Edison Motors Offering All-Mechanical Trucks, At Least to Start

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We’ve been following Canadian startup Edison Motors for some time now, but their latest offering caught us a bit off guard– their BDE-sieries truck will be offered first without the electric hybrid drive that first peaked our interest. They make a good case for why in the video embedded below, in which the production prototype tows around a junked Nikola semi as a sort of momento mori of what Edison does not want to end up as.

Now, make no mistake: Edison Motors is going to be selling the series-hybrid version of these big rigs eventually. That truck will have a Scania diesel rated at 500kW driving electric motors rated at a combined 1800 kW peak power– that’s 2400 ponies. Along with the diesel generator, those ponies will be driven by a big o’le battery– but none of that is in the truck in the video. It’s the same cab, and the same frame, but in order to get some revenue in while jumping regulatory hurdles and working the kinks out of the hybrid drive, they put a conventional Cummins diesel and 16-speed transmission in the “Big D” as the truck is known.

The business case makes sense: they don’t want to have their single new product hit a snag, possibly require a recall, and fall into bankruptcy the way the electric truck company Nikola did. The conventional drivetrain also lets them prove their engineering prowess to companies that might like the idea of a Made-in-Canada truck, but be nervous about new technology from a new company.

If you want to know more about the whole diesel-electric scheme, we covered that last year. Edison also has plans to offer its hybrid drive technology for smaller trucks in kit form, which is perhaps the most exciting part from a hacker perceptive.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!



from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/7wTtUXG

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