Most of the buzz around EVs is situated in two market segments of the automotive market, personal vehicles and long haul transportation trucks like semis. While these two segments are key to the future reducing of our reliance on fossil fuels, they ignore some of the most important vehicles in our country.
Gross Vehicle Weight Rating, the GWVR, is broken in to several numbered classifications, and it’s how the government classifies vehicles. Basic personal vehicles like cars, trucks, and SUVs occupy the Class 1 through Class 3 space. Full-size tractor trailers are on the other end of the spectrum in Class 8 and Class 9. So what about all the stuff in the middle? Let’s talk about the electrification of our Class 4 to Class 7 market, one of the most important and neglected segments in our push toward the electric future.
Los Angeles-based Harbinger is building an electric powertrain platform to be used in the construction of medium-duty trucks, and they just announced a partnership with Autel to integrate fleet-capable charging hardware and software. This allows for a fully-contained platform solution.
The impact of this kind of partnership is hard to understate when you realize the importance of the Class 4 to Class 7 truck market in the daily operation of our modern world. Buses, cargo trucks, garbage collection vehicles, moving vans, refrigerated box trucks, emergency response vehicles, and more, all fall into this medium-duty truck segment.
This fully integrated approach allows fleets of vehicles to be created in varying sizes and segments, that all use the same charging and software management backbone. This will allow business and government customers expanded flexibility to convert their fleets to EV.
We don’t mean to sound overwhelming positive, or to suggest that this Harbinger and Autel partnership is the greatest thing to happen to EVs since the invention of the battery, but we feel it is important to remember that huge portions of the automotive landscape exist between the Chevrolet Bolt and the Nikola TRE BEV. That group of vehicles matters as much, if not more, than the machines on the far ends of the GWVR spectrum.
