An OEM’s Perspective on Charging Infrastructure for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles—Part 1

Did you know that when installing medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicle charging infrastructure, it’s easier, faster, and more cost effective to future proof right off the bat? Long story short—don't buy an EV without considering charging first. Join A.J. Palmisano, Director, EV Charging and Infrastructure, International® Truck and IC Bus®, for episode three of “The EV Fleet Road Map” podcast for all you need to know about charging infrastructure. There’s a lot to cover here, so we’re breaking this topic into two parts. Stay tuned for more.

Transcript

Fleet Equipment Host Jason Morgan:

Hi everyone, and welcome to the EV Fleet Roadmap, a Navistar podcast on your fleet's path towards zero emissions. I'm your host, Jason Morgan, and today we're talking with AJ Palmisano, Director of EV Charging and Infrastructure at Navistar. AJ, great to see you.

A.J. Palmisano, Navistar Director of EV Charging and Infrastructure:

Great to be here. I'm excited.

Jason:

Okay, yeah. We're going to talk about all things charging infrastructure. We're going to get the OEM view from it, and I want to zoom out a little bit here to start. Give me a sense for public charging. We are going to talk a lot about behind the fence fleet charging that is important, but a component of this is public charging infrastructure. Where are we at with that in terms of availability for commercial vehicles?

AJ:

Well, I'm glad you asked because a lot of times everyone's focused on light duty and so forth, and that's where you see the infrastructure sort of built for. You back your car in a nice, little, tight parking spot, and they don't think about these large, class six through eight vehicles.

Jason:

No.

AJ:

And so one of the challenges we have is we try to talk to our customers about it, and they say, "Well, where am I going to charge in public?" and that tends to be a problem. If roughly one-quarter of tailpipe emissions are coming from medium duty to heavy duty vehicles, you'd think that they'd make a better accommodation. But as it relates to challenges, it's the parking spaces. You can see vehicles parked sideways to try to get into these spots. Now you're blocking other EVs. Or the back end of your vehicle or trailer is actually sticking out into the aisle, and then people can't get by or you're blocking spots for other people to charge. So the biggest challenges we have, I would say parking is one of them.

Another one is interoperability. So light duty vehicles have been out there for a while. The medium, the heavy duty haven't been out there as long, so maybe not as much time to get some of the quirks worked out relative to software and handshakes and that kind of thing. So I'd say that's another one of the challenges is interoperability between the hardware and the software. We learn more every day. It gets better every day, but today it's still a little bit of a challenge sometimes. And then there's the connectors, so there's all these different connectors over there. Are you doing a CHAdeMO or CCS1 or NACS, and what does that even mean to anybody? So trying to make sure that you have the right connectors for the right vehicles, the parking, all that.

Jason:

Right. No, and I think that's important you bring that up because even when I think about it, even we can get tunnel vision in our commercial world about interoperability. Because when we're in charge of putting in the infrastructure, putting in the equipment, specking the equipment, buying the equipment, we make sure that all works. But then out there in the public world, it's kind the wild west of how you're going to be able to do that, right? So having that still within view, it's kind of one of those things that ... I mean, funny now that we're two, three years into this movement. We're kind of taken for granted to some degree in the commercial space. But maybe I'm still oversimplifying a little bit too because I do want to dig into that charging hardware then. So I get the chargers, and this is a new segment for our industry. What's important for me to know? I mean, I hear about AC. I hear about DC. We're talking about energy here, not the band. But how do I put this in the ground and start rocking right away?

AJ:

Right. So you mentioned a little bit about AC and DC. So AC is where you're taking AC energy out of the wall, and then the onboard chargers convert that AC energy to DC energy inside the vehicle.

Jason:

I see.

AJ:

So that's AC. So that's generally not as many interoperability issues there because you're in-vehicle, onboard chargers are already used to talking to the vehicle. However, the downside is that they're not as fast, and so medium duty, heavy duty vehicles have much larger battery packs so it takes longer to fill them up unless you're doing it quickly. So that's where you get into the DC charging. So DC charging, and these tend to be the size of a refrigerator. If you go into the public, we talked about public charging, these are about the size of refrigerator. All the electronics are converting AC to DC in the big box and then sending it directly into the batteries. So it can be faster. You can do things like cool. In these, sometimes, they have liquid cooled cables, that kind of thing. So the DC charging is faster and it plays a huge part when you're talking about medium duty and heavy duty. Trying to charge quickly, you're going to need the DC charging as well.

Jason:

Okay. And let's talk about charging quickly. I feel like there's some anxiety there. We had range anxiety. People are getting over that. But now I feel like there's charging speed, anxiety. "Am I charging fast enough? Am I charging too fast and impacting the battery life?" What do you recommend when you're talking with customers about what they should expect in terms of charging speed and meeting their application demand?

