View the September 16, 2020 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will be moderating today's seminar. Today's topic is Truck Freight Sustainability Initiatives.
Before I go any further, I do want to remind you to call into the teleconference for the best audio quality. If you are listening to the audio over the computer and experience any issues, I am unable to fix them as audio quality will vary based on your network connection, computer, speakers, and other factors. Please also keep in mind if you are calling into the teleconference for the audio, you will need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will send a link to the recording in the next day or so and will also notify all attendees once all materials are posted online.
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Today we'll have three presenters:
Our first presentation will be given by Alicia Birky, a systems engineer in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences where she specializes in emerging freight technologies. She has 14 years of experience with analysis and modeling at the nexus of transportation, consumer behavior, energy, the environment, and the economy. She currently leads several efforts for the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office, including medium- and heavy-duty vehicle program benefits analysis; data collection and analysis methodologies for commercial vehicle total cost of ownership; and a new effort to establish a framework for national commercial vehicle data. She also supports analysis of freight movement under VTO's multi-laboratory SMART Mobility Consortium. Prior to joining the energy field, she worked as a structural dynamics and systems engineer supporting NASA Earth System Science missions.
Alicia Birky
Thank you for inviting me to speak today. The presentation that I am going to be giving is trying to address two questions. The first is how emerging trends and technologies will impact freight truck sustainability, thinking about energy, emissions, and congestion. And then how we would go about assessing those possible impacts. Thinking about analytical framework or models that we should be using, and the data needed to populate those models and make those assessments. With that in mind the first thing to think about is just to set the stage here: Where is the energy and emissions in the medium- and heavy-duty sector? And our estimates are that Class 7 and 8 tractors account for about 71% of fuel use in Class 3-8 vehicles. So, because of that we can think of that as predominantly freight-based. And then, looking across all freight, service, multipurpose, and people movement, it is Class 8 that is dominant in the fuel use, well over ¾ of the fuel. And then, if we drill that down into the freight a little bit, you will see a lot of people talk about freight movement under 200 miles being where most of the tonnage is. But, if you look at ton miles, 80% of the ton miles are in shipments over 200 miles. That is a driving factor behind the fuel use, since the miles skew everything then to the right. So, keeping that in mind, that longer distance is important in thinking about overall net efficiency and emissions, although it may not be the only concern.
The next thing we need is a framework for thinking about how to assess the sustainability, or emissions and energy. At the simplest level, you have freight demand and you have vehicle efficiency. You multiply those two together and you get fuel consumption. Or, if it is emissions my "x" could be BTU or it could be CO2 tons or it could be NOx tons or something like that. But when you look at each one of those metrics, the freight demand and the vehicle efficiency, it very quickly gets complicated. There is a lot more going on than that. For example, freight demand is influenced by where is the freight being shipped to and from? What commodity is it? When does it need to be where it is going? What modes should we choose to move that freight? In terms of vehicle efficiency, we have vehicle size class, powertrain and vehicle technologies, payload capacity. And then we have the logistical efficiency of moving those vehicles. What are the load factors? How many miles are moving empty trucks? How are they routed?
Then we also have the road system, the network efficiency. I'm afraid I forgot to change something on here. Instead of network efficiency, I wanted that to say network accessibility so that we are not talking about the Internet, we are talking about our connection or our ability to access the road network. The condition of the road and also congestion. The classical R&D in terms of truck freight efficiency has looked at powertrain and vehicle technologies and payload capacity, rather than looking at this whole systems view. But, kind of more recently, we have started to take the broader view of energy efficient mobility systems. So, for example, VTO does have a program called exactly that at the Vehicle Technologies Office at the DOE. I would also like to point out working at NREL we have taken that mobility perspective recently and made it official in the name of our group. I also work a lot with a 21st-Century truck partnership, and we have a freight efficiency tech team as well. So, this systems perspective is luckily becoming more prevalent in our thinking.
So, for example, here's an analytical framework to put each of those pieces together. For truck movement in the green box I have kind of put each of those types of things in that green box. But there is feedback in terms of that efficiency or sustainability - energy, emissions, costs and time - that also feeds back into the mode choice. And something to keep in mind as we talk about truck freight efficiency is the full system efficiency as well. Because the changes we make here influences how much freight is moved by truck versus other modes. So, I just wanted to point that out. For the rest of my talk I would like to think about, in each of these areas, which ones are changing? What are the trends and how are they affecting that freight sustainability in trucking? The question here is which ones are important and which ones are changing?
The first trend that we see a lot in the press is the decreasing length of haul for the long-haul trucking or the truckload sector. This is a graphic that I pulled out of an ATRI report, I think the data was generated by the American Trucking Association. Basically, in the last 20 years the average length of haul for dry van truckload has dropped from 800 miles to around 500 now. Two of the factors that ATRI credits for this are driver shortage and e-commerce growth. The interesting thing in looking at this graphic is that e-commerce was not insignificant until around 2000. I'm sorry, it was not significant until 2010. So, only in the last 10 years has it become significant, and the length of haul dropped significantly before then. So, that is something to keep in mind. Then the next question is why does that matter? It matters because we talk about new technologies being applicable in different sectors, and particularly when we talk about electrification and range requirements and refueling infrastructure and that sort of thing. And this decreasing length of haul is often cited as meaning that it is going to be a lot easier to electrify. The first question that I start asking then is, well, this is an average. First of all, which truck service categories are really getting shorter length of haul? Are they really? The average is going down, but does that mean all of the trip lengths are going down? Do we see a growth in demand for shorter trips or a decrease in demand for longer trips? What's really going on here?
So, thinking about that, we had a project to start looking at, say long haul trucking. What is the range requirement? How would we determine that from operational data? For example, if we look at some data that we have in our Fleet DNA database, which is 1 hertz data of real world truck operations. That if you just looked at a calendar day you will get an answer consistent to that ATA ATRI data of 490 miles. But the truth of the matter is that truck operations are not constrained to a 24-hour window calendar day. So, instead, we said what if we took a rolling window and looked at what is the average distance we would go before a stop of varying duration, which might indicate say a charging window. If you look at two hours, we have already gone up to 537 miles. And that might be a good indicator of a relatively fast charge opportunity, but it is still not a day's operation. So then we said, as you expand that 2 hour stop to longer duration stops, say up to 8-10 hours, which might indicate an overnight rest period that you could fully charge a truck, it very quickly goes from this 490 miles up to something in excess of 600 miles. So, the point being that distributions matter and not just averages, and it is especially important if we do not want to get half of the trucks, we want to get a majority of the trucks that could be electrified say. In which case we need to start thinking about this long tail over here if we want to get to the 95th percentile or 80th percentile, it is not going to be the average number. Just some caveats on thinking about what is the data telling us and how do we use the data to figure out what technologies might be applicable.
