Total Cost of Transportation Analysis for a Heavy-Duty Fleet

At the recent Advanced Clean Transportation Expo, panelists highlighted that the cost of heavy-duty electric vehicles needs to reduce significantly for California’s Advanced Clean Fleets regulations to look feasible. That, and the availability of charging infrastructure and skilled technicians, the lack of which effectively increases downtime and adds to cost.

These and other factors were recently analyzed by Ryder and published in a white paper, (available to download).

Ryder is an end-to-end transportation solutions company, and they offer vehicles operating on all fuels, so their analysis of the reasons for the (lack of) demand for their electric vehicles is noteworthy.

The whitepaper is free to download and is a quick read so it’s highly recommended to do so, but the figure here summarizes the key findings for a Class 8 truck: the total cost of transportation for an electric truck increases by over 2X (from ~ $290K for diesel to ~ $620K for an EV). As seen in the breakdown, the key factor of course is the cost of the truck itself (which is presumably linked to the battery pack, mostly). The analysis shown here is for Georgia, but the study also considers the case in California as a special region with higher fuel/electricity prices. 

The other high cost is labor – the study concludes that because of the limited range of an EV, it effectively requires almost 2 drivers to deliver the same payload as the diesel.

The study also analyzes Class 4 and Class 6 trucks, and finally a mixed realistic fleet of 25 vehicles, and concluded that that fleet would require an additional $3.7M or a 56% increase in cost to convert to electric. That is a non-starter for most small and mid-sized fleets despite any incentives.