UPS Will Use Arrival's Electric Trucks In the US, Europe (engadget.com) 76
Delivery giant UPS has ordered 10,000 electrical trucks from Arrival, a technology company based in the UK. The two companies hope to deploy the trucks across Europe and North America over the next four years. Engadget reports: If everything goes well, UPS has the option to buy another 10,000 vehicles. For now, the trucks are still in a prototype phase. The current iteration is 2.7 meters tall and designed for "walk-in and walk-out" use, according to Patrick Bion, Arrival's chief of product. The final version should have a battery pack "around about 75KWh," he explained, and offer roughly 250 kilometers (155 miles) on a single charge. The vehicle will use CCS, a popular charging standard that cleverly combines the slower Type 2 port with two large DC pins for rapid charging. Arrival has also previously confirmed that its trucks will use BlackBerry QNX, an enterprise-focused operating system designed for cars, robots and medical equipment.
The trucks will utilize a "skateboard" underbelly that Arrival hopes will translate across to all of its future vehicles. According to Bion, this covers "everything below the floor," including the suspension, brakes and steering. The design is flexible enough, however, that changes can be made for different customers and vehicle types. "We have the ability to change the wheelbase," Bion explained, "to add front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive. We can also change the battery pack capacity so that the customer, if they only need 150 kilometers (90 miles) per day, doesn't have to pay for a bigger battery that could theoretically do more." Arrival's first UPS trucks will be built in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where it currently runs a research and development facility. The majority of the 10,000 order will be built "local to where it's needed," though, according to Bion. UPS also announced a pilot project with Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary and leading operator of self-driving vehicles. "UPS will use some of Waymo's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle packages between some of its stores in the Metro Phoenix area and its hub in Tempe, Arizona," reports The Verge. "The minivans won't be fully driverless; Waymo says it will keep trained safety drivers in the front seat to monitor operations."
The trucks will utilize a "skateboard" underbelly that Arrival hopes will translate across to all of its future vehicles. According to Bion, this covers "everything below the floor," including the suspension, brakes and steering. The design is flexible enough, however, that changes can be made for different customers and vehicle types. "We have the ability to change the wheelbase," Bion explained, "to add front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive. We can also change the battery pack capacity so that the customer, if they only need 150 kilometers (90 miles) per day, doesn't have to pay for a bigger battery that could theoretically do more." Arrival's first UPS trucks will be built in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where it currently runs a research and development facility. The majority of the 10,000 order will be built "local to where it's needed," though, according to Bion. UPS also announced a pilot project with Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary and leading operator of self-driving vehicles. "UPS will use some of Waymo's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle packages between some of its stores in the Metro Phoenix area and its hub in Tempe, Arizona," reports The Verge. "The minivans won't be fully driverless; Waymo says it will keep trained safety drivers in the front seat to monitor operations."
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Electric power train is ideally suitable (Score:5, Interesting)
For highway driving without much of slow downs this does not make much difference. But if a vehicle has to stop and start again and agins and drives just short stretches in between, something like a mail van, the electric power train will be so economical.
The battery prices are falling, in just couple of years almost all the postal vans, delivery vans, school buses etc will start switching to electric power trains in big numbers.
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Everything old again is suddenly tech news for nerds..
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The great thing about the electric power train is the regenerative braking. When the vehicle needs to slow down, a typical gas vehicle will use friction brakes and dissipate the kinetic energy into heat. But the electric vehicle will convert the KE to electric charge and recharge the battery.
For highway driving without much of slow downs this does not make much difference. But if a vehicle has to stop and start again and agins and drives just short stretches in between, something like a mail van, the electric power train will be so economical.
No, it won't be "so economical". Regenerative braking only works well when taking a vehicle from a high speed to a low speed. Regenerative braking cannot take a vehicle to a complete stop and if the vehicle is primarily driving slowly around parking lots and residential streets then it does effectively nothing to save energy.
The battery prices are falling, in just couple of years almost all the postal vans, delivery vans, school buses etc will start switching to electric power trains in big numbers.
Sure, that could happen. I recall reading somewhere that milk delivery trucks were electric in many places. This made them quiet running to prevent disturbing people in their early
Re:Electric power train is ideally suitable (Score:5, Interesting)
Delivery trucks and parcel vans are owned by corporations, they care nothing about looks or coolness. TCO is the only thing they look at. The running cost of electric vehicles is four times cheaper than gas/diesel vehicles. But the initial cost is higher. So when it hits price parity, they will switch en masse. How fast will they do it? Remember diesel locomotives replacing steam? It happened in just one decade. What's holding up is battery production constraints and price.
