Want to buy an EV bussiness?

[Mega]

https://www.carscoops.com/2020/03/ge...y-van-venture/

Funny how only Tesla are to only one that can make a Profit making EV's.......Full marks to their Accounts dept ;)

Mega

[GRG55]

Re: Want to buy an EV bussiness?

https://www.carscoops.com/2020/03/ge...y-van-venture/

Funny how only Tesla are to only one that can make a Profit making EV's.......Full marks to their Accounts dept ;)

Mega

Tesla profit? Really?
A true profit actually means earning more than your cost of capital (not just a quarterly balance of Q revenue exceeding Q costs every now and then). Tesla has never ever come close. Of course, if you treat your investor's Billions of $ of invested capital as "free", you can make any enterprise look "profitable".

As for Ford/DHL this is disappointing.
"Return-to-base" situations such as package delivery, urban bus routes, waste pickup, utility meter reading, taxi fleets, mine haul trucks and such are the absolute best applications for alternate fuel vehicles.

The routes lengths during a single driver shift are generally highly predictable, so range issues can be dealt with effectively by ensuring enough "fuel' (read: "battery" in this case) capacity on board. Only a single refueling facility needs to be constructed, back at the depot/yard, with enough capacity/vehicle slots to "refill" (read: "recharge" in this case) the truck before the start of the next shift.

Works extremely well for CNG and LNG as alternate fuels. Can't see why it shouldn't work for EVs.

I have a business associate that has made a good living from converting cube trucks, similar to those pictured in Mega's linked article, from gasoline or diesel to CNG. He buys used Ryder and Penske van trucks at auction that have the engines trashed or miled-out, installs a new purpose-built 100% natural gas engine, new Allison transmission, CNG fuel storage system, refurbishes the rest of the truck and sells them to fleet operators at a discount to what they would pay for a new truck. They are all return-to-base operations with an automated CNG fueling station at their yards. With the price of natural gas in the USA so depressed they save a ton of money on fuel costs.

I would guess this venture with DHL failed because 1) the vehicle reliability was not up to the rigors of continuous daily full shift usage; or 2) the range was just not enough to get through a shift without recharging - adding more battery takes away from vehicle payload, while recharging part way through the shift gets expensive when you are paying drivers to sit around waiting for the battery to charge and they can't cover as much territory in a shift.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Want to buy an EV bussiness?

Tesla profit? Really?
A true profit actually means earning more than your cost of capital (not just a quarterly balance of Q revenue exceeding Q costs every now and then). Tesla has never ever come close. Of course, if you treat your investor's Billions of $ of invested capital as "free", you can make any enterprise look "profitable".

As for Ford/DHL this is disappointing.
"Return-to-base" situations such as package delivery, urban bus routes, waste pickup, utility meter reading, taxi fleets, mine haul trucks and such are the absolute best applications for alternate fuel vehicles.

The routes lengths during a single driver shift are generally highly predictable, so range issues can be dealt with effectively by ensuring enough "fuel' (read: "battery" in this case) capacity on board. Only a single refueling facility needs to be constructed, back at the depot/yard, with enough capacity/vehicle slots to "refill" (read: "recharge" in this case) the truck before the start of the next shift.

Works extremely well for CNG and LNG as alternate fuels. Can't see why it shouldn't work for EVs.

I have a business associate that has made a good living from converting cube trucks, similar to those pictured in Mega's linked article, from gasoline or diesel to CNG. He buys used Ryder and Penske van trucks at auction that have the engines trashed or miled-out, installs a new purpose-built 100% natural gas engine, new Allison transmission, CNG fuel storage system, refurbishes the rest of the truck and sells them to fleet operators at a discount to what they would pay for a new truck. They are all return-to-base operations with an automated CNG fueling station at their yards. With the price of natural gas in the USA so depressed they save a ton of money on fuel costs.

I would guess this venture with DHL failed because 1) the vehicle reliability was not up to the rigors of continuous daily full shift usage; or 2) the range was just not enough to get through a shift without recharging - adding more battery takes away from vehicle payload, while recharging part way through the shift gets expensive when you are paying drivers to sit around waiting for the battery to charge and they can't cover as much territory in a shift.

Collapse(temporary) of OPEC?

Repeat of 1980’s Oil Glut?

That was a critical contributing factor to both the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the Invasion of Iraq.

What will this contribute to?

Surely someone somewhere has modeled the price of energy with the viability of electric vehicles.

I remember the Honda CRX HF, a 1500-ish pound car getting over 50mpg in the mid 1980’s.

Right around the return of cheap energy. the return of the muscle car and the inception of the later SUV economy.