Portland, Maine–It was difficult at times, in listening to a panel discussion on fleet electrification at a WEX-sponsored forum here, to remember it was taking place against a backdrop of Washington eliminating various subsidies and incentives designed to reorient transportation toward electrons and away from petroleum molecules.
A $7,500 U.S. federal tax break for buyers of new electric vehicles (EVs)? Gone. A $4,000 break if you purchase a used EV? Ditto. A tax credit for new wind and solar projects? That’s still around, but given the aggressive timeline to get the projects moving, it might as well not be.
And Congress has taken steps to undercut California’s Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule by withdrawing its EPA waiver, though the legality of that is being challenged.
But for the panel at the forum sponsored by WEX, which is mostly a payments provider but also has its own division that invests in mobility technology, the outlook remained positive. If there was a theme running through the comments by the panel’s members, it was that technology is racing ahead so fast that while U.S. government policies are shifting quickly from a pro-EV slant to at best a neutral stance, those changes will not derail the energy transition.
The members of the panel have a stake in seeing it happen; they were all in businesses that will flourish on the back of EV growth.
But their message did not falter at all during the panel. They left little doubt about where they see the electrification of fleets heading.
Looking around the corner
Andrew Beebe, the managing director at venture capital firm Obvious Ventures, said a failure of those who are now predicting a big slowdown in EV technology is that they are not “looking around the corner in terms of making probability-weighted predictions about technology that’s coming, that’s in the labs, that are soft of breakthrough things that we invest in as venture capitalists.”
While much of the focus on the panel was on smaller vehicles including medium-duty trucks, discussion on heavy-duty trucks crept into the conversation with a balance of acknowledgement of current limitations but still with a belief that technology will eventually be able to overcome them.
Beebe made the analogy to trans Pacific ocean shipping “which we’ve all thought for a long time there’s no way you can electrify that.”
He cited an unidentified company that three or four years ago that Obvious Ventures looked at for an investment. At the time, the company’s engineers said of electrified trans-Pacific shipping, “we want to do that someday, but there’s no way we can get there in the next five to 10 years.”
But in recent discussions, Beebe said, the company is now saying “we can get across the Pacific with a container ship that’s fully electrified and it’s more cost effective than today’s container ships.”
That led Beebe to note that the assumption in long-distance over the road trucking always has been that a transition would need to end up with hydrogen as the fuel, because battery weight and storage capacity would be inadequate. He’s no longer sure: “Batteries do extraordinary things and they will be an order of magnitude better over the next decade. So I would just encourage everyone to sort of go on a journey of suspended belief.”
Lessons from the solar industry
Beebe is a former executive in the solar industry. “Remember the solar cost curve and others that we’ve seen over time that have blown our minds in terms of the capabilities to reduce costs,” he said. “I think we will get to those places faster than a lot of people anticipate.”
Beebe also said during his days as a solar investor, the challenge was to have solar power generate electricity at less than $1 per watt. He noted that it is now 15 cents per watt.
Lisa Drake, the director fleet electrification for third party fleet manager Merchants Fleet, was somewhat more cautious about the pace of electrification in general. Medium duty trucks were part of her discussion of the market.
“Pickup trucks and cargo vans in 2021 really weren’t ready,” she said. “I think that the excitement and curiosity and some level of readiness to at least get started was there, but the vehicles were not.”
But that was followed by a period where both tax and other incentives came into the market through the Inflation Reduction Act. Concurrently, more vehicles were making their entrance as well. She also said the now-sidelined California Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule also arose during that period and was “the first regulation that really forced fleets to create the demand.”
Sustainability not a big worry anymore for many
But with ACF effectively done and ACT either done or locked in litigation for the foreseeable future, electrification for some fleets is “the least of their worries, unless they have sustainability goals or parent company expectations.”
Without those factors, Drake said, “we see many, many fleets taking a break.” They haven’t written off that there might eventually be change in vehicle propulsion, she added. “But it doesn’t have to be today.”
Drake said there’s an upside to that. “I think it gives us some time to breath and kind of reevaluate what are the right services that are going to meet our fleets’ needs,” she said.
Sarah Booth, panel moderator and the director of Sawatch Labs, which WEX purchased last year sounded a sentiment similar to Drake: the pace of adoption is slowing. Sawatch consults with companies investigating making a full or partial switch to EVs.
“Ultimately, the people that run logistics today and fleets are sometimes not super forward thinking, and they‘re used to doing it one way,” Booth said. That reluctance often still exists even after Sawatch has shown that if total cost of ownership is the guide, EVs are clearly superior.
“Sometimes they’re still saying we’re going to hold up another two years,” Booth said. “So they’re making a more expensive decision by putting an internal combustion engine in because change is hard.”
‘Just more efficient’
The representative on the panel who works for a company that is actually using EVs was Mathias Krieger, the chief product officer and co-founder of the UK’s HIVED, which is a parcel delivery service. He came back to the point that any long-term analysis of EVs will always wind up with the conclusion that it will become the dominant mobility technology. That case can be made without making reference to net zero or other climate goals.
“It is just more efficient to deploy,” Krieger said. “I think people are gradually realizing that. I don’t think there’s a sudden shift, but I think more and more people are realizing that is the case.”
But beyond the withdrawal of government support, what about the reports of EVs being warehoused due to a lack of buyers? Part of that development is due to Tesla and its political problems, but it extends beyond Elon Musk’s company.
Beebe cautioned that while the industry is experiencing a drop in the rate of growth, he still expects more EVs to be sold in the U.S. this year than in 2024.
The confidence of not just the panel but those in attendance could be seen in a spot “raise your hands” poll conducted by Booth.
A few hands went up when she asked if the audience saw global new sales of passenger vehicles being 100% by 2035. But when the timestamp was pushed out to 2040, the number rose to close to 100%. For over the road trucks, the time frame of 2050 got some support.
As far as the rest of the world’s adoption of EVs, Beebe said Europe is “sort of holding steady” and “China is cranking ahead.”
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