AJ:

Yeah, so there's a couple of things, right? So there's cost, and nobody wants to spend a fortune only to find out that they didn't need to. One of the things we do is we talk with our customers, we say, "Well, what are your routes like?" If you're only driving 50 to 100 miles, you might be doing a lot of stops in between, but that's a good sweet spot. I mean, you're doing 50 to 100 miles, and if you're not running the vehicles overnight, you have plenty of time to charge. So it's not range anxiety. It's charging anxiety. "Where am I going to be able to go to charge? What do I need to do to charge?" So we help our customers in what we call behind the fence, which is, of course, "I'm parking at home every night or back at my fleet's parking lot, so how do I figure out what kind of chargers I need?"

And what we tend to see is if they think they're going to do a lot of turnover, they need to charge quickly. That's where you can get into the larger chargers and charge more quickly. If you have a lot of vehicles and you're trying to make sure that you do it in a cost-effective way and you have the ability to charge overnight, you might do a lot more small chargers. So you try to have maybe one port for every vehicle in a lot of cases. And then what we see is if you're mostly charging overnight, but once in a while you get that, "Oops, I got to charge quickly," when you get to a large number, we see a lot of overnight chargers and then maybe one or even two of the fast chargers. So then if I have to, I can go ahead and charge quickly, but most of the time I want to charge slowly because it's less expensive.

Jason:

I see. Okay. Now we're getting into that, we call it, behind the fence, right? So I'm a fleet. I have a location. All my charging is on my property, right behind my fence, so to speak. What else do I need to think about there? I know this is a large conversation and we can talk very broadly about it, but what kind of things should I be planning for and looking at when starting that behind the fence charging plan?

AJ:

Yeah. So as I said, we'll try to look at your routes and see how many chargers you think you need. One of the things we think about too is, "I don't want to pull too much power too quickly," because then you get into what we call demand charges, and that's where you're pulling too much energy too quickly and the utility company will say, "I don't like that. We're going to charge you extra for doing that." So we run into that sometimes where people don't know any better and they didn't ask us ahead of time. They think they're doing the right thing by putting in these fast chargers, only to find out they're hitting these demand chargers. So we really want to work with our customers. We don't want it to be any more expensive for them than it already is because it is a little bit different.

And then also, there's interoperability. So I want to make sure that the chargers that I put in my parking lot to charge my vehicles actually work with my vehicles. There's a lot of things that change all the time on software and hardware. So less so on the hardware side. But on the software side, just like your iPhone, if you opened it up this morning and said, "I've got 20 updates for 20 different apps," chargers are doing the same thing. And to some extent, vehicles as well. So if you get into a situation where the softwares don't match up because they're not asking Jason ... There's 1,000 other customers out there. They're not asking Jason if it works for you.

So one of the things we make sure we do with our customers is to make sure, "Okay. This charger, we know it worked with our vehicle. We've done a lot of testing on it." And if we get into a situation where there is a software incompatibility, we have charging partners so that we can say, "Hey, charging partner. Whatever you did, let's either undo it or make a fix because we're running into this situation." So it's super important that no matter what your fleet is, you're talking to whoever's putting in those chargers in, make sure it's the right charger for the application, and that you're going to get support in case something goes wrong.

Jason:

Right. I imagine there's a lot of education there too because you mentioned the iPhone example, and I go swipe right and it's gone forever and it's not my problem today. I don't know. But to that point, if your charters need an update or the truck needs an update, you could plug it in and think it's charging and, "Oh, I plugged it in and it'll charge." But if that software isn't talking ... It can be plugged in all at once and you're not getting any power to those batteries and you wake up the next morning like, "Huh, I guess there's a problem here."

AJ:

And we run into that. So for example, somebody plugs in and they've got that scheduled charge. "I don't want to charge when it's expensive. I want to charge when it's cheap." All of a sudden, because the software wasn't compatible, they don't find out that the two aren't doing what they call the handshake. That handshake didn't happen. And so you get there the next morning, the vehicle didn't charge overnight because of some software update that happened. So it's super important to test these things out and to work with us. So if you did have a problem, you could come to us and say, "Hey, this didn't work last night. Help us fix it."

One of the things we also suggest is that you buy chargers that we can see remotely. So if I can see the charging session remotely, I can help you through any schedule issues or compatibility issues. That's also what you can do. You need the mobile part of that or that data part of it so that you can program the software to start at certain times of the day. Because what we run into sometimes is people don't realize how important that is, and then they say, "Oh, I just found out that I have a real expensive from this time to this time. I want to now charge only at night." If you don't have a charger that has the ability to do that, if you find out too late, we've run into that where people didn't ask us first. It's like, "Let us help you and get a vehicle and a charger combination that'll work together to reduce that total cost of ownership."

