The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the Northwest’s two big truck makers PACCAR (of Bellevue) and Freightliner (of Portland) are developing hybrid-electric drives for their step trucks and other mid-sized vehicles. That’s a bigger deal than you might imagine.
As Clark noted here, improving the fuel economy of low-mpg vehicles actually matters a lot more than improving the fuel economy of high-mpg vehicles. The fuel savings are much larger.
(We touched on the energy security benefits here: Cascadia Scorecard 2005 (pdf, see page 50).)
Rodney
While this sounds great, I worry it might not be the best application of hybrid technology. Hybrid tends to help a lot in stop and go traffic, and not so much on the open long-haul road. This could be great for heavy local delivery trucks. (Think postal service, UPS, armored cars, etc.) Long-haul trucks, on the other hand, wouldn’t be nearly as big of a win, IMHO.(I’m still wondering why King County’s Metro runs most of its hybrids on long-distance routes instead of on the stop-and-go in-city routes. The in-city neighborhoods they serve would also benefit from the reduced noise of hybrid busses vs. traditional diesel.)
Alan Durning
Good point, Rodney. In fact, you’re so astute that you ended up describing the market that the truck makers are actually targeting: medium-weight trucks such as those used by UPS and FedEx for urban delivery. (See the links in the orginal article.)RMI’s book Winning the Oil Endgame (www.oilendgame.com) documents a variety of other fuel-saving design innovations for heavier trucks.
MichelleV.P.
Good discussion.Since I don’t understand hybrid technology very well, your points are helping me see both the relevance of this technology and the best uses of it.(Full disclosure: I’ve never even owned a car, but I do try to keep up with the latest technological advances in good fuel-economy, should I ever decide to get one.)