Hyundai and Kia back Arrival, a British startup making electric delivery vans
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Anyone with a tesla care to comment on how fast travel is through stop sign filled suburbs compared to ICE cars?
That being said, you really don't want to accelerate forwards quickly because you'll shred tires, and you don't really want to "decelerate" hard either because it's not good for your brake lifetime and passengers don't really enjoy it much.
Electric cars with regeneration are more efficient than ICE vehicles, especially in stop-and-go traffic because when you don't need the power, it's not being used. Most gas vehicles still burn fuel spinning the engine while idling at a stop sign. So while yes, the acceleration may be faster, the real thing that's gained here is efficiency, because you can recapture some of the car's energy whrn stopping the vehicle.
So brakes should have longer lifetime.
[1] The original clutch was changed at 450000 km.
[2] The brake pads separated from the backing, even though they were only half-worn. Higher-quality pads might have prevented this, but the previous owner installed them.
Is this sarcasm??? Do you honestly think that regenerative braking is harder/faster than brakes? Are you the type of person that is hard accelerating from every stop sign in the suburbs?
If you want to deliver lots of packages without violating traffic laws, then rapid acceleration seems like obvious low-hanging fruit. If the vehicle is quiet and nobody's in the way, then what is the problem?
It's energy intensive.
The US passenger car market is orders of magnitude larger than the commercial van market. 500k units vs 18 million units per year. $9 billion versus $650 billion in total annual sales.
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2019-us-commercial-van-sales-f...
If an electric van can reduce operating costs by several orders of magnitude, it might make sense for fleet owners to switch over ASAP. Especially if their competitors do it first.
What I quoted was annual new van sales. ~500k new vans purchased per year, growing at about 5% per year.
A massive operating efficiency improvement might draw forward some new purchases / push existing vans into early retirement. Cost savings would definitely not be anywhere near an order of magnitude, but e.g. if TCO could go from $0.55 a mile conceivably to $0.40 a mile that would be very compelling. (Based on 15,000 miles a year, that would mean $8,250 goes to $6,000, saving $2,250)
Note that TCO is including financing, taxes, insurance, depreciation, maintenance, repairs, and fuel. Fuel is about 30% of the TCO, so cutting fuel costs has a large effect. Depreciation on vans (after the first year) is pretty meager.
Cratering resale value of ICE vans in the face of cheaper to operate EV vans will accelerate the transition to EV vans, but there’s still an adoption curve and an infrastructure challenge to face. The market share for EV vans is essentially 0 today.
A scruffy delivery person looking hassled as long as not rude or disrespectful to your goods and turn up when expected most don't care about. As they know otherwise they will end up paying more for delivery...
But a smoke belching van will get people commenting from my experience.
At least in the UK people don't care much for the reg number (age) of a companies vehicle. But will size up a companies entire environmental policy on the eco credentials of the final step.
I get the impression the EV vans are a good niche to play in for smaller players that don’t want to go head-to-head with Tesla.
They get a lot of miles put them on them. They will need enough range to drive 100-150 miles, sometimes towing a trailer or full of heavy equipment.
Another thing to think about is if you have a van with four workers in it, you have to pay those 4 workers if they stop to recharge on the road. Lots of times you're working on jobsites that are under construction and might not have charging stations, or power at all.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/royal-mail-electric-truck-te...
https://www.streetscooter.com/de/modelle/umbauloesungen/#pic...
In China I noticed many of the vans and trucks of various sizes in cities were electric (which was kinda scary because they are silent, but it makes the city more livable). I probably saw electric trucks almost as often as I see Tesla's in the Bay area.
This reminded me of a project I knew from 2016, whose pitch to management was cheaper running costs by splitting a monolithic application into microservices. That did not go well neither for the team, nor management.
Arrival may have something in common with Nucor steel and its mini mills.
Legacy steel mills created steel by melting iron. This required a big, expensive blast furnace that was hard to start and stop.
Nucor recognized that it could use a smaller more nimble electric arc furnace to melt scrap steel. The timeline we're discussing was '68 so think Space Race Era. The concept proved successful.
Since then, Nucor has remained successful with its mini mill concept while other steel companies have faced myriad ups and downs. The technical limitations of the mini mill have gradually gotten better as well expanding Nucor's market. [0,1]
Arrival is claiming that:
1) Its "vehicles won’t require things like metal stamping facilities (the vehicles are made of composites) or paint shops"
2) So that it can create microfactories situated closer to its customers
Regarding Arrival's strategy, I see a similarity to Nucor. Arrival recognizes a new reality for how it will build EVs that it thinks will allow it to manufacture differently just as Nucor did with scrap metal and arc furnaces enabling mini mills.
Is this a viable strategy? I don't know. To decide that I'd need to weigh critiques from people with industry knowledge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor#History
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/23/business/the-rise-of-mini...
I understand Nucor did 3 things differently.
First it used scrap metal as input and smaller electric arc furnace for melting. Meant it could set shop near scrap source and sell to local construction market saving on shipping costs.
Second, they did away with unions with their smaller employee base and could pay them lesser than their counterparts could pay their unionized workforce.
Third, the mini mill format meant cheaper setup cost and they could pause operations at lower operational and maintenance costs which again their counterparts could not.
This makes sense for Nucor.
For Arrival however, given their target is the commercial van market, I don't see what is backing up their claim to keep the cost of the car low by setting up shop closer to the customer.