Jason:

Right. And a couple things there I just want to point out too. One, the relationship. Having partners to be able to do this because there's a lot going on. As a fleet, you're still running your business. You're still running your equipment. You have a lot more on your mind than wanting to get through the nitty-gritty of this. So being able to pick up the phone and actually talk to a human about something very technical is important, right?

AJ:

Yeah, it is.

Jason:

But setting a charging schedule, remote visibility into my charging. So those were a couple that stood out to me. Are there any other aspects or things I want to look for? I want to try to future-proof my charging equipment as much as possible. Those seem like two really big standout ones if I'm shopping around. What else do I look for?

AJ:

Yeah, we get questions all the time like, "Well, everything's changing so quickly. How do I know I buy a charger today and it doesn't work with my vehicle tomorrow?" If you've ever pulled into a public charging spot, you'll see one OEM's vehicle parked next to another OEM's vehicle parked to another one. And the reason that works, and that those chargers can charge all these different OEM vehicles, is because really the vehicle tells the charger what it wants. It says, "I want this much voltage. I want this much current for this period of time." So really, they are future-proofed in the sense that the vehicle tells the charger what it wants.

And so if you find out that the battery chemistry changes, so you have one chemistry now and you have another chemistry in the future, as long as the vehicle knows that and it obviously knows what kind of batteries are inside of it, it will tell the charger, "Hey. I want this much energy now," and that's the future proofing that happens. The other thing you'll see is that a lot of these chargers have the ability to have multiple connectors on them. I won't call them out, but I've seen some chargers where they actually have three different handles with three different connectors so they can accommodate three different vehicles in the same box. So the future proofing is not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be.

But one of the things you want to make sure is that the voltage is high enough. We're seeing a lot where the old infrastructure was a voltage that was 500 volts. But the new vehicles are coming out. They're 800 volts, maybe even higher. So looking for higher voltage, that's important. That is something you really can't undo. So for future proofing, you really want to have the right voltage, the software. So if things do change, you have the ability to update the software. And again, the vehicles are going to tell the chargers what they want.

Jason:

Right. Speaking of things I don't want to do again or maybe don't want to redo, how far out should I be planning? What kind of timeframe? Or if I'm a fleet and I'm managing my vehicle makeup here, how far out am I looking to make sure that I'm going to be able to scale my infrastructure to where it needs to be? How far from here? What am I looking at?

AJ:

Yeah. I mean, you're talking really about five years is what we tell people. It's really difficult. If you think about where we were five years ago, it's really difficult to tell where you're going to be five years from now. However, one thing you do know is how much energy the new vehicles are going to take. So we know, as an OEM, what our vehicles take now from a power level, and then what our future vehicles are going to take. So if you think you have a medium duty truck now, but you might need a heavy duty truck later in that same parking lot, then think in terms of charging that higher capacity vehicle, the higher charging speed vehicle in the future.

So run the infrastructure now for the future, even if you don't think you want to pay for the chargers just yet because they're kind of expensive and you want to spread your costs out. You really want to tear up the ground only one time. You really want to pull the permits only one time. You really want to trench only one time. So at least think in terms of what's going to be out there, even if you run the wires later, because maybe that's expensive now and you don't want to pay for that quite now. The analogy I like to use is the holes in the wall. You don't want to tear up your kitchen multiple times, these kinds of things. So what I would say is get all the piping done, future-proof it that way, and then know what sizes you're going to need because the power that you're going to require, that's not going to change even if battery chemistry is that kind of thing changing.

Jason:

Yeah, no, that's a good point. I've got a lot of outlets in my house. I'm not using them all all at once or all at the same time. But yeah, I need that one by the chair. Right. Exactly.

AJ:

You know you want it.

Jason:

Or that one that that's not quite where I actually want it. Right. And also, I mean, going back to it too. I know we talked about this in the public as well, but I imagine behind the fence, still thinking about layout, traffic flow, not dropping your infrastructure right in the middle of that just because it's convenient. But you might want to think about the actual workflow of the trucks and not obscuring any of that.

AJ:

Yeah, that's a great point. So you want to look at the layout. The way you park your vehicles today may not necessarily be the best way to park them if you need to charge them.

Jason:

Right.

AJ:

Right. So if you have to go and fuel with a conventional diesel or gas, you go to the fuel pump, you go there, you fill it up, and then you move, right? In this case, your dwell time's going to be longer, so your vehicles are going to have to sit there for some period of time. So lay it out such that you can get the vehicles in and out. If you're going to do a tractor-trailer, make sure you can make the turn to get in there and park. The other thing is that the charge port locations are not common through all these different vehicles.

