09-05-2020, 02:32 PM
cbelt3 wrote:
Delivery box trucks and taxis are the sweet spot for all electrics with regenerative braking and slow speeds. I’m kind of amazed there hasn’t been a huge conversion.
Pickups are great and all. And the torque from electrics is above and beyond any jacked up diesel.
I can speak to taxis since its my industry. It's been tried here in Portland and failed, likely due to the high initial cost of vehicles (Teslas were used) and low industry mileage rate ( they tried charging about double the going rate, pre Uber). The entry into our market of ride shares was their death knell.
In my company we looked hard at going electric and the biggest problems for us were initial cost, range and charging time between shifts. Perhaps the next iteration of electric vehicles would change that. $20-25K is the upper range for us in per vehicle cost, range has to be a couple hundred miles and charging time needs to be less than a half hour in order to facilitate 2 shifts per day.