They are inter linked. But the trend has been 15% reduction in cost per year.
Regen braking is overrated (Score:2)
Regen braking can bring a car to rest all the way.
No, it can't. The force the regen braking can apply is proportional to the speed. At near zero speed it can apply near zero force, assuming no other losses. Since there are other losses then the braking force it can apply goes to zero before the vehicle comes to a stop.
Some car makers might claim this is regen braking down to a complete stop but this will have to include some other braking mechanism if only to hold the vehicle from rolling once it has reached zero speed.
Let's just assume that regen braki
Re:Regen braking is NOT overrated (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, there are some unjustified leaps of logic in your post.
Yes, at very low speeds, EVs can't effectively regenerate energy back to the battery. But remember that E = mV2, so little energy is lost by using mechanical brakes at low speed.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/fe... [fueleconomy.gov]
Smaller batteries imply lower charge speeds so the amount of energy that can be recovered by a hybrid is lower than that of a full EV with a larger battery.
Above the minimum speed (5-10mph), it's more like 60-80%.
https://ww.electrek.co/2018/04... [electrek.co]
Regen braking is STILL overrated (Score:2)
Smaller batteries imply lower charge speeds so the amount of energy that can be recovered by a hybrid is lower than that of a full EV with a larger battery.
What is the basis for this claim? I'm pretty sure you are just pulling this out of your ass.
If the battery is large enough to accelerate a vehicle at a rate of X then it will be capable of decelerating a vehicle at a rate larger than X, this is because of the inherent losses in regen braking and because a battery that can output power Y for acceleration will be able to take in power Y for deceleration plus some power Z which is lost in the inefficiency of the system.
Yes, at very low speeds, EVs can't effectively regenerate energy back to the battery. But remember that E = mV2, so little energy is lost by using mechanical brakes at low speed.
If little energy is lost to friction bra
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EV batteries are now cheap enough that hybrids cost more to build than EVs, because of the ICE. So while the same technology could be used to build a hybrid, it wouldn't make any sense. It is still cheaper to build a mild hybrid AFAIK, but they're more expensive to maintain, so that doesn't make sense for a fleet customer either unless they need the increased range. UPS has plenty of routes where the range is not an issue, in urban environments.
Plus, make up your mind. You can't charge a diesel with your be
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EV batteries are now cheap enough that hybrids cost more to build than EVs, because of the ICE. So while the same technology could be used to build a hybrid, it wouldn't make any sense. It is still cheaper to build a mild hybrid AFAIK, but they're more expensive to maintain, so that doesn't make sense for a fleet customer either unless they need the increased range. UPS has plenty of routes where the range is not an issue, in urban environments.
We have only begun to investigate how to integrate the ICE with an electric drive motor. There's been many variations on this theme that have been tried and it will take time yet to find out which styles of hybrids work best in given use cases. For large vehicles this has been investigated long enough that this is largely a solved problem. By "large" I mean submarines, cargo ships and other seagoing vessels, trains, and large construction vehicles. This is still a problem in scaling this down to the siz
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My understanding of process is that as soon as you take your foot off the accelerator, Regen braking begins, and it can actually take you to a full stop, it would just take an inordinate amount of time/distance to so, especially at that last 5-10 mph. So for that last bit, you press the break and let friction stop you.
I do think blindseer is being a bit pedantic
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Remember diesel locomotives replacing steam?
No, great grandpa, I don't. Jesus how old are you people?
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There are dyed patterns imprinted on ground up dead tree pulp pressed into sheets. Some of us can read those runes and communicate with people who had died ages ago, (to be precise, we can only read the cache, no live updates obviously, they are dead). They were describing vividly how quickly the age of steam died, how great it was, how seemingly invincible it was, so sudden many railroads did not have time to even cancel the orders, they took delivery and scrapped brand new locomotives! Not
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TCO is the only thing they look at.
No, ROI what they look at. A house brick has a much lower TCO than the fancy electric trucks they're using after all. The return however is not nearly as good.
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I dunno, spending 0.50c on a brick to throw through a storefront window and grab a bunch of electronics is a pretty high ROI!
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Dickson by zero?
