Cummins Unveils Electric Semi Truck Before Tesla (autoblog.com)

Cummins has beat Tesla to the punch by unveiling its own electric semi truck. According to Forbes, the fully electric, class 7 day-cab urban hauler, called Aeos, gets 100 miles of range from its 140-kWh battery pack and can haul a 22-ton trailer. While the company does offer the options of additional battery packs to triple the range or a range-extending engine generator, the Aeos is better suited for city use rather than long-haul trucking. Autoblog reports: While this electric truck is a concept, it's a working demonstration of a product Cummins plans to start producing in 2019. At the unveiling in Columbus, Ind., Cummins also revealed its latest near-zero-emissions natural gas engines, as well as the X15 and lightweight X12 clean diesel engines. The company said it is embracing new technologies that allow its customers to contribute to a sustainable future.

Comments

it's just another prototype.

[pezpunk]

we've seen hundreds of Tesla-killer prototypes and promises. What we haven't seen to date, though, is a company other than Tesla who can actually deliver a production electric vehicle that people really want to drive.

disclosure: i'm a Tesla owner (and it's by far the best vehicle i've ever owned by an extremely wide margin)

Re:it's just another prototype.

[Rei]

BMW owners used to say the same thing about their "ultimate" vehicle (right before it started a never-ending journey into repair shops)

Given that the person's Tesla will have a 8 year / unlimited mileage warranty on the battery pack and drive unit....

No, those aren't the only things that can break in a vehicle (the rest is 4 years / 50k miles), but just pointing out, Tesla's warranty coverage on the S and X is superb. And it didn't come with the 8 year / unlimited mileage warranty on the drive unit - they added that in for free to all owners when the early drive units started having bearing issues. I mean, what sort of company does that? And they generally go ahead and replace any early drive units if they make any sound at all, just as a precaution to avoid any problems down the road that might be past the warranty period.

In case you're curious, the battery packs have held up amazingly well - even in heavy service like taxi duty in harsh climates. The relatively small number of battery replacements have been almost exclusively nothing to do with the packs themselves, but a switch / connector on them. As mentioned further down in the thread (with a link to data), typical degradation for a Tesla pack is about 4% in the first year of ownership, and then it slows down greatly, with typical 5-year degradation at around 6-7%. Which is pretty much the sort of "range degradation" you'll see in a gasoline vehicle as well, since gas engines become less efficient with age and thus you don't go as far on a fixed-size tank. The primary difference being that gasoline vehicle tanks are primarily sized to minimize how infrequently you have to through the inconvenience of detouring from your daily life to go to a gas station, while EVs start each day with a full charge and the concept of "range" doesn't even come into play unless you go on a road trip - wherein a Tesla, that means "several hours of driving, then a lunch break, then back on the road for several hours more driving..." etc. Depending on the model, a 10 minute bathroom/stretch break when stopped at a supercharger means another hour or so of range. A half-hour stop to eat means about 2 1/2 hours more range. In short, it's only a minor, leaves-you-properly-rested-like-you're-supposed-to-be slowdown on long trips, while in your everyday life it means you never even have to think about whether you have to detour from your schedule to go stand outside at a place full of carcinogenic evaporating gas drips and exhaust fumes while paying out the nose for fuel.

Re: it's just another prototype.

[Rei]

No, the "fuel" that Tesla runs on is the fact that the market thinks it has massive profit potential, and has consequently pumped capital into it valuing the company as one of the world's largest automakers based on said profit potential.

But then again, random Slashdotters living in their moms' basements disagree, so clearly major capital funds and their due diligence analysis of the company's financials are wrong.

Note: there is a wide spread on the value guidance from different investors on Tesla - it's one of the curious market stories of our time. These figures generally range from bulls who think it should be around $200 to bears who think it should be around $450. But even with TSLA at $200, it would still be a massive company.

Re: it's just another prototype.

