Converting To Electric Trucks
Distributor offers tips to help customers make the switch.
By Michael Sain

When a lift truck user’s equipment reaches the end of its useful economic life, it is time for the fleet to be replaced. At Material Handling Inc., we have been making a concerted effort to switch our customers from internal combustion lift trucks over to electric lift trucks since the early 1980s.

We’ve been able to do this effectively, in part, because we utilize the latest technologies and methodologies from our in-house battery and charger division and combine these with the appropriate electric truck for the application. Whether we use fast charging, standard charging, high-frequency charging or a combination of all three, the goal is to eliminate battery changing. I realize that most forklift dealerships are not also battery and charger dealerships, but a partnership with your battery and charger supplier can still achieve many of the same things.  You can help your customers realize the benefits of converting to electric fork trucks by following some of the principles outlined in this article.

Choosing a Target
In our experience, the best accounts to target are users of internal combustion trucks that run multiple shifts.  This is important because a light, one-shift operation can rarely generate a return on investment fast enough.  The upfront cost of the electric truck, battery and charger, compared to a propane truck, is significant, so a fast ROI is important. Therefore, we look for an LP, cushion-tire, multi-shift operation. Once we’ve targeted the potential customer, we outline the benefits for them, dividing the list into hard costs and soft costs. Hard-cost benefits are those we can easily measure and calculate for comparison to their current operation. We term soft costs as those benefits that exist, but may vary in economic importance in various companies. Some examples include overall environmental impact and noise pollution.

Hard-Cost Benefits
The four areas of hard-cost benefits we present to customers are fuel consumption, maintenance, equipment life and operator productivity.

Fuel – Since electric trucks run on batteries, and normal recharge costs are less than 20 percent of the equivalent propane costs, customers can avoid paying for the more expensive fuels.

Maintenance – It is well-documented that electric trucks require substantially less maintenance. The engine, transmission, fuel system and even regular brake jobs are eliminated from the maintenance equation with electric trucks.

Economic Life –The economic life of an electric truck is about 20 percent to 30 percent longer than an IC truck due to the drastic reduction in moving parts. So an IC truck with a life of five years equates to an electric truck with a life of six or seven years. Whether the customer purchases or leases the truck, the annual cost to operate that piece of equipment is lower.

Productivity – In a multi-shift operation, the driver stops what he’s doing and takes his truck to either change or refill the fuel tank. The time it takes to do that is non-productive. We design the charging systems to work so that the electric truck’s battery is recharged during the operator’s already-scheduled breaks, eliminating the productivity loss from refueling. This is a hard number that you can calculate by studying how many minutes it takes to change a tank, how many pieces of equipment the customer has, how many times a day they change it, multiplied by the average hourly cost of an operator. That cost is eliminated by switching to electric trucks with no battery changing.

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