This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Misconceptions about EVs
DETAILS: Sami Khan, co-founder and CEO of all-electric trucking company Nevoya, shares insights with FreightWaves Editorial Lead Brielle Jaekel to dispel myths around electric vehicles.
KEY QUOTES FROM SAMI KHAN:
“The problem is people, understandably, they look at the retail price of these assets and they get sticker shock when they see a vehicle that is often – for the case of the Class 8 vehicle – over half a million dollars. … [B]ut we look at this slightly differently, and we’ve done a lot of analysis on the total cost of ownership. I.e., how much is this vehicle going to cost you over its entire lifetime. This is where EVs start to claw some of this disadvantage back and actually start to gain an advantage on traditional ICE vehicles.”
“Fuel and maintenance are the two largest operational costs for trucking fleets after drivers. These are the areas where you can drive huge benefits by switching to EV. Not only are EVs more efficient, they simply use less energy to get from A to B. That energy is also cheaper to access through the grid and, in some cases, through renewal. In certain states, going EV can actually reduce your cost of fuel by over 90%. On the maintenance side … this then translates to up to 50% lower maintenance costs.”
“A mixture of private and public funding has really helped to narrow that [charging station availability] gap. In Southern California now, there are an abundance of options for charging an EV truck. There are already over 10 providers in Southern California alone providing charging capacity for EV trucks – which anyone can tap into if you have the vehicles.”
“People look at EV trucks and they think they should be able to replace a diesel truck with an EV truck one-to-one, but that just isn’t the case. … If you have a fleet that is predominantly long-mobile and moving goods from coast to coast or up and down the country, you should not be buying an EV today. I’m an EV evangelist and I’m happy to say that if you’re one of those guys, diesel is probably your best bet today, but come back and talk to me in five or 10 years time. However, 50% of the freight in this country is not long-mobile. Fifty percent of freight moves under a distance of 250 miles, which incidentally is the range of most of the EVs available in the market today. These are the use cases that EVs were born to serve.”
“Petrol and diesel vehicles catch fire 20 times more frequently than EVs. So yes, when an EV catches fire, it is difficult to work with it. But compare that to 19 more fires that you would have had if you had been running diesel vehicles and it starts to become clear that it’s not a fair fight.”