So, moving on. What else is going on in long-haul trucking and what might be behind this length of haul? And one of the other things that ATA points out is this driver shortage. It is interesting to look at their information that this driver shortage is in fact in long-haul trucking and not in the shorter truck sector. A lot of it is backed up by some of the statistics that BLS pulled out as well, that there is a lot of pressure here on these firms and they have a problem retaining their drivers because of dissatisfaction with the conditions of being on the road, but also that there is a lot of market pressure and not a lot of room for them to pay their drivers well. So, this is an interesting factor that we need to keep in mind, driver satisfaction and retention is an issue now, and it will be very important in the future. It will influence what technologies look attractive to fleet managers as well as their adoption of these technologies. And we may not be capturing those factors when we do cost-benefit analysis, because it is very difficult to quantify the value of retaining your drivers.
The next trend that seems to be all the rage to talk about is e-commerce. Why is everyone talking about e-commerce? Well, because it has been growing really fast, 16% per year compared to 2% for overall retail sales. At the same time, e-commerce is only about 11% of retail sales by value. It is not really a huge section of retail. The next question is why is it so important and why do we need to consider it? One of the things to note here, too, is that the majority of e-commerce is online sellers that do not have a brick-and-mortar channel. So, the interesting thing is that while this is a small amount of retail, it actually has driven change throughout the retail sector. So, thinking about what that means for truck freight energy and emissions in the future, what we need to understand is what is going on throughout the retail chain. And basically, we have gone from kind of a fairly simplistic model of logistics to something far more complex. Because brick-and-mortar retailers have to compete with this online idea of being able to get goods, have a huge variety of goods available, and have them available quickly. So, we have a much different logistical system with a whole lot of shorter hops to get from point A to point B. We are being driven by same-day delivery requirements, a high rate of refused deliveries when there is no one to receive the package and they have to come by your house again to deliver it. And there is also a high rate of returns for goods because you couldn't see them or try them on, so there is a reverse logistics issue. You see that these arrows are multidirectional. There is also this new concept of new delivery locations and options like parcel lockers or returning things to Amazon through Kohls and that sort of thing. This is why, even though e-commerce is not a huge percentage of sales, it is very important throughout the whole chain.
So, in thinking about the energy impact of all of this if the end-to-end shipment distance has not changed. Basically, if I order something on Amazon versus going to Walmart, it still has to get probably from China all the way to my house, which makes it difficult to look at freight data, for example, to figure out what is going on. But we do know that how it is getting from point A to point B is changing, and that there are a lot of responses to the long haul driver shortage that is also adding to those changes. We know that the location and size of distribution centers have changed; there are route and operational changes; there are shifts among the relative magnitude of long haul delivery and in the vehicle size and type; and there is an increase in local delivery activity, which means there are heavier trucks now on the road with the passenger vehicles in urban areas. There may or may not be a decrease in passenger VMT because of shopping trip changes, but all of this really changes the mix of vehicles on the road and their emissions and energy consumption.
Some other considerations in that last-mile delivery, which is growing so quickly; it is difficult and labor-intensive. It is probably not the largest portion of energy consumption or emissions, but it is a very important, high-cost segment for shippers. Because of that it is very much on their minds as a problem that needs to be solved. And the interesting thing to me is that when we think about the solutions for the problems that we have there, the congestion and the package space for dropping off, the solutions may not be energy efficient solutions, so that is something that needs to be considered. And then, all of these reverse logistics have to be kept in mind, and the analysis becomes very complex.
So, that is how the patterns and changes are affecting the energy demand. The next question then is how does technology affect that? Looking back at our model, in the first area we start with vehicle technologies. We have new modes and business paradigms. We have advanced and new powertrains and fuels. We have changes in energy storage and lightweight materials. Connectivity and data analytics are affecting logistics. And then from the road system efficiency, connectivity is also affecting that or can affect that. And then we have some new modes that may change our accessibility to the road system. But we also have feedback from all of this. If we change the energy efficiency, the cost of truck shipping, that will feed back into mode choice as well.
Now, to drill down into some of the technology starting first with conventional diesels. The research that is going on is driving the efficiency of diesel engines pretty much toward what we think is a practical or even theoretical limit of probably around 60%. I wanted to point that out. First of all, that there is plenty of activity making conventional vehicles more efficient through diesel engine combustion advances, but also through improvements to the glider that also are beneficial for any of the advanced technologies in powertrains as well. In looking at emerging technologies instead of conventional technologies, the first one everyone seems to be talking a lot about is electrified powertrains. We had some analyses looking at what that might mean for long-haul trucking, for example. The first scenario was a top-down look at what if we could electrify everything that is under 500 miles, for example, if battery size might limit us to something of that type. It actually saves quite a bit of energy, but the question was would it be cost-effective? So, in a second analysis, we took a look at a portfolio of electrification that wasn't just battery electric, but also plug-in hybrids. It could get very similar fuel savings with very high adoption of some type of electrification, but not much of it was battery; a lot of it was plug-in hybrid and hybrid. Also, in looking at drilling down into this regional under 500 miles and what's going on there, there was another analysis through the AFI, which is the Advanced Fueling Infrastructure. And when we started looking at the operational patterns of even just regional delivery, it is actually a lot more complex than you may think. Even if you're just looking at trips under 300 miles, you need quite a bit of battery and charging just to get 94% of those trips.
Real quickly, hydrogen and fuel cells, probably a very good option for the longer haul trucks. We had some work in our office, this is not my work, but my colleagues working for the fuel cells and hydrogen technology office and finding that fuel cells could in fact be the most cost-effective option for decarbonizing that sector. They actually did take a look at some of the more important things like how long did it take to fuel? How much payload might we have to give up? And they still found that fuel cells can be very competitive.
And finally, one other way within vehicle technologies is, what about the fuel itself - going to net zero carbon liquid fuels? This is also not an area that I am involved in, but it is something that NREL is working toward is basically using affordable renewable electricity and converting these low energy molecules, including CO2, into high-value products which would include fuel along with other chemicals. So, an electrically-based future, but not necessarily electric vehicles. Other technologies, new modes and business solutions on that last-mile in particular. We have a lot of micro freight solutions coming up. The interesting thing when I think about this is that these cannot carry a lot of freight. So, they might be very efficient, but we have to think of this on a ton-mile basis. One of my colleagues at Idaho National Lab did some drone studies and as the payload increased on a drone the fuel consumption per mile increased and could approach a light-duty passenger car, which can clearly carry a lot more payload than 15lbs on a drone. So, that's something to keep in mind. Also, connectivity, telematics, data, and analytics. They can improve the maintenance of the vehicles, they can help the vehicles optimize their routes, we can get better load factors by pooling loads across companies. And there is also the potential for automation to increase safety, potentially improve cost, especially if one or no driver is required. But then we have to think about what happens with mode choice. One of the analyses we did showed that as the cost of trucking improves, then we get a shift from rail, which on a ton-mile basis it is more efficient. So, emerging technologies can impact energy through mode choice, obviously through the vehicle efficiency itself. I basically included all of these technologies as impacting efficiency, network accessibility because the great thing about drones is that they could help with access for rural and particularly in underdeveloped countries for high-value, time-sensitive deliveries.
