Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
Beer giant Anheuser-Busch Co. LLC said today it placed an order for up to 800 hydrogen-electric powered semi trucks from Nikola Motor Co. and will begin using some of the electric vehicles before the end of the year.
In announcing the largest deal to date for heavy-duty trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells, St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch cited the Nikola One trucks' range of 500 to 1,200 miles per refueling stop, 20-minute refueling time, and zero-emission operations. Anheuser-Busch is a unit of Belgian brewer InBev.
Anheuser-Busch plans to integrate the full order into its dedicated fleet by 2020, replacing all of the 750 to 900 vehicles in that fleet by 2025, Ingrid De Ryck, vice president for procurement and sustainability at Anheuser-Busch, said in a conference call with reporters. The company uses its dedicated fleet to move one-third of its total U.S. over-the-road shipments between its brewery and wholesale networks, De Ryck said. This represents about 12.5 billion 12-ounce cans per year, she said.
Depending on the terrain and load size, a Nikola One truck can travel 100 to 200 miles on its battery alone, a Nikola spokeswoman said. However, each vehicle carries a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to automatically re-charge its battery pack as it travels. That fuel cell requires refueling every 800 to 1,200 miles, she said.
Salt Lake City-based Nikola did not disclose the value of the order, though published reports pegged it as high as $720 million. The vehicles would be less expensive to operate than diesel trucks on a dollar-per-mile basis, Nikola CEO Trevor Milton said on the call.
Nikola leases its vehicles at a rate of 90 cents to $1 per mile in a package that covers the vehicle, fuel, warranty, and maintenance. It also includes replacement parts such as tires and wiper blades. Its leasing arrangements are managed by rental and leasing giant Ryder System Inc., which serves as Nikola's exclusive distribution and maintenance provider.
Anheuser-Busch will not favor one type of vehicle over the other, De Ryck said. "We see both solutions as complimentary," De Ryck said on the call. "We have thousands of routes, with very different distances, so both can co-exist with their own roles."
Another contrast between the two alternative-fuel technologies is the infrastructure required to fuel the trucks. Fully electric vehicles such as the Tesla Semi require specialized electric stations to recharge their batteries, with more powerful "Supercharger" stations providing a faster charge. In contrast, Nikola's trucks refuel by filling their tanks with compressed hydrogen fuel obtained from specialized stations. There are only about 30 such sites across the U.S., but Nikola has contracted with the Norwegian firm Nel ASA to create a nationwide hydrogen refueling network that will operate more than 700 hydrogen fueling stations by 2028, with 30 coming on line over the next two years, Milton said.
Nikola plans to defray the cost of building its refueling network by opening the stations to all vehicles, including private cars and commercial trucks, he said. The company, which will announce the locations later this year, said the stations will be situated on freeways just outside large cities. This is similar to the locations of the leading truck stops like Love's Travel Stops & Country Stores, Pilot Travel Centers LLC's Pilot Flying J, or TravelCenters of America's TA-Petro, he said.
Instead of shipping hydrogen to those stations, Nikola will generate the fuel on site, tapping into renewable power sources such as wind, solar, or hydroelectric to perform electrolysis, a process that uses electricity to split water into its chemical components of hydrogen and oxygen.
Self-driving technology could also be a differentiator between the Tesla and Nikola platforms. Tesla has promoted the improvements in safety and efficiency it says will be provided by "enhanced autopilot" features, which use a suite of surround cameras and onboard sensors to provide object detection, automatic emergency braking, automatic lane keeping, and lane-departure warning, the automaker says. Tesla also says its trucks are capable of operating in platoon mode, a strategy of improving aerodynamics and fuel efficiency by allowing multiple trucks to draft in quick succession, using precision telematics and wireless communications to follow a human driver in a lead vehicle.
Nikola trucks will ship with radar, camera, and lidar sensors—the latter a detection system that works on the principle of radar, but uses light from a laser—that are required for autonomous driving, Milton said on the call. But the company will wait to deploy those advanced features at a Level 5—or fully automated—level until it gains greater clarity on legal approval of self-driving cars, he said.
"Autonomy and platooning are really fun to dream about, but they are still speculative because they rely on changes to regulatory and safety issues," Milton said on the call. In the meantime, Nikola trucks will offer basic driver-assistance features such as automatic braking and lane control in a bid to improve safety. "When a truck wrecks, it wrecks everything in its path. And one driver fatality is too many," he said.