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To be fair, I believe many of the late steam engines had been converted to run on oil as it is. So its not much of a leap from there to switch to locomotives using an oil derivative (diesel). Also personal theory: Most steam locomotives had probably been running for many decades and been fully depreciated by that point.
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Very late they tried steam turbines making electricity to drive the wheels. But stea
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Tesla's drivetrains can be weirdly low tech sometimes. The original Leaf used to stop regen below 5 kph too, but the newer ones use it as well as mechanical braking for a super smooth stop.
Even that's pretty simplistic. It wouldn't be hard to say "you need to use the mechanical brakes for X seconds/day on average" and then apply them only as necessary to keep them polished or apply more force than regen can provide.
But then your brake pads would last forever...
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if the vehicle is primarily driving slowly around parking lots and residential streets then it does effectively nothing to save energy.
You've not watched many UPS drivers have you?
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Why are you so confidently *wrong* about everything? Why do you post as if you can think through the efficiency of regen from first principles, and just blithely ignore the fact there are millions of us who actually drive EVs, and who can tell you that regen provides the biggest range boost in stop-start traffic?
Regen works just great to recover energy when travelling at 30 or 40, ie urban speeds, in stop-start traffic. *Obviously*, the total energy recovered is less than the total energy recovered when bra
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No, it won't be "so economical". Regenerative braking only works well when taking a vehicle from a high speed to a low speed. Regenerative braking cannot take a vehicle to a complete stop and if the vehicle is primarily driving slowly around parking lots and residential streets then it does effectively nothing to save energy.
That's not quite how it works.
Regenerative braking absolutely works around parking lots and residential streets. The fact that it is not used for the final 2mph to 0mph stop is utterly
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Where some == most. Most EVs are very efficient in lower speed stop-start driving.
ICE vehicles turn about 70% of the energy in the gasoline directly into heat, without any of it doing useful work.
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I can tell you from personal experience that it works very well.
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I am well aware that my car does have mechanical brakes. It also has an energy flow/battery current indicator. I can see when regen is active.
Please try to stop being a condescending prick. I realize that will be a challenge for you, but try anyway. Start by not posting information that you pulled out of your ass and accusing other posters of being ignorant.
Just because regen drops out at very low speeds means little to overall energy regeneration. As I pointed out elsewhere E = mV2, so at very low velociti
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Can't stand being shown to be wrong? Then don't post based on ideas you pulled out of your ass.
Here is a hint: there are some websites that you can use to search information before you post. One is called Google, another is BIng. There are more. Do you need help finding them?
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Everything you said is correct.
I feel I should elaborate a bit, and point out that regenerative braking typically recovers up to about 1/2 the energy used in running the motor. My cheap-ass bottom-of-the-line EV recovers about 1/4 of the energy used with regen.
Fun fact: some mines and quarries are now using electric dump trucks that regen downhill with their heavy loads, then drive empty back up the hill for the next load. They can do this all day with minimal or, in some cases, no battery energy loss. T
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Yep. This is why DHL Germany owns an electric delivery van manufacturing company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
driver monitors (Score:2)
The minivans won't be fully driverless; Waymo says it will keep trained safety drivers in the front seat to monitor operations.
So they have someone to blame when they kill someone.
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Well, they still haven't devised the robot to call and ask where the package belongs...
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So they have someone to blame when they kill someone.
Which is also why aircraft will have pilots for the foreseeable future.
I see a big BUT coming (Score:3)
Will Europe accept low-cost delivery trucks that come from the UK?
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Seriously, why not? If you mean the brexit could prompt EU countries not to buy from the UK
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Maybe they can manufacture them in Romania or Bulgaria.
I was really hoping they'd just hire Truckla to do all the deliveries, though. Darn.
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This is going to be a major issue. Word is that Boris will announce that the UK is diverging from the EU and there will be "paperwork". That's a lie of course, it's way worse than that. Vehicles made in the UK won't be certified for use in the EU any more.
UK manufacturers will have to re-certify and re-test them in the EU. Or maybe the UK can come to some arrangement where the EU has inspectors at British, but then it won't be worth having separate lines so in practice all the vehicles made will be EU spec
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Full-circle (Score:4, Interesting)
For the UK, this is delivery & commercial vehicles coming full-circle. The world's first motorised taxi (1897) was in London & was electric: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org... [sciencemuseum.org.uk] The UK also used to have fleets of electric "milk float" door-to-door delivery vehicles for dairy produce & sometimes groceries. In 1967, the UK apparently had more electric vehicles on the road than all other countries put together, almost all of them milk floats.