So, that is everything that I have. Basically, patterns are changing. We cannot really say what is causing it, it is complicated, but it is definitely a factor in sustainability for freight. Unfortunately, our freight data is not very helpful in capturing some of that, so we do need other data sources to try to understand what is going on. Emerging technology has the potential to reduce energy emissions. Unfortunately, right now a lot of our change and concerns are in last-mile delivery which isn't the largest energy portion. And some of these solutions may actually not be as sensitive to energy as we would like, so we want to make sure as we look into the future that that is something we keep in mind in our analysis, and in our research and development. And, of course, mode shifts are possible. The main point I wanted to make the through all of this is that it is really important to have a systems perspective to really understand what is going on.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Alicia, I didn't mean to cut you off there, I wasn't sure if there was anything you had to add on that last slide.
Alicia Birky
I'm sorry, thanks, everybody for the opportunity. That is all that I have.
Jennifer Symoun
I do see a question. Please continue typing questions. We will get to those at the end. We will now move to our next presentation, given by Mike Roeth, the Executive Director of the North American Counsel for Freight Efficiency and the trucking lead for the Rocky Mountain Institute. Mike has worked in the commercial vehicle industry for over 35 years. His specialty is brokering green truck collaborative technologies into the real world at scale. Mike served on the second National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine Committee on Reducing Fuel Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles, is a Department of Energy Merit Reviewer and served as Chairman of the Board for the Truck Manufacturers Association. He understands the customers, operations and intricacies of the commercial vehicle industry having held various positions in product development, engineering, reliability and quality, sales, materials and plant management with Navistar and Behr/Cummins. Tomorrow Mike will deliver the prestigious 65th SAE Buckendale Lecture and receive their annual award.
Mike Roeth
Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you very much. As everyone deals within the pandemic world, they are mowing the yard right outside my apartment, so bear with me a little bit. It is good to be here. Alicia, that was a really good, comprehensive look at good movement and some of the solutions that are emerging around moving goods, energy demand, and so forth. It strikes a chord with me of how complex this market is. You will see that a little bit in the slides that I offer. So, I am going to focus this a little bit more on electric trucks and where those might take us in the next years and to very specifically, when she talked about those day cab energy use being such a high portion, it is not as high as the long call, heavy-duty, but it is a big use of diesel fuel today. So, that area is one that we need to deal with in order to deal with emissions and cost. And electric trucks have a real opportunity there, so we will walk through that. We are a nonprofit, fi you don't know about NACFE. I wanted to put this up, as there are probably a lot of people in this webinar that they may not know us. There is a lot of free available information at NACFE.org, have a look at it. We focus on burning less diesel and in looking at these alternatives to move even zero emission goods movement. So, a lot of things there that are layered. You can watch shorter videos to 150 page reports and everything in between.
To kind of set the stage here on what I wanted to talk about, and this is some of what will build on Alicia's. This is production of commercial vehicles over the last, I don't know, 75 years as a percent by weight class. So, truck production varies dramatically, anywhere from maybe 750,000 trucks per year to 300,000 trucks per year across these classes of smaller trucks at the bottom and bigger trucks at the top from class III to class VIII. And what we see here, in the last 30 years, is a movement to smaller trucks. Some of that is e-commerce, some of that is just in time. So, that has been growing as a percent of the total. Just for the fun of it, it is interesting to see the highway system was built back in the 40s and 50s all of a sudden we started to see bigger trucks on the freeways; that's the green and the two yellows, class VII and VIII. And then we saw deregulation expand that a little bit back in the 80s, to then now have this growth. I always find this somewhat interesting, but a precursor to some of the things that I think we are seeing around some shorter lengths of haul as we are moving into the 2020s.
We have been really studying this middle mile, this regional haul. This is typically day cabs, it's either going to distribution centers or a distribution center to a fulfillment center, or to groceries, restaurants, or even to stores and so forth. So, this regional haul class VIII tractor as we looked at it and studied it, it is becoming much more organized. Some people talk about freight movement as sort of a hockey game, where it is all a bit crazy and moving goods; trucks can be in New York one week and California the next and all over. We see that changing and becoming more disciplined, which will be an opportunity for both drivers where we can get drivers home at night. That will be much easier to attract drivers to the industry. As well as for alternative fuels, where we will have more confidence to wear those trucks can be charged or fueled.
Then we did some work last year where we really focused on Run on Less, a three-week demonstration around regional. You can see the 10 fleets that participated there in that blue bar. And we just watched them as they ran freight for 3 full weeks. Off to the right you can see that's day 10 the JB Hunt truck where they were delivering mattresses around Texas. In this case they left the manufacturing plant and drove down, I think to Austin, where they delivered mattresses to multiple stores. We looked at how fast did they drive? How many times did they stop? How long were they stopped? It is only 10 trucks out of maybe 800,000 out there in regional haul, but it takes really looking at this specificity to be able to figure out what technologies will work and what do we use to lower the energy demand. With that Run on Less, we have a full report that gets to this shorter return to base day cab tractors. It shocked me a little bit as to how much fuel they burn and how many miles they travel. This is a huge niche and one that is typically not talked about a lot. We typically go to sleeper tractors and long hauls, and then we talk about little trucks and package delivery, or maybe box trucks in the city. And this needs more attention and that is why we are so focused on it. We see it as a good opportunity for the industry to focus.
Let's get into a couple of thoughts. You know NACFE, we are not an expert on all of the alternative fuels, alternative propulsion going on. If you take a walk from left to right, we have been keeping track of what we see out in the marketplace. It is getting a little scary, or maybe that's not a great technical term, but there are a lot of options emerging. Alicia talked about many of them, but these trucks for 100 years have been gasoline and diesel. Now we have had things like various diesel blends all the way out to hydrogen, renewable natural gas, natural gas, there are a lot of options. We have been trying to help understand those options and help fleets from not only being scared of too many options and making a mistake and doing nothing, or, grabbing to one and making a mistake and then something better comes along. Much like when you're buying a new computer and you're fearful of buying a new one because another one will come, and another will come that is better.