[rtb61]

You will far more likely find those employed by the fossil fuel industry targeting Tesla and any other electric vehicle manufacturer, with propaganda. People seem to forget, electric vehicles will bankrupt large portions of the fossil fuel industry. As more electric vehicles and renewables to power them, so demand for fossil fuel drops and with it drops the price and all the more expensive sources of fossil fuel, where producing the fuel, costs more than the fuel, then that company goes bankrupt, hundreds of billions will simply go belly up, floating in a sea of oil, no one wants. So not in mom's basement (which is a pretty nasty slander for children living with their parents) but trolls living in Public Relations Firms, paid to troll the internet, and more often than not, first posters, actively full time monitoring target forums with their lame targeted messages.

I am surprised they were no jumping all over the trucks limited range but of course trailers with batteries, will fix that and you can simply drop off the trailer with the load and pick up another fully charged empty trailer or a loaded one going some where else. Cummins also launched, near-zero-emissions natural gas engines, "X15 and lightweight X12 clean diesel engines". Tesla likely forced their hand with their electric semi and they added to the launch for those other fossil fuellers, sort of the last hurrah of the infernal combustion engine, the old and new at the one opening.

Other company

[DrYak]

What we haven't seen to date, though, is a company other than Tesla who can actually deliver a production electric vehicle that people really want to drive.

Like Renault ? Who's been putting electric vehicles on the market for quite some time (cooperating with Nissan) (Covering a whole range of uses cases: Twizzy, Zoe, Megan, Kangoo)
Like Citroen ? Whose electric truck have been used by French postal services since the 90s ? (who needs extreme range when 20km is about as far as a your regular delivery route goes ?)

On the other hand: all of the above are European manufacturer, and Europe's densely populated cities are just ripe for EV (even back when these used to have ridiculously short ranges), and lots of country have electricity production that doesn't even rely on burning fossils.

What Tesla managed is to find a way to make it marketable in the US, mostly by a combination of getting around US' "range anxiety" problems (mostly using off-the-shelf cells for the batteries, and integrating as much as possible the production to keep the costs low even with the ginormous battery) and doing very well executed marketing campaign (they managed to make the cars look sexy in their consumers' minds).

Re:GOOD!

[Solandri]

Tesla Motors wasn't started to make a buck, it was started to prove the viability and promotion of electric vehicles.

Telsa was started to capitalize on the ZEV (zero emissions vehicle) mandate the California Air Resources Board (CARB) implemented in 2015. Beginning in 2015, ZEVs had to account for a certain percentage of each automaker's annual sales (percentage increasing each year - currently 4.5% for 2018). If they failed to meet that percentage, they would have to buy sufficient credits from a company which exceeded the percentage, or be banned from selling cars in California. About a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's standards, so failure would result in being locked out of about 33% of the U.S. auto market. Musk correctly foresaw that there would be a lot of demand for these ZEV credits among automakers, and set up a company which could capitalize on this - generating credits and selling them to other automakers.

Tesla has not proved anything about the viability of EVs until the heavy hand of these ZEV credits and the federal and state tax incentives to buy an EV are removed from the market.

Incidentally, all of this has happened before. In the late 1990s, CARB tried to implement a similar ZEV mandate beginning in 2000 (initial goal of 10% ZEVs by 2003). Ford and Chevy bet on hydrogen fuel cells. The Japanese automakers gave up early and bet on hybrids. GM invested nearly a billion dollars and produced the EV-1. By 1999, it was clear GM was the only company which had a viable ZEV. GM was on the verge of cashing in on their capital investment by being the sole supplier of ZEV credits to everyone else. The other automakers petitioned CARB and some even sued, and CARB gave in. They changed the rules and decided to allow hybrids and PZEVs (partial zero emissions vehicles) to fulfill the requirement. CARB pulled the rug out from under GM. Since California wasn't allowing GM to benefit from the technology they had developed, they decided not to allow California to benefit from it either. And as a result GM destroyed every EV-1 and locked the R&D away in their internal archives. The only difference with Tesla is that CARB stuck with the ZEV requirement in 2015.