You won’t find many similarities between the Ontario Power Generation fleet and that of Purolator Courier. But both are in the process of transitioning to battery-electric vehicles. We chatted with these two early adopter fleets at a green tech session at truck world and left with these five key takeaways.

It’s infrastructure that takes the time

Joe Lombardo: Where we should have started in our journey was really working with master electricians, electrical engineering and really looking at the infrastructure.

Vehicles are readily available. The last panel talked about that quite a bit. Vehicles are readily available, it’s infrastructure that takes the time, especially when you need to upgrade power needed to get utilities involved.

So, starting your plans with a view of your own infrastructure landscape would be a key learning that I would share with with the audience today.

Engage all stakeholders early

Joe Lombardo: It’s about roles, responsibilities. It’s about being ready for that change, and about engaging all of the stakeholders early. And I think that’s top to bottom in the organization; our frontline couriers, you know, feedback from them. And I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, as it’s always been, you know, don’t tell me how to drive a truck, we already know, but tell me what’s different about this truck?

And how should I be operating it? And I think that goes right up the chain, making sure that you’ve got good alignment across facilities and their role in the process when it comes to charging infrastructure, the role of fleet in that as well and the role of operations because operations do need to adapt how they do things. So that’s, those are the key learnings there.

Moderator: There’s been a lot of reticence about electric vehicles in Canada because of the harsh climate, I’d like to ask what your experience has been with with the weather here in Canada. Start with you, Joe

Cold weather affects range

Joe Lombardo: Yeah, sure. So, our first 100 vehicles were deployed over the last year, we did have five test vehicles deployed in Vancouver which doesn’t really — Vancouver doesn’t really get too much harsh weather, although maybe 10 centimeters of snow might have been tell you otherwise.

But we’ve seen operations in up to sort of -18C,  -20C degrees for a number of weeks, this past winter in Quebec City. There is a range degradation and you need to be ready for that.

You need to anticipate that so you are sort of, behind the fence charging. For certain routes that go longer, range may not be enough, when we’re more penetrated with EVs out in the field.

And so we’re going to have to work with partners we have, you know, for mid-shift or mid-route charge points to make sure that there’s enough range coming back. So, we expect a 50%, loss of range. But again, we’re couriers for the most part on the medium-duty side.

And if you look at the profile of our vehicle deployment, the majority of our routes are doing under 100 kilometers a day. And most of the available vehicles are publishing 300- and 400-kilometer ranges. So, we can manage within that. But again, charge strategies, charge planning and how you manage all of that is a key to the equation as well.

Drivers love them!

Mike Skirzynski:  Yeah, and on the OPG front, initially, it was actually mixed reactions and even negative, but like Joe alluded to, until they got in the vehicle and until they started coming.

In fact, after we implemented some light-duty vehicles in the fleet, OPG’s, personal uptake of electric vehicles has actually gone up because people love them so much.

And then from a driver experience standpoint, some of the fleets we’ve been talking to on the side, I heard a story where a last mile delivery fleet, pre-electrification had driver turnover about the mid to high 30%s annually.

After they implemented EVs, it went down to below 10%. So, the experience on many levels is just very positive for the drivers who try it.

Public chargers are needed

Mike Skirzynski:  I think when people talk about range anxiety, the reality is it’s charger anxiety, it’s can I find a charger that will top me up when my range is low?

And public charging is certainly a critical piece of that. But to give an example for the routes, were looking the route routes, were looking to electrify the 400 kilometers from Darlington to Bruce, we need an en-route charger.

And that’s actually where we’re starting to take the take a look at where we could potentially stop, where can we put that en-route  charger and that is what’s fundamentally going to make that possible and other people use it great but because OPG wants to be a leader in that space, that’s absolutely going to be critical.