Let me get into electric trucks, in particular, before I come back to that. And that is, we have been studying electric trucks from class III to class VIII and we are finding what is typically talked about is the big barriers, things like infrastructure; now you have to charge the truck. These trucks need a lot of power to move freight even small distances or longer distances. So, that is a huge barrier and a huge challenge on the electrification of these trucks, but there are an awful lot of benefits. Those benefits are showing up in some areas that are easy to monetize, and some are really difficult. What we discovered as we looked at electric trucks, as many times you have with new products, you have those that are incredibly optimistic, or they are out there arguing for electric trucks. You hear things like we don't need diesel any longer because batteries are so good. Then you have the arguments against electric trucks. And many of these are very biased. And as we looked at it, of course, we kind of found the reality is in the middle. And when that happens, that means that electric trucks will be good for some customers, some applications, some regions, not so good for others. It is really important to understand that and get into the details as they look to deploy them. So, what we did was we talked to fleets and we did the work that NACFE typically does. And we identified it, it is small, but I will describe it at a high level. We identified 25 purchase criteria or reasons why a fleet owner would purchase a truck. It is things like how much weight can it carry? What is the initial cost? What is the operating cost? What is the weight, service ability? What we did for both medium duty trucks on the left, class III to class VI, and then heavier trucks and tractors on the right in class VII and VIII. On each of these factors we said with the developments that are going on around battery electric trucks, when will they reach parity with their diesel counterparts? For some it will take a lot longer than others, but definitely on the left, medium duty is ready for electric trucks on many of these today or soon. So, we see medium duty trucks are emerging first with respect to electrification, and longer haul being later, if not much later.
So, here on this medium duty trucks, a lot of detail we went and uncovered when we looked at medium duty electric trucks. But they stay close to base, limited range. They are much more consistent. We put together a total cost calculator when we did this work. But as we were putting together that cost calculator, what struck us was that there were a lot of benefits of electric trucks. We tried to start monetizing those. Things like noise; you look at some fleets and maybe so what if a truck is louder quieter, but a quieter truck is better than a louder truck. And maybe there are areas where that can be monetized by the fleet. Maybe a better example is zero emissions in warehouses. So, people who do package delivery and those sorts of things will pull their trucks into warehouses for sorting, unloading, and loading. Those warehouses will be very large, and they'll have huge emissions exhaust systems in those facilities, which then prevents them often times from being air-conditioned. So, in a world where that entire warehouse is serviced by electric trucks, a lot of costs go away in that facility. Very few fleets even who have that are factoring that into their total cost of ownership of an electric truck. So, anything new has risk, but we see a lot of characteristics or benefits with electric trucks that are not yet being monetized. We're going to learn more as we move forward and we think that will make them an even better return on the investment.
Here I describe the infrastructure work that we did, kind of two things here. This can be a very long process. As we start to work with fleets, and even cities, utilities, planning organizations, and real estate, it takes a very thoughtful, inclusive effort to really do electrification and get that charging in place. So, that is the graphic on the left. It just takes a long time and a lot of players, so get started early. Your utility will be your new business partner, and fleets have not had to have that before or at least not to the extent they will with the big power they will be using on big charging trucks. Off to the right is the fact that it is not just about the hardware to charge the truck, but it includes the software and the networking. If you have 10 trucks plugged in, which are you charging first, and which are you charging faster? And a lot of choices can be made with the software. When might you use storage on site versus coming from the grid? If you have issues around brownouts, maybe there is different software that can be used to manage that differently. Finally, maintenance; these charges are going to go down, they are going to the maintenance. Keep that in mind, it is some of the learnings we have had as we look at the charging side of the equation.
Finally, and I touched on this a little earlier around heavy-duty trucks, but we definitely see electricity and batteries may be augmented with hydrogen fuel cells as the future, whether that is 2040, 2050, 2060, 2037, we don't really know. Between then and now we do see hybrids, natural gas, and renewable natural gas, and even some of these fuels that Alicia was talking about could possibly emerge. But they all have their benefits and consequences, and it is going to be a very interesting next number of decades in trucking as we look to be more sustainable, and use less energy, but also do it in a way that makes total sense. So, it's going to be complex.
I am going to skip this, but it basically says it is a movement to why we believe these day cab regional trucks are a really good place for electrification. We are not at the stored power in the batteries yet to get the range of 300 or 400 or 500 miles. In the next 4-5 years we definitely have trucks coming that are in the 250 mile range with things like Ecascadia and Volvo lites and even Tesla and the other truck builders bringing products. So, we believe in the 250 mile and down, that is where we will learn some of these electrification challenges. And then, as it grows out and we get the longer range and that still makes sense for a battery electric truck, if it does, that these regional haul day cab tractors, more and more can be satisfied with these electric tractors.
We did do work along with NREL and Ballard around these routes that was in that Run on Less that I mentioned. We have now designed electric trucks and hydrogen fuel cell trucks for those duty cycles. I will say the longer distances are the big challenge and how much dwell time they have to charge, even if it is when it's a lunchtime for the driver or a shortstop back to that mattress delivery I mentioned earlier. He may be at that mattress store for 30-40 minutes and there is an opportunity to charge there, they'll know. Electric trucks are coming, they are coming kind of slow. But just a point to note, another organization in our space, CALSTART, has done some great work in what they call their ZETI tool. You can go take a look at the different kinds of duty cycles and regions of the country, and you can see over the next few years who has trucks available. So, this is sort of an electric truck availability guide that we use quite often that I think could be useful, so I just wanted to bring that up.
Finally, we have been looking at where electric trucks best emerge. I chose my words specifically and slowly there. Right now, California is clearly the hotbed of electric truck deployment. They have particular challenges in California around air quality, etc., and they have also committed with funds both from utilities and from the state to get that bleeding edge of electric truck deployment, get us through that in California. What NACFE and our friends at Rocky Mountain Institute took a look at where next would they and should they go? Maybe this is helpful for some of the audience here where you are in charge of some regional parts of the country. We looked at three categories and then I think 9 or 10 attributes of those categories around technology. Such as where is the electric truck best suited? Where is the need? And finally, what support by state? We publish this report a couple weeks ago. And this allowed us to do a first analysis with this framework. Here, the darker the state the more potential for early deployment of electric trucks, given what we put together. We are now analyzing the Canadian provinces, because the data that was available for the U.S. is different than Canada, so we will do the same thing in Canada. What you see here is a little bit of the coast; you have California and Washington, Oregon and that area, up in the Northeast. What surprised us a little bit was the Texas triangle and the front range of the Rockies in the Colorado area. You can download my presentation, there are a number of links here that might help you with some of the slides that I put forward. Thank you for the time. I look forward to answering some questions in a little bit.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Mike. Again, I see a number of questions in there and we will get to those. Please continue typing them. We are now moving to our final presentation given by Steve Ciatti, a Principal Engineer for Advanced Engines in the Advanced Technology Group at the PACCAR Technical Center. Steve joined PACCAR in 2018. During his time at PACCAR, Steve has worked on several different advanced engine technology projects, including SuperTruck 2, and represents PTC at many external meetings and workshops on advanced engine technology. Prior to PACCAR, Steve was the Technical Lead for advanced engine research at Argonne National Laboratory for 17 years. Steve is also an ASME Fellow and he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Automobile Engineering. Steve is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed publications, and he earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steve Ciatti
Hopefully everyone can hear me. Good afternoon to most of you, morning to those of us on the West Coast. I will be taking a little different look at the freight and trucking issue today from an OEM's perspective, rather than from a national lab or a nonprofit perspective. Today I will talk about some of the things that concern us as a heavy-duty and medium-duty truck OEM that sells these vehicles globally.
