News / Swapping batteries on electric trucks – can't be done. But apparently... 

Photo: Janus

Last month, Australian company Janus Electric exhibited a converted Volvo ‘road-train,’ a cab-over class-8 electric truck, pulling two trailers full of lithium, weighing 115 tonnes, and described by CEO Lex Forsyth as the “heaviest road-going electric truck in the world”. 

Electric trucking is hard. EV trucks are beginning to make it to market, but sales have been slow.

Support for truck charging throughout Europe has been lacklustre: according to McKinsey research, there are around 10,000 chargers today, and some €7bn ($7.22bn) will need to be spent on installing 300,000 more by 2030. 

The EV’s biggest problem is what rocket scientists refer to as the “payload fraction”. Batteries are heavy and, unlike fuel, their weight barely changes from full to empty. And, as well as being limited in range, they also take a long time to charge – a truck battery will take an hour to fill up, even with a megawatt charger, a profane copper and rubber behemoth requiring heavy-duty cooling to prevent it melting. 

Tesla’s “badass” Semi highlighted this recently with the completion of its first 800km journey – thought to be an impressive distance, until sceptics noted that the vehicle was carrying packets of Walker’s crisps (mostly air, as the old joke goes). A DHL test with a Tesla Semi this year came closer to real-world conditions carrying a 34-tonne payload 625km on a single charge. 

But in Australia, Janus is doing what European truck manufacturers insist cannot be done: swapping batteries.

Janus installs an open fairing on either side of a truck, where its fuel tank would normally be. Then, two large L-shaped battery packs of 620kWh are installed, weighing 2.08 tonnes each. With the removal of the diesel engine, fuel tanks and associated systems, the added weight is around one tonne.

Each recharge is good for 400-600km, depending on whether the route allows for regenerative braking. 

Conversions, apparently, can be done for about a third of the cost of a new truck. The Loadstar Premium’s man ‘down under’, Mr Joy, made contact with a former colleague, who is now COO of a major linehaul company to assess the veracity of the claims, as he had retrofitted a diesel-bonneted prime mover from his company’s fleet with Janus Electric batteries.

He said. “Conversion of a prime mover is around A$174,000 (US$108,000). There is no loss of revenue-generating freight – I was very surprised by this. Battery weights usually mean a reduction in the freight tonnage you can compliantly transport.” 

One of the critical benefits of battery-swapping rather than charging is alleviating the strain on local grids. In a remote community, it is a lot easier to charge a battery for days at a time before swapping it in, than to have a powerplant’s-worth of energy on standby just in case a truck shows up. 

“You lease the batteries at A$7.5k a year,” Mr Joy understands. “The benefit of this is, as battery technology improves Janus removes the core out of the casing and reconfigures it with updated technology. It is, apparently, a simple operation of forklifting the old battery out and the new battery in. It rolls out and in – no wires to connect or anything.” 

Not only is this proving viable for a number of operating scenarios but – horror – does will not require operators to replace their fleets. It is easy to understand why the economics are unappealing to truckmakers, which, with some careful strategy, could bring about the alternative: a paradigm in which your vehicle, like a smartphone, is impossible to fix and reliant on software updates that end when the time has come to sell you another vehicle, a pursuit on which agricultural OEM John Deere has already spent millions of hours of talented engineers’ time. 

“The problem with the OEM vehicle is, that after seven years the battery cannot be recharged and you have to fit a new one, which currently costs A$220,000 to A$240,000, so the total cost of ownership does not stack up,” noted Mr Joy. “Further, building new electric trucks is creating more carbon and emissions, rather than ‘recycling’ old bonneted prime movers. So the transition is not as green as the OEMs want to tell you.” 

It has not been plain sailing for Janus, however, which has seen three big truck fires. Mr Joy’s former colleague indicated that investigations revealed a fuse issue between connectors caused overcapacity. 

“Interestingly, because the vehicle had live telemetry, the fleet allocator was able to advise the driver the vehicle was going to catch fire half an hour before it did, which allowed the driver time to get off the freeway and contact emergency services before the fire.”  

Though battery-swapping would hardly be unique in electrification projects, it is a major concern to be addressed if Janus is to hit the big-time. Not only could its model accelerate electric trucking adoption in remote and infrastructure-starved areas, but, as the results seem to show, pose a riposte to the emergence of a predatory business model elsewhere. 

“If you bought an electric prime-mover truck from an OEM, apart from paying A$450,000 to A$600,000, you are limited with the range of that truck; so, as battery technology improves range, you are still stuck with an expensive (and rapidly depreciating) asset with an inferior range,” said Mr Joy.

“[With battery swapping], the beauty for me is that it is an existing truck. I can theoretically get my old Sterling – I still have a handful in my fleet for local work – and have it retrofitted.”