Electric Cars and Trucks Will Take Over When I was a kid there were several companies that used electric trucks. Yes, you heard me correctly they used electric trucks. I am telling you this to show the recent move to electric trucks is really us going back to our roots. So why did we use electric trucks but not electric automobiles? Trucks had a route and usually it didn’t consist of too many miles. I don’t know what the range was of these vehicles, but let’s say somewhere around 25 miles or so. It was enough to get around and deliver milk products to homes using the electric milk vans or deliver pies using the electric pie wagons. If it wasn’t it was easy enough to ride into the garage and swap out the battery for a fully charged one which would give the truck back its original range. Electric trucks were in a lot of places. Take East Germany for example. In the early 1950s that country used electric vans at the Deutsche Post. A big thing has been made about UPS ordering a fleet of electric trucks recently. Indeed, that will probably save them a lot of money in the long run. What I find strange about these trucks is they look similar to the fleet of electric trucks UPS had in the 1930s. That was almost 90 years ago. So, what stopped them from keeping these trucks? One of the reasons might have been the manufacturers didn’t continue to advance their designs or power sources. UPS also had electric trucks in the 1980s, but again went to gasoline. If we look at UPS in England we would have noticed they were test running an electric truck in 2009. While diesel trucks belch out their black clouds of smoke, the electric truck doesn’t have that offending exhaust. It is said the first electric vehicle was made in 1828 by Anyos Jedlik who had invented an early type of electric motor and put it into a vehicle. In the late 1800s the electric vehicles looked mostly like wagons, which one might compare to a truck today. The difference is they usually hauled people. Ferdinand Porsche of sports car and Volkswagen fame built an electric car which had an electric motor on each wheel. This is interesting because today some companies are calling their cars with motors on each wheel revolutionary. Some of the early electric cars had radiators in the front to hide the fact they were electric. Apparently, there was the stigma of an electric car being a woman’s car. Some of the early cars and trucks came without a battery. You would purchase that later from companies like the Hartford Electric Company which had an exchangeable battery program. One of the things which worked against the early electric cars and trucks was their slow speed and short range. You could expect your top speed to be between 15 to 20 miles per hour and the range to be between 30 to 40 miles. I imaging it was less for trucks which carried a heavier load and stronger motors. A range of 40 miles and a slow speed were still fine for a van delivering milk in a city where it stopped on every block. This also meant speed was not a problem either. This is one of the reasons I believe the new Chinese buses which run a few minutes but recharge on every stop might just be fine in a city like New York where the bus would stop on either every block or every other block. Much has been said about the General Motors electric cars of the 1990s. They were not allowed to be owned but were leased. When the leases were over all the electric cars were recalled. The owners were devastated at the time. Many wanted to buy their cars because they had fallen in love with them, but the company demanded the cars back. They didn’t want them back to examine them, they didn’t want to experiment on them, they wanted to destroy them and they did. A similar thing happened with electric vehicles from other companies at the time. It was strange how all the companies wanted their cars destroyed. It was as if some higher power demanded all cars were to run on gasoline and the offenders had to be punished. Today electric vehicles are making a comeback, but there are still things in their way. One of the main things is the lack of recharging stations across the country. There are two types of systems used. Tesla charging stations can recharge any car, but the other system can only charge their type of cars and not the Tesla type. The other thing holding back electric cars is battery technology. We keep hearing how this is improving but yet we haven’t seen much of an improvement in the last few years in this area. Some really incredible electric trucks have come out and a large truck can haul more and bigger batteries so their range is far better than a car. The truck can go 500 miles on a charge. We are talking about a tractor trailer truck which also has incredible acceleration and speed. In 30 minutes in can recharge to a 400-mile range. Other companies are jumping on the electric truck bandwagon. Not to be outdone another company with the name Nikola, I am not kidding, makes an electric truck and their advertising states they can travel 500 and 1200 miles and can be refitted in 20 minutes. This sounds like the old battery replacement scheme from over 100 years ago. Volvo has announced the production of an electric garbage truck. It is said to have a range of 125 miles. This seems like plenty for a garbage truck. The truck releases zero emissions and can lift 60,000 pounds. Electric vehicles are on the verge of taking over, it is only a question of how long big oil can delay them and also when will battery technology catch up.
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