PACCAR is a company that you may not be familiar with. I get a lot of questions about exactly what PACCAR is. But you're most likely familiar with our truck brands. Those truck brands are DAF, as you see across the top, that is our European and Brazilian truck brand based in the Netherlands; and Peterbilt and Kenworth, both here in North America. As you can see we specialize in building trucks that run the range of different applications and types, all the way from medium-duty delivery trucks and panel vans through locational trucks, cement mixers, dump trucks, things of that nature, all the way up to long-haul sleeper cab, heavy-duty class VIIIs.
This slide is probably not a surprise to most people. Transportation is responsible for a fair amount of energy consumption in the United States and globally. In particular, heavy-duty trucks account for more 20% of the fuel consumed in US transportation. What does surprise people is just how much US freight is transported by trucks, almost 70%. And vehicle miles traveled are projected to grow by a substantial amount between now and 2050. As you can see on the left-hand graph, the amount of transportation energy consumption in medium and heavy-duty, which is in the grey, is expected to at least remain flat, if not increase, along with commercial light trucks and other such as we go forward. So, the problem is not going away due to lack of truck usage or lack of truck operation.
What's interesting is that when we look at all of these technologies for improving our trucks and for meeting upcoming regulations, everyone is familiar with upcoming ultra-low NOx regulations and upcoming greenhouse gas regulations. So, as we look at a variety of different technologies to ensure that our trucks will meet these regulations and our customers will still get the value they come to expect from purchasing our trucks, one of my tasks is to try to figure out which technologies are going to fit which application and in which market segments. What I am showing here is an EPA picture or view essentially of the different types of grid carbon intensity. So, if you take a look at the Pacific Northwest where most of our electrical power is hydro-, the electricity is relatively low carbon intensity. Electric type trucks in a variety of applications here and in California certainly would make an awful lot of sense from a grid intensity point of view for carbon. However, I am a lifelong Midwesterner other than the last two years that I have lived out here in the PNW, and most of the power you see in places like Wisconsin and away from Chicago in Missouri, Kansas, and a variety of other places, the grid intensity it is significantly different when it comes to the source of carbon. The electricity is generated primarily by either nuclear or coal. In some cases, the diesel may actually be more carbon efficient than the electric truck based on where the power is coming from. These are changing, but it depends on how fast they are changing. Infrastructure is not something that happens quickly as a general rule. You do not see people transitioning to clean power overnight. It is not something that is going to happen tomorrow. It is happening and so this is a graph that will be changing over time. But as it currently sits, our customers that sit in these Midwestern locations have a relatively high carbon grid intensity. So, then the question becomes what is going to "green" faster? The fuel moving toward low carbon or net zero carbon fuels, or the grid? Those are the types of questions that we are concerned about at PACCAR, in an effort to make sure we are providing the technologies that are needed by our customers to ensure they can continue to operate their businesses profitably and still comply with the regulations.
So, one of the things since I have worked for all three different types of companies, I have done a lot of work with the automobile industry, I currently for a heavy-duty truck company, I used to work for a railroad about 25 years ago, is that most folks tend to think in terms of MPG, because everyone has a car. And MPG is a lousy metric in particular with freight efficiency of freight type transportation. So, I thought that it will be kind of interesting to plot out these different types of transportation, and different ways that we can essentially assess their performance. These by no means are standard or apply to everything, they are just representative examples. But you can kind of see here that the amount of freight that is so-called carried, and in an automobile I counted passengers, essentially the weight of a couple passengers is what the freight is. BTE stands for break thermal efficiency of the engine that goes in each of these vehicles currently. Power-to-weight ratio gives an indication of performance. The higher the power-to-weight ratio, the faster the vehicle will accelerate and the higher the top end speed tends to be. Freight efficiency is how many ton miles per gallon, essentially, we get out of that vehicle. How many tons the vehicle can carry in freight in terms of miles per gallon. That gives us another indication as to exactly how any particular transportation system is performing. All of these metrics point to a variety of different ways to analyze the issue. What is important to remember in freight transportation is that when you look at a photo of this Peterbilt supertruck, for example, everything you see is overhead, all of it; the tractor and the trailer. No one pays our customers to drive empty trucks around the country. The only thing that matters is what goes into the box; that is revenue. What goes into the box is revenue, everything else is overhead. For our customers, the total cost of ownership then becomes the equation that is of primary importance to them. How do we limit the overhead and how do we increase the revenue?
One question I get very often is why is it so difficult to move engine efficiency and why doesn't it change much? When I used to teach this as a professor, this graph seems to help illustrate the point. When you take a look at engine applications where fuel efficiency isn't necessarily the primary focus, such as Formula One, IndyCar, NASCAR, even in light-duty trucks and passenger cars, you see the power density is fairly high; higher than 50 kilowatts per liter. Then, as you move down the graph here, you see medium trucks, heavy-duty trucks, and then marine, the power density of those engines falls off quite quickly. It has to do with this stroke-to-bore ratio of the engine. Without going too technical, it has to do with being able to lower both heat transfer and lower friction. When someone earlier mentioned SuperTruck, and I showed the SuperTruck vehicle here before, you can see that the marine engine, which is roughly 55% break-thermal efficiency, has roughly 3 kW per liter. If I were to use that geometry, I would need roughly a 120 liter engine running at 100 RPM to produce the power I would need to move my heavy-duty truck. And the truck would become so big that essentially the freight that I would be able to carry would probably be one package. So, this becomes a design trade-off curve where we only use the power density that is absolutely required for the application so that we can maximize the practical efficiency for that particular application. Ships are not nearly so weight or size constrained as a heavy-duty truck is. This graph tends to illustrate that point.
