If you’ve considered buying an electric truck for your fleet, you’ve undoubtedly wondered about who will have the expertise to maintain and service that vehicle. We caught up with Travis Brown, vice-president of product support for Mack and Volvo dealer Vision Truck Group, to learn about the training and equipment requirements needed for a dealer to sell and support EVs. After all, given the presence of high voltage wiring, it’s not a matter of stopping in at a typical service center, is it?

Travis Brown: Mack and Volvo Corporate have put together a dealership package, a roadmap, so to speak, for the various departments, parts, service and sales. Very easy to follow, step by step process on what needs to be achieved, as far as battery storage, battery handling, certification training for both the techs, the sales staff, parts department and handling. We’ve got requirements for the service, bays, charging infrastructure, tooling, safety equipment, etc. Initially, when signed up, which is going back about approximately three years ago (we started our certification process in 2021) we had monthly meetings set up with corporate, and all involved and started out with a checklist of items that we needed to work through, percentage of progress through each one of those. And I think we were fully certified within a six month period. So very hands-on with corporate, a lot of feedback back and forth, Q&A, writing, a lot of SOPs for the dealership and our team, but relatively painless.

The training required from a Mack or Volvo dealer that sells electric trucks is extensive. Everyone is involved, but training requirements are most detailed for the technicians who will be interacting directly with the vehicles.

Travis Brown: Everybody in the dealership needs the safety training just because, if they’re even in the building with a BEV and there’s a potential fire, they have to know what to do. And that’s as little as just a 10-minute training video. And then it gets a lot more extensive with technicians, obviously. They have to do many, many hours of online training and then attend an instructor-led training on safety, decommissioning and re-commissioning, so that that’s rather extensive. From there, the service manager handles a lot of the service department operations, the barriers, the tooling, the safety equipment, those acquisition and follow-up certification, annual inspection — parts department, the parts manager handles that side of it, battery storage areas, battery handling, any kind of special equipment for that.

Everything right down to the wrenches and sockets used by the technicians must be insulated, including their gloves and headwear. We asked Travis to give us a quick tour of the dedicated EV Bay and Vision Truck Center.

Travis Brown: A lot of special insulated tooling, obviously that doesn’t conduct electricity, various different pliers, ratchet sockets, screwdrivers, any tool that could be used on that truck in an insulated format, as well as all the safety gear, the head-to-toe suit, the insulated gloves, the head gear, the helmet. And then you’ve got the battery lifting equipment, which is, is both crane-based and/or fork truck based, yeah, the various truck specific decommissioning items that would be applied to certain connectors as they were disconnected. And then we put that all in one toolbox. They would come in and inspect it, “Yeah, everything is here good to go.”

The EV service bay itself at Vision is mobile, but the charger less so, Travis explains.

Travis Brown: We have the ability to move our EV Bay wherever we want in the shop. The barriers are mobile. Everything else is mobile. The only thing that is not is the charger. It is mobile, so to speak. But just like a welder, it has a pigtail that would plug into its receiver on the wall and transformer. So charging is limited to one bay. Service could be conducted in any bay, if required.