run 24/7 so there’s always a driver on-site driving an electric truck. With Einride, they have come up and if we have any maintenance issues, or our yearly PMs [preventive maintenances] [are due], they take care of it for us, which is really nice. I don’t even have to change tires or anything, which is really awesome. They have been so great with that. I can call one of their representatives any hour of the day.”
“I think there is a lot of hesitance when it comes to switching over [from diesel to electric trucks], and I think it was kind of the same hesitance when switching over to manual from automatic trucks. I think a lot of the misconceptions are like, they’re not going to haul as much, go as far, last long term or drive in winter. But I drive in Utah. We get some crazy snows out here, and I’d rather be in the electric truck driving it than in a diesel any day. It rides really smooth, and it can pull its weight. I haul oat milk, so my loads are always maxed out weight-wise, and it has no problems. You wouldn’t even know you were pulling a load if you didn’t see a trailer behind you.”
“As far as the battery lasting, I think right now it is going to be for mostly local runs. But it’s the local guys that use a lot of fuel, really, because you’re going in and out of cities. I think it can be really beneficial if local drivers changed over to the electric trucks as we work to get longer hauls out of them.”