Looking at heavy-duty trucks over the years, you can see the break thermal efficiency of these trucks over the last several decades have improved substantially. Then you see this interesting trend that happened around 1998, it is called a Consent Decree from the EPA. Some of you folks may remember that. I was actually involved with running a heavy-duty diesel engine as part of the research program when this occurred. It had to do with the heavy-duty industry being found by the EPA to be doing cycle beating. It was the Volkswagen diesel-gate scandal, essentially 20 years before the Volkswagen diesel-gate scandal. And what happened was the response was to just flood the engine with EGR to meet the NOX targets, and you see the efficiency essentially falls off this cliff around 2000. Over time we have adapted and changed significantly in engine technology to the point where not only have we recovered the efficiency that we had once lost, but we have exceeded it. What's interesting is looking at the SuperTruck 1 and 2 targets in orange. And there is still a delta between the Blue Line, which is where we actually are at, and the orange line which is where the SuperTruck target goals were. It is important to understand why that is. In SuperTruck there is no durability requirement as part of the solicitation; i.e. these are not million mile engines. So, we absolutely leave a little bit of efficiency on the table so that we can build the engines to have the durability and reliability that our customers have come to expect, which reduces their total cost of ownership. Our customers are very in tune with what all of these costs are and, for example, one day of unscheduled downtime per month is 5% fuel economy for them. That is a substantial amount. So, we are very sensitive to our customer's requests for lowering the total cost of ownership and providing engines that are as durable and as reliable as possible. This is why you see a small delta between the efficiency of what's possible if we remove the durability restraint versus what happens when we have to impose it.
So, efficiency constraints, two primary issues come into play with regulation: greenhouse gas and a well-to-wheels assessment is needed. You hear about people describing zero emissions. Well, as we've seen from how grid sensitivity and grid intensive can be, that is tank-to-wheels when people talk about and EV being zero emissions. Indeed, from the tank-to-wheels perspective it is. But from well-to-wheels, depending on where you've charged it, it may not be. In a greenhouse gas an assessment of well-to-wheels is needed to make sure we're all playing from the same playbook. And air quality, which tends to be more localized, but is also very important. One of the issues here in the top graph that you see to the right, is I did a log-log plot of a NOx plus hydrocarbon emissions over the years. Every major tic point you see is a 90% reduction. If you look in the upper right, from 1985 down to 2007, we essentially have had an order of magnitude reduction of NOx; that is a 90% reduction and that took on the order of a little over 20 years. Now, what you are looking at over the last several years is another order of magnitude reduction, but it's happening much more rapidly. So, these regulations are certainly influencing our technology choices. The vehicle application and the solution, as a result, need to fit together. There are two different types of fits: the technology fit, which technology fits which marketplace that we sell in; and the economic fit, does the technology cost fit that particular marketplace. And that is the part that seems to be overlooked more often than not. For example, our medium duty customers tend to be extremely cost sensitive. They will even request removal of standard hardware if it gives them a $500 savings per truck. So, we are very in tune with medium-duty truck cost when it comes to providing advanced technology. It does not mean these equations won't change or can't change, they can and do, but these are issues we have to bear in mind if we are going to bring new technologies to the marketplace.
There are three paths to zero greenhouse gas emissions as we are looking at these technologies: electricity, and green fuels which can be bio-derived, or they can be E-fuels. There are a variety of different ways to make fuels much lower carbon than what diesel is. The good news for us is from a carbon point of view diesel is just about the worst liquid hydrocarbon that we can use from a hydrogen-to-carbon ratio with regards to making it low carbon. There are a variety of fuels that are substantially better they still maintain a fair amount of low heating value that would allow us to be much lower in carbon intensity than diesel. So, there are options. And then hydrogen gas, of course, is another possible solution.
Some of the electrification trends that we see, if you look in the upper left, we tend to focus on medium and heavy commercial. You can see the electrification share of these global fleets by segments, medium and heavy commercial are probably not the prime adopters of electrification, at least from our perspective, in the near future. Again, these can certainly change based upon cost and availability. But we would need batteries to become more powerful and less expensive for this to happen.
Some of the battery considerations that we need, and these are some of the assumptions that we have recently run, with regard to capacity: 1 kWh per mile versus 2, battery weight, and battery cost. There are a lot of different assumptions that people tend to use. We tend to use the ones that are in the middle of the road. But our conclusion is that over 300 miles, the BEV commercial vehicle just does not become cost efficient for us to provide for the way our customers tend to drive it.
However, we are absolutely looking at a variety of these technologies. We're looking at parallel hybrids, we're looking at fully electric vehicles, we have two different fuel-cell trucks running around the tech center as I am speaking to you. One is a partnership with Toyota, and it has two Murray fuel cells essentially end to end. Another is called a ZECT, a Zero Emissions Cargo Transport, and that is a drayage truck that we have in partnership with DOE and, I believe, Southport Air Quality Management district. Peterbilt Electric Port and Peterbilt Electric Refuse trucks. We are absolutely looking at a variety of these technologies, regardless of which it up becoming viable, reasonable, or profitable, we want to make sure that we are staying on top of all of them. PACCAR has been selling trucks for over 60 years and we want to make sure that we can continue to sell trucks as we go forward, even through these changes.
So, one of the other considerations, and I think someone else touched on it briefly, has to do with drivers. And again, economics change. But at the current time, drivers cost fleets about $40 per hour and 5 minutes a day to any fleet cost on the order of $1,000 per year. So, the convenience to the driver matters. If you look at the fill rate in megawatts and the fill time in minutes, and that's in blue, between diesel, hydrogen, and EV; and you can substitute to some degree liquid fuel for diesel, but we will leave it at diesel for the current discussion. When I was working at Argonne, one of my friends there was a batter expert named Jeff Chamberlain, and he used to tell me that part of the real problem that they had in batteries was that they were so focused on range. He told me, Steve, the problem with ranges is that we are not competing with a 500 or 800 mile range vehicle, we are competing with a liquid fuel vehicle that de facto has infinite range. Because there is not a single truck driver in America that gets into his truck that is concerned about whether or not they are going to find another diesel station before they run out of fuel. So, de facto, the vehicle has infinite range. And when you take a look at the fill time of being on the order of 10 minutes, the amount of their day that gets consumed by refueling the vehicle is almost negligible. And that is the part that is very difficult for us to overcome.
All of these things are issues that we at least have to keep in mind or consider as we bring technologies to the marketplace. So, in summary, regulatory and market pressure are both changing the freight transport business and we need advanced technologies to meet these targets. But the well-to-wheels analysis is critical to ensure we do not follow the wrong path. Tank-to-wheels tends to lead to deceptive conclusions, because you are just pushing the pollution somewhere else. There may be a need to do so, but we have to account for it. Technology needs to fit the application and it needs to meet the market constraints. TCL and uptime are absolutely the most important factors to our customers. The HD truck industry is investigating all of these technologies. We cannot afford to be left behind, and as you can see it is changing and we absolutely will change with it. But it is important to realize solutions that sometimes seem like a slam dunk are not always so. With that I will conclude and be happy to take your questions as we finish. Thank you very much.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Steve. We are now going to move on to our question-and-answer session. I know we have a number of questions typed in there. I think what I will probably do is start off with questions for Steve, since he just finished, and then we will move out. I think some of these questions can be answered by any of the presenters, so everyone, feel free to jump in with a response. The first question, which I think the person who asked it said that you actually provided some answers, but I will ask anyway to see if you want to provide any more detail. What is the latest on the issue that electric trucks and vehicles in general are not 100% of environmentally friendly? Electric power still needs to be generated somehow and the disposal or reuse of batteries is not easy or cheap.
