Electric Garbage Trucks: Huge Energy Savings And They Won't Wake You Up In The Morning

The only thing better than this is for all those trucks to be carrying either recyclables or compost, avoiding waste to the landfill.  

It is amazing that batteries of electricity have the power to run something as big as a garbage truck.  The technology has clearly come a long way.

If one raises the topic of electric vehicles (EVs), everybody seems focused on Tesla these days. How many vehicles have they sold? Is Apple a would-be competitor? Where’s the stock going? And of course Tesla and its EV brethren have tremendous potential to reduce overall energy consumption and pollution, if sold in significant volumes. To date, there are over 250,000 EVs on the road, which is a solid start.

But if one really wants to cut down on fuel use through electrification of vehicles, it might make sense to focus on the types of vehicles in which the most energy consumption is concentrated. And one of the biggest, nastiest (and loudest) such vehicles – offering the greatest potential for improvement – is your unfriendly neighborhood garbage truck.

We’ve all seen them: these belching beasts that stop every twenty yards to pick up trash, but they have become so much of our landscape we tend to ignore them. Yet while most of us look (or drive) right past them, Ian Wright, CEO of California-based Wrightspeed sees a huge opportunity for both improvement and profit.

Wright, one of the original co-founders of Tesla, believes that Class 8 garbage trucks represent a soft target for electrification, because the benefits are so significant.

They are burning 14,000 gallons a year, and chewing up their brakes every three months. Doing on average of 130 miles day with 1,000 hard stops, drivers are going full throttle, full brakes 1,000 times a day.

Wrightspeed was created – and a unique assemblage of technology was developed – to address that challenge of stopping and starting and high energy consumption. The company essentially takes an existing garbage truck or medium-duty delivery truck and swaps out the entire powertrain with a more sophisticated and efficient replacement.

That powertrain upgrade includes battery packs that directly drive electric power to all four wheels, and a regenerative braking system so one doesn’t burn out brake pads as many as four times a year, as current trucks do. However, perhaps the most interesting element of the powertrain is the gas turbine range extender generator. Much like the Chevy Volt – which uses a gas engine to supplement the initial battery range – the Wrightspeed system uses a back-up engine as well. In this case, though, it’s a small gas turbine that supplies energy to the battery system, keeping the direct propulsion system all-electric and vastly extending the range...