Raise your hand if you think you’re a pretty good driver. Now put your hand back down, because we’re about to introduce you to someone who has set the bar much higher than you can ever dream of reaching.
Meet Greg Swift, a longtime driver for Schneider National Inc. who has driven 5 million miles without a preventable accident. The Green Bay, Wisconsin-based carrier boasts a notable safety record: More than 6,500 of its drivers have traveled at least 1 million safe driving miles with the company. Swift, however, stands out from that crowd, joining only two other drivers in Schneider’s nearly 90-year history in reaching the 5 million-mile mark.
Swift’s achievement was recognized with a parade, a “Sound the Horn” celebration—a long-standing tradition of sounding a truck horn inside the headquarters building to celebrate achievements—and a $10,000 bonus.
And if you’re wondering how long it takes to motor 5 million miles, that’s the equivalent of driving to the moon and back 10 times. Swift began that odyssey 33 years ago when he started his career with Schneider after leaving his teaching job. He now runs a dedicated route for Schneider customer Georgia-Pacific.
In his time as a driver, Swift has witnessed the evolution of trucking technology from paper maps to advanced GPS and collision-mitigation systems, but his advice to new drivers is simple and technology-free: Plan ahead and manage your time efficiently.
Look around any distribution center and you’ll see dozens of devices powered by batteries. They range from large-scale cells in electric forklifts, to mid-size units in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), to slim, palm-size batteries in barcode scanners and smartphones. Despite the ubiquity of these applications, there is more work to be done. That’s why a battery-industry group has launched an initiative it hopes will encourage the next generation of engineers to continue developing smaller, safer, more powerful industrial batteries.
The effort is funded by donations from BCI member companies, including the lead donors Entek and Daramic, as well as gifts from more than a dozen other companies, including such distribution center stalwarts as Crown Battery, East Penn, and EnerSys.
Global supply chains have long had to weather disruptions triggered by sudden spikes in demand. Holiday gift shopping, big price discounts, and stocking up before major storms are just a few reasons for jumps in consumption. Now there’s another variable to consider: Taylor Swift.
Devoted fans of the pop megastar often wear outfits reflecting Swift’s own costumes or references to her songs when they attend concerts. Her influence is so notable that, according to London-based Dalston Mill Fabrics, the singer’s lyrics appear to drive spikes in demand for certain styles and fabrics.
Songs on Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, mention several types of clothing and have boosted fans’ interest in similar items. For instance, as any Swiftie knows, miniskirts have always been a signature piece in Taylor’s wardrobe. But this summer, they jumped in importance thanks to a reference in her song “imgonnagetyouback,” which begins with the words “Lilac short skirt, the one that fits me like skin.” The singer wore a lilac skirt in a video for the song, increasing the hype. Since the video was released, worldwide internet searches for “lilac skirt” have skyrocketed by 992%, reaching a peak in July, Dalston Mill said, citing data from Google Trends. The fabric purveyor reports similar search trends for black dresses, lace tops, and dresses with buttons, all of which are mentioned on the album.
“The recent release of The Tortured Poets Department has solidified Taylor Swift’s reputation as a fashion icon,” a Dalston Mill spokesperson said in a release. “These search spikes also demonstrate Taylor Swift’s position as a global trendsetter. Her influence is indisputable, and it will be great to see Swifties debuting some of these outfit trends at the upcoming Eras Tour shows.”
Which prompts a burning question for supply chain professionals: Should demand planners in the apparel industry consider Taylor Swift albums as leading indicators in their forecasts?
The announcement from the electric vehicle (EV) charging company contained a really big number: 1 million. That’s the number of places in North America and Europe where drivers can go to charge up their cars, according to ChargePoint, a California company that provides a list of those charging stations on its smartphone app. And it’s important because the lack of a robust charging network has been one of the main obstacles to the mass transition from fossil fuel to battery power.
But the number also made me wonder, How does that stack up against the number of service stations where drivers can pump gas or diesel? And since charging an electric car takes longer than filling a tank, does the EV industry need more plugs than pumps anyway?
The rough answers to those questions were easy to find—the American Petroleum Institute says there are more than 145,000 traditional fueling stations across the U.S., and Statista puts the number in Europe at around 135,719—but those numbers only raised more questions for me. For example, each filling station typically has between four and eight pumps, so shouldn’t we multiply the number of stations by the number of hoses at each one? As it turns out, ChargePoint’s number is the total amount of ports—or plugs—not the number of locations. So I was trying to compare apples to oranges.