Mike Roeth
This is Mike, I can start. You know, everything has its challenges. Steve just did a nice job of talking about both the benefits and challenges of diesel with respect to batteries and so forth. So, the new things not going to be perfect; it's just going to be different. When I say new thing, I'm basically talking about any technology that comes along that we can choose, we are going to make a choice on it if it serves us better. And trucking has always taken a total cost of ownership look at it. Now, this is a little different with sustainability, climate, and so forth where across the whole supply chain of moving goods there may be an appetite for slight increase in cost if that environmental benefit is so significant, but the answer to the question is that absolutely the industry is looking at, you know, batteries and battery recycling along with the various pluses and minuses of the whole well-to-wheel like Steve talked about. All of that is looked at comprehensively by the manufacturers or the fleets, I think
Alicia Birky
Yeah. I would say to get the latest on it the best place to look is at Argonne's Greet Model, which does well-to-wheels. I am not sure how much is in their reporting right now in terms of heavy-duty. In the analysis that we do, we do see that with our expected efficiencies in our electric heavy-duty vehicles, they will be lower CO2 intensity in general with the current mix and certainly what we anticipate as future mix. And then on the battery recycling, I feel personally that thinking about an electrified transportation sector at scale, battery recycling is a major issue that needs to be addressed. I know there is work going on within the national labs at DOE on that issue.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Steve, do you want to add anything?
Steve Ciatti
All of that is certainly important to our customers and they are certainly concerned with resale value, for example. If batteries have a finite lifespan, and what's even more challenging is that batteries as a general rule, the faster you charge them the less they tend to like it. So, there are restrictions, to some degree, on how fast you can charge them or how often you can charge them fast, which are two different concepts. That is a challenge, because you do not necessarily know what battery history the truck may have had when you go to buy it in the resale market. For example, in our world our trucks tend to go through on the order of 3-4 different owners before the full useful life has been exhausted. Each of those owners has a very different business model and a very different approach to how they view operating, purchasing, and driving those trucks. These are all unknowns. What is also a little bit unknown is what that million mile battery or million mile fuel cell looks like and whether or not they will have two leave efficiency or performance, or both, on the table in order to achieve the durability that will end up lowering that total cost of ownership. To some degree those are all unanswered questions. Those are certainly significantly important to our customers and as a result they are important to us as well.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you to all of you. Steve, the next question came in during your presentation, but anyone can address it. Even if new SuperTrucks have increased efficiency, what truck fleet turnover is needed vs. current turnover to realize SuperTruck benefits?
Steve Ciatti
It actually goes faster than you think. Our trucks do move into these secondary, tertiary, and quad markets reasonably quickly. Maybe not as quickly as light-duty vehicles, but more quickly than locomotives, ships, and other large vehicles. Our first customers tend to hold on to their trucks about 3 years, which means if we are offering them an improvement in performance or fuel economy, they tend to want to see that pay itself back; that return on investment is about 18 months. Because they want to be able to make back what they spent extra in 18 months and then realize the benefit for the next 18 months that they own the truck. And then, theoretically, that truck has a little more value in the resale market because of its efficiency and improvement, and they will be able to get a higher price for it in that secondary market as well. So, the truck turnover is faster than I think most people realize. So, these SuperTruck benefits and the efficiency benefits we are already starting to see in some of our trucks, even from SuperTruck 1, and SuperTruck 1 ended here a few years back. Some of those technologies have already gotten incorporated into the participant's trucks that are being sold now. In fact, if you were to go looking online you will find there are several articles talking about the four original SuperTruck 1 participants and which technologies have been incorporated already, and I would expect that SuperTruck 2 would have a similar level of technology and incorporation.
Mark Roeth
Yeah, Steve, I concur with everything you said. I even wrote one of those articles. There are a lot of SuperTruck features in today's trucks being built by Peterbilt, Kenilworth, and the others. I'm glad you said what you did, because I get a little upset, people will put trucking in a hard to abate sector. And they will put it in with planes, trains, ships, and even buildings and manufacturing, and it is just silly. I mean, this is a 10 year life vehicle. They may be running the truck a few more years after its 10th year, but at very low mile. So, the trucks turnover. It is also why retrofitting trucks is a limited opportunity. It really is about the truck being built as efficient and low emission as possible and then running it really hard for the first 4-5 years, and the it is kind of done in 10 years. That is how I'd view turnover, very much in line with what Steve said.
Alicia Birky
The good news is certainly that the highest users of fuel that the class VIII tractors are going to be accruing most of their miles in the first few years. They may stay in the fleet for 20-25 years, but they are not going 100,000 miles per year anymore. So, the benefits accrue faster for the highest using sector that we have. We do an analysis of benefits for the Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office, and we do put the vehicles into the stock model. In fact, we are just wrapping up an analysis on that and there should be a report out on that pretty soon if you are curious about how that plays out. But they do start accruing benefits pretty quickly.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Another question, and anyone feel free to answer this. How are non-emissions environmental externalities (e.g. lithium sourcing and disposal costs) being assessed in truck propulsion alternatives comparisons?
Mark Roeth
I think we talked a little bit about that earlier and somewhat answered it. But one of the things that I would like to bring up is that electric trucks, fuel cell trucks, they are at the very early stage of maturity. Diesel engines and transmissions have been around for 75-100 years powering these trucks. So, we have fine-tuned those from an emissions performance. Of course, they are getting better and Steve talked about how they can still get better. But we are just starting with electric trucks and even batteries to haul these big trucks. There are dozens of different battery chemistries that are being looked at for the unique needs of moving freight. And I just think there is a lot to discover. And so, one of the challenges we have is that the technologies that we have right now is good enough for us to get started with electric truck adoption. And then, we will look at all of these different factors and the industry will keep improving. There is just so much to be learned. We are very early on in battery electric trucks.
Alicia Birky
And I think the sourcing and recycling issues are definitely on the radar for the Department of Energy. It is part of the portfolio to be considered. It is not my area. I have a colleague, Maggie Mann, that works in that area. Like I said, it is something that is on their radar; it is an issue.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. The next question, Mike, these came in during your presentation. With respect toward the growth in haul within the 300 mile radius, how much is influenced by job attractiveness and driver preferences?
