By Sebastián Betancourt
Efficiency would be the main factor driving the interest of logistics companies in Chile to buy or lease electric trucks. The trend has begun to break with the “fashion” or the need to incorporate this type of machine only to build a “good” corporate image, said Patricio Waddle, partner and founder of ZEV Chile, representative of the Yutong brand in the country.
“We started two years ago. We are the official representatives and importers of the Yutong brand in Chile for the line of light urban delivery trucks and for heavy trucks which are divided into the tipper truck, the mixer, the mining trucks and the tractor unit, all of them 100% electric and, the truth is, when we started, companies and carriers, in general, what they did was ask us for a truck to do a pilot and it was mostly for corporate image, carbon footprint reduction and its respective reportability in the case of multinationals, but -now- we are starting to reverse that trend and we do see that there are carriers who are interested in buying electric trucks or leasing electric trucks for a reason more of efficiency than of fashion or emission reduction,” stated Waddle.
“When we first started we thought of a sales model with all the desire to sell, with a showroom and everything that our principal asked of us, but -as the months went by- we realized that model was not going to prosper and we had to open the operational leasing unit, so the same trucks that we imported, we did a leaseback; that is, we sell them to a financial entity or a bank and we lease them to carriers and we also launched a third business unit which is that of logistics operation with delivery trucks in Santiago, Valparaíso and O’Higgins. Since we have been carriers for several years we were talking with our captive clients to convince them to change their 5,000-kilo diesel trucks for an electric one maintaining the same rate, which allowed us to meet the purchase quotas imposed on us by the brand,” he said.
According to Waddle, the trend -in the future- the mining industry will lead the incorporation of electric trucks, since the clients of these companies are increasingly demanding cleaner products or products with a lower carbon footprint impact, which, mostly, comes from transportation.
“Mining and construction will have a much faster acceleration than the urban delivery issue, because large companies, the principals are pushing to have green copper, lithium or different green minerals and a large part of the emissions generated in mining are scope 3 emissions which are those produced by the suppliers that move material, supplies, inputs and finished product, so there will be growth in the incorporation of electric tractors,” he observed.
Ports
Regarding ports, Waddle said that the business opportunity for electric vehicles is in container haulage.
“There is a business which is container haulage, which is when containers are taken out of the port and taken to off-dock locations.
There, it would be possible to work with an awareness of changing those trucks and, within the port itself, there are special trucks for moving containers and what is coming a lot in the future, and something that Yutong also has, are the autonomous trucks that already operate in Europe and Asia, so within ports that is what is coming,” he said.
When asked if this technological change could happen in the short term, Waddle stated that “we have a telecommunications problem, a network problem for bringing the autonomous part to Chile. What we are indeed on the verge of are hydrogen trucks which, although it is a much more expensive fuel to produce. In turn, it also generates much more range than electric, because an electric with a 500 to 600 kilowatt hour battery has a range of 450 kilometers, a diesel reaches 1,000 and a hydrogen one would exceed 1,000 kilometers, but with a cost five to six times higher.”
“The only way for electric transport, in general, whether it’s passenger, light vehicles, or freight, to have sustained and exponential growth is for the State to intervene and subsidize charging points or by making concessions, because -the truth is- there are private parties investing, but it is not enough to convert 20 or 30% of the vehicle fleet to electric, since for that you need to increase the number of charging points that exist today by 100 times,” reflected Waddle.
Waddle added that for the supply of electricity to be massive and that to incentivize the conversion of fleets, there must not only be more charging points, but also a balancing of the price of fossil fuel relative to these clean sources, so that both can compete.