Jason:

Oh, yeah. Okay.

AJ:

So even if we had all of our vehicles set up the same way, on the next OEM ... And some people have shared OEMs. They have multiple OEMs in the same parking lot. One vehicle may have it where you get into the vehicle. Another vehicle may have that charge port on the opposite side. Another vehicle might have it in the front or the back, wherever it might be. So the reason we really, I say, push for pull-throughs is because gas stations figured this out a long time ago. You don't know which side the charge port's going to be on or where it's going to be forward or aft. So a pull-through allows you to virtually [inaudible 00:15:42] any orientation.

Jason:

Right. Well, and going back to it, it's something we talked about in the public charging world, but also thinking about it here in the behind the fence is just the location. You don't want to drop your charging infrastructure right in the middle of where your trucks are rolling through, right? You need to think about just, "It might be convenient there, but it might not be the best long-term place for it," and really mapping that out.

AJ:

Yeah, and that's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up. You're used to putting gas or diesel in your vehicle. You're pulling up to someplace for a short period of time, and then you get out of the way and the next one can go and so forth. You're only there for a couple of minutes. When you're charging, you're there for a longer period of time, and you're going to have more fueling stations, more chargers. So you're going to have multiple chargers, and you want to be able to get your vehicles in and out in a traffic pattern that makes sense. So you want to look at the flow in and out. The vehicles are longer, so you need to have the spacing kind of figured out.

The other thing we see is that there are oftentimes where you have multiple OEM vehicles in the parking lot at the same time. So whereas we may have our charge port in one location, another OEM may have it on the other side of the vehicle. Or if we have it in the front, they may have it in the back. You could really be anywhere around the vehicle. We've seen some where it's even in the front. The nice thing about a pull-through orientation is that you can orient your vehicle whichever way you need to, and you don't run into the situation where you pull in and the cable doesn't reach. So gas stations figured this out 100 years ago, but we keep thinking in terms of light duty when they keep putting these chargers tucked away in the corner of the parking lot. Now there's no way to get my large vehicle in there. You want to make sure you're really doing that in your own fleet.

Jason:

Well and even in the diesel world, it might be something you have to think about because typically you got diesel tanks on both sides and you're feeling both sides. So you might pull in the wrong way, but it's not the end of the world because you can still just stick them in the tanks and use one as the primary one. Okay, so let's bring this back full circle because we know that we're going to get our arms around our own charging infrastructure, and that'll be kind of our home hub. This is what we're going to depend on. We do want public infrastructure to grow as we go through this. We need that support on the commercial side. What do we want out of public charging? Whether it's you all on the Navistar side or even fleets, customers working with my public utilities and other people, what should we all be pulling for of, "Look, public charging infrastructure has to have this"?

AJ:

Yeah, it's a good question. A lot of the funding and so forth is set up for these light duty vehicles. They're not thinking about our vehicles. Actually, one of the best things that happened to us, I think, is that now there are OEMs making pickup trucks, and the pickup trucks are towing something behind them. Now you're the same length as our class six through eight vehicles. So they're starting to think about it. These folks, they're driving. The energy they're using is higher. They have to charge more often because they're towing something. So now you have the situation where, "Oh, jeez. Now I can't charge because I'm so long," so the length. And it's not just for medium duty. It's going to be the pickup trucks that are towing the camper or whatever it is that they're towing behind them, so having the large enough parking spots and the pull-throughs. Like I said, anytime I go and talk about it, I try to talk about that.

The other thing is that we're seeing higher and higher voltage as time goes on. So vehicles, the old school or the old time, the original EVs were on a 400 volt, 500 volt architecture so you had 500 volt chargers. Now we're seeing higher voltage. There are some OEMs out there making cars that are now 800 volt, for example, right? Why do you do that? You say, "Well, the higher voltage allows you to charge with less current. And less current, it'll run cooler." So higher voltage, there are lots of advantages to that. So making sure the public charging infrastructure has the high voltage, 950 volt is pretty much perfect, that way you can handle the whole broad spectrum no matter what kind of vehicle is in there. So the large spaces, the higher voltage.

And then the ability to look at an app and say, "Okay, I can look and see I've got a car OEM." I can look on an app and I can see, "Okay, yeah. I can go to this public charging station." You don't see that for the medium duty and heavy duty out there. So an app that people can use, a charge management system that tells me where these chargers are, that's going to be a big deal too down the road.

Jason:

Right. For sure. That visibility is key. AJ, thanks so much for taking the time. This was wonderful. It's always great catching up with you.

AJ:

Would love to come back. It'd be great.

Jason:

And thank you all for watching the EV Fleet Roadmap, a Navistar podcast on your fleet's path towards zero emissions. I'm Jason Morgan. Thanks for watching.