Mike Roeth
Yeah, great question, so I'll be quick with this. When we did the 10 truck Run on Less regional last October, we went out and met every truck driver who was driving those out-and-back return to base. We also had a finale where all 10 of them joined us in Atlanta. And, I don't know, probably 6-7 of those 10 drivers would not be driving a truck if they had to do over the road long haul and sleep in the truck and be away from family, friends, school, and social events. Well, I guess with the pandemic we are not doing as much of that. But they would not be a truck driver without that. It is an attractive job. Two or three of them, it was their second career. I think three of them had college degrees and had other careers and got into this in their later lives. So, I really believe that that day cab return to base, we can get more truck drivers and we can attract really good employees to the market that we can't otherwise, so I think it is huge.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Load matching requires truck companies to share information and loads. Truck Platooning benefits accrue mostly to other than the lead truck in a platoon. The system optimal solution in trucking is not likely to be the user optimal solution actually chosen by firms and trucks. What incentives are being investigated to move the user optimal solution closer to the system optimal solution?
Mike Roeth
Steve might want to answer this or even Alicia. I would say that looking at taxis and Uber or all the tools that we have on our cell phone to do incredible amounts of things. That is disrupting all kinds of systems that we thought were in place. So, why can't freight movement be another one? Some of these habits that are institutionalized in goods movement could very well be disrupted by these technologies, I think.
Alicia Birky
I think that we are seeing that in load pooling, that it is occurring for the truck load. For platooning, the issue that was raised, I think it is part of the reason why some manufacturers are saying platooning is probably not going to happen. It is difficult to negotiate among trucks and among fleets. It would be interesting if there was a technology solution. I cannot comment on policy, most of the work I do it is for the Department of Energy and policy is not part of their purview.
Steve Ciatti
What I didn't have time to get into is the work we are doing in connectivity and autonomous, ADAS, essentially Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and things of that nature. That falls into a lot of this particular issue and question quite nicely. All of the OEMs are certainly working on these types of things to provide our customers with the tools they need to derive optimal solutions. I think the question poses a very good topic. Because any particular fleet's optimal solution may very well not be the system optimal solution. In fact, it sometimes may run counter. I think it is true in light duty sometimes as well. I think the key will be incentivizing system optimal solutions so that you don't have particular fleets, customers, or people unduly paying for that system optimal solution. There has to be a way to negotiate. That is a business decision as much as a technical decision. I think the tools will be available to do it, whether or not that is how it is going to end up evidencing itself. I think we are still trying to figure that out.
Alicia Birky
Going back to the platooning issue, if we talk about instead connected and adapted cruise control, that was ubiquitous and there was basically traffic smoothing everywhere. We wouldn't get maybe the aerodynamic benefits, but we would get a lot of the benefits out of that technology that would be to everybody's benefit.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Mike, another question for you. If Tesla does announce a million mile battery, do you think such a battery will be able to expand the daily range of a vehicle?
Mike Roeth
Well, so a million mile battery is kind of important. We have million mile trucks, right? And that is sort of the current design standard. Batteries are expensive and we have to replace them during the life. So, we have to have that as not really our north star, but kind of our plan. We don't know really where we are. Durability growth is only proven with time. We don't really know. That whole equation that Steve talked about of range, speed to charge, cycle life, cost, weight, that is what all the brilliant battery minds are working on. You can't just put a car battery in a truck, so it is very specific to these trucks. Charging speeds up to a megawatt are being talked about, and even more. That's a big challenge. Like I said, the good news is we are on the early learning curve for batteries and, like I mentioned earlier, I think we are good enough to start and with the applications it works for we can move forward with all of those different design challenges that batteries have.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Alicia, we will move on, we have two questions for you that came in. Are you tracking local truck delivery van volume, too?
Alicia Birky
I saw that question. I guess I'm not quite clear on tracking volume, what that was referring to. Whether that was the analysis of fuel by segment, which we did cover for vans; we did have a rough estimate of fuel use. Then we also have our data set fleet DNA, which is a collection of data from a wide range of projects that does cover different locations. But I guess I'm not clear on the question.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, it looks like the person who wrote that might be typing in a clarification. While we wait let's move to the next one for you. Given that most of the last-miles occur off the Federal-aid Highway System, which federal agency has responsibility for improvements to last-mile delivery?
Alicia Birky
Yeah, I'm not sure if that is a question for me either. It is an interesting question, maybe even the audience has thoughts on that. What we are seeing is it is a very important hot topic to local planning agencies, certainly within the Smart Mobility Consortium, for example, where they are working at the metropolitan level. They are very concerned about last-mile issues, congestion, delivery space, freight trucks moving in urban roadways. So, that is kind of where we are seeing that rather than at the federal level.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, anybody else have thoughts on that one?
Alright. Going back to the first question. To clarify, they are referring to fleet size increase and fuel efficiencies as well as sustainability of the fleet?
Alicia Birky
So, certainly, fuel efficiency. With working with the Department of Energy the focus over the last 10 years, primarily in that class VII and VIII long haul, where the majority of the energy is, we are seeing a pivot right now trying to get medium and heavy-duty vehicles into the portfolio. So, the 21st century partnership, for example, is a department partnership between the Department of Energy and some OEMs, as well as other federal agencies are active in that, including the DOT. But we are pulling in more active membership with medium and heavy-duty vehicle manufacturers and starting to work on what do goals and program research gaps look like for those sectors. So, in terms of that sustainability it is becoming more and more a part of our focus. In terms of fleet size increase, Mike Roeth had shown the growth in class III. Class III has been neglected a lot in our work, IIb and III kind falls through the cracks between commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles. And I know that a lot of that growth is class III is actually class III pickup trucks, which are used in both commercial and some private use. But I think this is definitely an area that is right for us to take a closer look at what is going on there.
Mike Roeth
Yeah. It ends up being kind of simple, if there is anything simple in all of this. The class VII and VIII have the big miles and burn the fuel because of miles, but there are not as many vehicles. When you get down into class III you have a lot of vehicles that are going shorter distances, so they're burning a lot of fuel. It is kind of at those end. In between is just an incredible diversity of truck sizes and models. Things like garbage trucks, snowplows, street sweepers, vacuum trucks; it goes on and on. When you just purely look at it from an energy standpoint, it is a little trucks because of the sheer volume of them and the heavy trucks because of how far they drive.
Alicia Birky
Yeah, and the little ones are very difficult to tackle. We did a study a few years back on class IIb and III, just getting interviews with some OEMs and trying to understand how the vehicles are used and what is going on in the segment. And there is such a variety in duty cycles and uses from day-to-day and from fleet to fleet. They become very difficult to think about in terms of how you design vehicles for them. But we also hear a lot from manufacturers saying that because it is such a high volume market, that if there were a way to design components that were modular that could be used in that class III all the way through V or VI, that would be bold.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Well, we have made it through all the questions, and we are out of time. So, we are going to end for today. I want to thank all three presenters. Thank you also everyone for attending today's seminar.
Thank you all for attending today's seminar. I will send out a link to the recording of today's webinar within the next day. The October talking freight is not yet available for registration but once it is an announcement will be sent through the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The Freight Planning LISTSERV is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars. I also encourage you to join the LISTSERV if you have not already done so.
