Roadmaster’s managing director Geoff Robertson had done his fair share of homework before taking the plunge on a new Volvo FL electric truck for his Sydney-based refrigerated fleet.
He’d been fortunate enough to tour the Volvo HQ in Sweden and visit the big truck shows in Germany a couple of times and seen first-hand the “change of scenery” coming our way.
“Every couple of years you just see that transformation of moving from ICE trucks across to electric and hydrogen trucks,” Robertson said.
“Hydrogen to me seemed to be a lot more complicated while electric seems a lot more straightforward and a good option for metro areas.”
The city-friendly FL option seemed a natural fit for Roadmaster.
The company, which boasts a fleet of over 230 prime movers, trailers and rigids across seven depots, has been with Volvo and VCV for over 30 years now with 95 per cent of the fleet sporting the Wacol-based badge.
“Volvo have always been great from a support point of view,” Robertson said.
“So obviously, you know, the trucks are great, but we also use their contract maintenance and their finance, and all those sort of things.”
Robertson concedes the investment in the first electric model, however, was still a leap of faith in the sense the big corporates embracing the technology have deeper pockets than the family-run operation.
Although there are initial big savings in maintenance and fuel costs to be had, there is also still no clear idea of total-cost-of-ownership given no one knows what value these trucks will have on the second-hand market yet.
But the early adopter, which prides itself on being at the forefront of many industry technologies over the years, felt the time was right to play its small part in reducing emissions.
“There were some requests from customers about what we were doing to do our bit and that sort of got me thinking,” Robertson said.
“Obviously they’re not cheap [about twice the price of the equivalent diesel-powered alternative], but it’s not all about dollars. I also felt the fact that we’d spent so long in our partnership with Volvo I felt comfortable that if we did have some challenges, it’s a partnership – they’d support us, and we’d support them.”
[L-R] Josh Murray (TfNSW), Roadmaster’s Denis Robertson, Volvo boss Martin Merrick, Geoff Robertson and Volvo Trucks Australia vice president, Tom Chapman. Image: VolvoAlthough it’s relatively early days in terms of on-road performance, Robertson says range anxiety “is a real thing” – they’re currently getting between 150-200km – but he is getting positive reports back from the designated driver on how it performs.
The truck also has an all-electric rigid fridge Thermo-King body, essentially like the old off-engine drive trucks that you have around town now.
“But it runs off the ePTO [electric power take off] on the Volvo EV so we think it makes around 50km difference to our total distance that we can do each day.
“So far, it’s worked quite well. There are different ways you can do it, but this is the way we’ve chosen to do this one. Some people are going with an all-electric fridge motor as well, but we’re not doing that.”
The truck is doing between 100-125km a day and takes about four to six hours to charge each night with email alerts to Roadmaster’s ops team to tell them when it’s fully charged, or unplugged.
It’s put to work each day in the Sydney metro area doing multi-drops for a variety of customers, rather than being linked to one contract.
“That’s probably a big change to what a lot of people do,” Robertson said.
“We’re doing this on our own back, which is a bit unique as well, in the sense that we’re just trying to see how it works, trialling it in our business.”
While it’s still early days, Robertson is encouraged by the interest customers are already showing in the technology, which could lead to specific contracts that will help “share the load”.
“Some people think that we’re a bit mad for doing it, but I think we’ve all got to do our little bit to help where we can as far as the environment goes.
“I’m not a hardcore environmentalist by any stretch, but if we can have equipment that does the job just as good, then why not.”
Meanwhile, Robertson would like to see the states get behind electric trucks and offer more incentives for early adopters.
Some relief on stamp duty from states would be a good start, believes Robertson.
The stamp duty on the company’s new Volvo is an estimated $9000 more than he’d pay for the equivalent diesel model.
“So, I think some state government support around that would be great just to even up the playing field up a bit.”
In Europe in particular, Robertson said a lot of the governments are supporting the capital expenditure gap between the ICE and EV trucks.
“I know in some countries if an ICE truck is costing $200,000 and an EV is costing $500,000, governments will support that $300,000 difference by up to 80 per cent, which is massive.
“All of a sudden it does become cost-effective.”
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