So I guess this will be the third "electric vehicle revolution" in 200 years for the UK.
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So I guess this will be the third "electric vehicle revolution" in 200 years for the UK.
It sounds about like when I tried to build a castle in the swamp. It sank in the swamp so I built another. That sank in the swamp. I built a third, it burned down, fell over, and sank in the swamp. But the fourth castle stayed up!
I don't know if this is a "revolution" or just another short lived attempt to prove electric vehicles as viable. Maybe this time is indeed different but there's a limit to how cheap batteries can get, and when demand goes up then so does the price.
I keep hearing people claim t
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Are those packages being delivered overnight? No.
Overnight is when the vehicles will be charged. That's plenty of time.
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Yep provided the truck has the range to do a days work and can be charged up overnight all is good. I am quite sure UPS know exactly how far their trucks go each day. In a fact I am sure they could shuffle the packages being loaded into individual vans to make sure that they don't exceed the range of the truck.
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And if this were an article about consumer adoption of EVs, it would make sense to argue about that. But it isn't.
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You're so full of shit https://about.bnef.com/blog/be... [bnef.com]
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You're so full of shit
How? The article you linked to proves my point.
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You claim battery prices can't fall due to increased demand. The article shows a steady decline over 8 years.
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You claim battery prices can't fall due to increased demand.
That's not what I claimed. My claim is that the decline in prices will not be as fast as most others claim. As the price lowers the demand rises, this rise in demand will slow the rate price of lowering prices.
The article shows a steady decline over 8 years.
Steady decline? It looks asymptotic to me. They expect maybe a halving in the price of battery packs in the next 10 or 15 years. I can't say if this prediction has any basis in reality but, assuming this to be true, it would seem to me to mean that electric vehicles will continue to cost more th
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What kind of toddler economics only considers first-order effects? Here's how it works:
- More people want EVs
- Demand for EV batteries goes up
- Supply constraints create a temporary spike in prices
- New capacity gets built because unmet need is a thing that investors like
- Supply constraints ease and prices fall further because of economies of scale and competition
- And onwards from there
This is the story of almost all tech adoption, eg LCD panels.
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What kind of toddler economics only considers first-order effects?
Apparently you replied to the wrong post because I did not just consider first order effects.
Here's how it works:
- More people want EVs
- Demand for EV batteries goes up
- Supply constraints create a temporary spike in prices
- New capacity gets built because unmet need is a thing that investors like
- Supply constraints ease and prices fall further because of economies of scale and competition
- And onwards from there
This is the story of almost all tech adoption, eg LCD panels.
Yes, that is how it works. What's going to happen is prices will rise then more mines will need to be created. Because it takes time to start a mine, and doing so is expensive, the price of EVs will not fall nearly as quickly as many people claim. The same goes for the infrastructure to support EVs. It takes a lot of money to build a charging station, and there won't be a charging station until there is evidence
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Apparently you're incapable of remembering what you wrote. What you wrote was "when demand goes up then so does the price" and then "when people want more of something, and the rate of production cannot keep up, then the prices rise again"
That is a clear example of your *not* considering second-order effects. In your new post, you now consider second-order effects, in your own special way, including:
- non sequiturs ('prices are nearly as low as they can go. Batteries can't hold as much energy as diesel')
- c
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I don't know who you are arguing with but it's certainly not me.
Nothing you wrote "corrects" anything I claimed. It adds more detail to my claims, details I did not go into because I didn't feel it relevant to go into detail at the time to make my point.
What was my point? That I believe many people have unrealistic expectations of the growth of electric vehicle production.
There are many limitations on growth. One being costs, which are driven by complex interactions in the market. Another related limita
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Do you not mind sounding absurd in public? You claimed demand causes prices to go up. I pointed out that second order effects means that -- surprise -- demand causes prices to go down over time. That's not exactly "detail", is it? It's kinda fundamental. It just gets worse from here on in, but never mind, you do you.
You've made the same category error again in relation to diesel in this post, showing you're nothing if not persistently wrong. No, lower demand for diesel won't lower the price. Falling demand
Current vehicles (Score:2)
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UPS doesn't sell used its used package cars [yes, they call them "cars"]
https://jalopnik.com/i-dont-ca... [jalopnik.com]
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They occasionally do leak out, though. A friend of mine had one that he used for motox racing. He slept on a shelf.
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