A Whole New Range: Commercial Trucking with Electrified Trailers

Watch this video to see if the commercial transportation industry can move beyond diesel. Spoiler alert: Yes, and it starts with practical decarbonization. Learn how Range Energy is accelerating the electrification of commercial transportation via powered trailers for the heavy-duty truck market.

Transcript

00:00:00 what does the range Energy System unlock for your customers is it efficiency is it maintenance what does it unlock for them yeah I think maybe zooming out a little bit for people that don't know exactly kind of what the range Energy System may be um you know I've I've been in the automotive industry now for nearly 30 years and actually one of the

00:00:21 first things I ever did in automotive was uh join the the Student Chapter of the SAE and and I quickly became the president of the Student Chapter and ran the formula SA team and and that's kind of stuck with me for a very very long time and um even from those days it's always been about uh roadway efficiency and safety and and I've really kind of pulled through my career uh using that

00:00:45 as as one of the one of the underlying kind of um pieces that that motivates me and drives me is is how can we make our roadways more efficient and safer at the same time um growing up you're sitting in the backseat of your parents car and you see this big rig next to you and and you see these big wheels and you're just fascinated by the mechanism that's that's rolling but then you kind of get

00:01:06 bummed out when you see that black soot coming out of the tailpipe and so carrying that all the way to where I'm at now you know uh nearly 20 years in in developing electric vehicles Alone um my my thought was well how can we be empathetic to the existing Fleet of drivers and Fleet managers sorry existing population of of drivers and fleets and uh and bring electrification

00:01:31 and bring efficiency and safety to these folks and so the the concept that we have or the idea it's not a concept anymore it's they're trailers on the road now um is we Electrify uh a trailer by adding an energy module which is basically a a battery box that Clips in underneath the the outside of the trailer and then a drive module that basically replaces one of the passive

00:01:53 axles in the back of the trailer with an active axle and if just to kind of contextualize we're talking about big rigs 18 wheelers that are on the road today the front half is the tractor or the truck the back half is the trailer really focused on the trailer and the way our system works is that we use first order principles to uh sense and measure how

00:02:16 hard the truck is pulling on that trailer and we we then uh deploy Drive algorithms and regen algorithms to make the trailer feel absolutely weightless to whatever is Towing it this is done without a can signal or any kind of data communication or any type of requirement from the towing vehicle and what that allows us to do is hyrize old you know your old diesel Peter Built or a brand

00:02:41 new Freight lineer Cascadia and then also extend the range of all the new electric stuff that's out there and so that's the kind of highlevel concept here and the net benefit is that we see as much as 70% gains in fuel economy and that's 70 this these are numbers that have never been possible before and uh and over 7 % reduction in harmful emissions out of the tail pipes uh and

00:03:05 so this is these are really really big game-changing numbers and and the The Fleets are starting to pay attention to the impact that we can have not only to the environment uh and drivability but also to their bottom line it's a tremendous impact is that because your technology allows the trailer for all prodct purpos to become weightless where there's not as much stress on the

00:03:25 tractor that's right that's exactly the the um the idea here is that what if we made the trailer feel weightless to the Tractor but you know if you've ever driven a truck in a trailer and you're bobtailing you can you know that that's actually not bobtailing if you're driving an empty trailer the empty trailer is actually in some cases more scary than a full

00:03:47 trailer because it's kind of bouncing around and you you have limited control uh of The Brak uh braking situation but but what we do is we actually assist the entire system and bring a new layer of safety we can regen a lot more from that axle in the rear trailer so that we're actually now saving the brakes on the entire system increasing the break duty cycle by about 5x because we're regening

00:04:11 from the trailer now um we are able to accelerate through intersections and for example fill torque in your semi-automated transmission extending the life of that semi-automated transmission bringing the shift times from let's say 3/4 of a second or a second down to a quarter of a second or a tenth of a second so that that Driving Experience is dramatically better right

00:04:33 now we're actually testing threshold breaking and stability control and Jack knifing on the ice up in uh Northern Michigan and so these are all new benefits that are only available by putting a full powered e axle in the trailer with with the intelligent control system that we've developed