Don’t get me wrong—providing drivers with a list of a million charging stations is an awesome achievement—but the number also demonstrates the difficulty of comparing electric and fossil fuel infrastructures.
Here’s an example: We recently learned about a $3 billion EV battery factory being planned as a joint venture by the automotive giants Cummins, Daimler, and Paccar. Intended to ensure a U.S.-based supply of commercial and industrial batteries, the plant will be a 21-gigawatt hour (GWh) factory. I’m not an engineer, just a humble reporter, so that number meant precisely nothing to me. And when I tried to figure out how that would stack up by more conventional measures of production capacity, I ran up against the vagaries of “green math.”
First, a little background: In transportation terms, gigawatts are like horsepower—a measure of maximum potential output—and so, gigawatt hours are like horsepower multiplied by endurance. But of course, no one drives their car at top horsepower all the time—they’d quickly collect a stack of speeding tickets at the very least. Maybe that’s why legacy automotive plants don’t measure their vehicles’ output in “horsepower hours.”
Further complicating matters, an EV battery is like an internal combustion engine (ICE) and its fuel tank, all wrapped up in one box. Describing the “power” of that box with a single number requires that drivers think about energy in a new way. Here’s the best I could do: That new battery factory would be able to offer a single charge-up to about 48,000 electric Freightliner eCascadia trucks. But that math only works in the absurd scenario where those truckers somehow all come in for a charge on the same day and claim the plant’s entire annual battery output.
It was a similar story when I started looking into the driving ranges of EVs versus their gas-powered counterparts. That seems like a simple concept, but I stumbled over that one too when I learned that my friend’s Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck has an EPA-estimated range of 300 miles. Pretty impressive: That’s more than my Toyota Rav4, which runs about 240 miles on a tank of gas. But wait a minute, that’s not a fair comparison because maybe the Rav4 has a smaller gas tank, so … but hold on, the Lightning doesn’t even have a gas tank! See, I lost my direct comparison again.
Fortunately, the next generation may have this thing figured out. We now have two teenage drivers in the house, and whenever I hand my son the keys to that Toyota, he sets the digital dashboard display to show the car’s estimated remaining mileage. Call me old-fashioned, but all these years, I’ve just been keeping an eye on the analog gas tank needle to see when I needed to fill up. If you change your mode of thinking to watch the number of miles the car can go, not the number of gallons left in the tank, it no longer matters whether you’re burning gasoline or electrons under the hood. Wait a minute, an EV doesn’t actually burn any electrons … oops, I did it again.
Earlier this year, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted new regulations that will eventually ban most forklifts with internal combustion engines from operating in the Golden State. With a few exceptions, companies will have to phase out their carbon-emitting trucks between 2028 and 2037. These regulations are designed to help clear the skies over California, even though lift trucks are responsible for a very small percentage of the state’s air pollution.
CARB has also begun to target drayage trucks that operate in California, with the goal of having only zero-emission models in use by 2035. It has offered incentives, such as grants and access to dedicated lanes at ports, to encourage the shift.
In both of these cases, the technology required for the transition to greener vehicles exists. Sadly, that is not the case with CARB’s proposal to transition the rail industry to clean locomotives. Essentially, CARB wants to do away with diesel engines in favor of electric-powered locomotives—and it wants this transition to happen by 2030.
While I support the overall goal of making transportation greener, there are some major problems with the proposed regulations for railroads. I believe they’re going too far too soon.
The main problem is that the shift will rely on electric technology that is not yet available for train operations. Trains can’t just pull over to a plug to recharge the way battery-operated cars and trucks can. We can’t expect a regulation to drive invention. It doesn’t work that way.
Unlike forklifts and drayage trucks, railroads also cross state lines in their daily operations. It is unreasonable to expect trains to switch locomotives when they enter California. So, in effect, California’s regulations will become the de facto standard for all states nationwide.
However, the biggest problem with these regulations is that they will actually defeat the goal of reducing pollution. Instead, more carbon will be released into the environment as freight is diverted from rail to less-fuel-efficient trucks. A single train can haul the equivalent of 200 truckloads while producing far fewer emissions. And trains don’t add to road congestion—no small consideration for a state notable for its endless traffic jams.
CARB’s regulations will result in more complexity, longer transit times, and higher costs for moving freight. If you agree, contact your senator or representative and lobby for federal intervention before it’s too late.