With gas at $5+ a gallon and diesel at $6+, business owners who operate fleets of vehicles may be looking for ways to lower their transportation costs. David Funk from the Spokane company Zero Emissions Northwest wants them to consider electric vehicles.
David Funk: The premise of renewables or electric vehicles is they're cheaper in the long run, but it is that upfront cost that is a challenge sometimes. What we have seen is there are so many different types of reasons for a fleet to experience and transition, but you need to really find your own reason. Some people care about the financial savings. We've worked with food truck owners that care about not having a generator because the car is a generator as well.
DN: Funk’s company has developed a pilot program with Avista. The idea is to give companies a chance to test drive electric vehicles for a few weeks and then make a decision. Skip Hires is the product manager for Avista’s Clean Energy Solutions program.
Skip Hires: They're really concerned about the range and the extra cost of it, and I think that's one of the things that there's a lot of misconceptions out there that we're trying to really knock down and really try to say, hey, try it out, experience it for yourself, don't just believe what we're telling you.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
DN: When you walk in, let's say do a cold call, what's your upper line argument to them as to why it's a good deal?
DF: Avista's rates are so much more affordable than gas and diesel.
There's a huge national security aspect of this right now because this is domestic energy produced by Washingtonians, but it's a cost standpoint. Electric vehicles are cheaper in your fleet today and they will be cheaper for the next, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Additionally, this is where the market is going. Whether or not the USA is leading, globally, electric vehicles are expanding every quarter. I think China exported more electric vehicles than gas vehicles last month for the first time on record. Sixty percent of cars sold in China are fully electric. So I would say that this is something that our businesses should be looking at because it's happening and there's a competitive advantage to taking control of your fuel costs and your fleet management.
SH: We're trying to get out the message is that electric is like a dollar equivalent a gallon. That's like a 75% savings compared to the $5 for gas that people are paying now or $6.50 for diesel. So that's immediate savings that they have and if you look at how much it would cost over the course of a year per vehicle, it could be a $2,500 to $7,500 savings. These are savings that businesses can take advantage of right now. It's not something that, you know, will pay off in five, ten years.
DN: How does it work?
DN: GoDriveZEN.com is an EV pilot program for fleets within Avista's territory. That's Clarkston all the way up to Colville and west towards Othello, anywhere there's an Avista customer that has a fleet can take advantage of this (within Washington). It's a two to four-week pilot program.
We provide a vehicle, we provide the charging expertise, we collect data during the rental period. At the end of the rental period, that fleet owner will understand how this truck or this SUV will operate within their business operations and how much money they could save. If you drive a lot, you'll save more. If you drive less, you'll save less. But rather than having it be a hypothetical, it's that fleet's data. It's their experience. And I also say we want to understand where the vehicle does not achieve the business objectives, where the range might be limited or where the charging speed wasn't enough or where towing wasn't enough.
We've been doing this with rural fleets for quite some time and we've seen some of the challenges that fleets encounter, whether it's payload or maybe the turnaround of how quickly that vehicle needs to get charged and then back into the field. But a lot of those are very edge cases. If you can save 10 grand a year and that one day you have to spend 30 minutes more at a charging station because you needed to go up to Colville and back, is that worth $10,000? That's for that business to decide. But we get the data. We get the experience. We understand it.
I'll also say that the goal is not to have a fleet go and buy a truck. That's not our role here. The goal is to validate that experience, those savings, and give that fleet more confidence in maybe going forward with electrification. And if they do, Skip's your guy to help you out with the other incentives. There are many programs that a fleet can take advantage of.
DN: In terms of infrastructure out there, as you talk about, I don't want my guys to drive 300 miles and have to stop somewhere in the middle to be able to charge and hope that they find someplace to charge. Is the infrastructure catching up, Skip, to make these business owners a little less wary about that?
SH: Yeah, I think that's the development that's happened in the last couple years that we're pretty excited about. There's a lot of commercial charging that's happened. Avista's installed our own charging, DC fast chargers, so that they can charge in 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how much charge they need. We've stationed those all around transportation corridors throughout our region in remote areas, so that people don't have those anxieties.
But I think what we're also looking at is that the range of vehicles have increased pretty significantly. I think one of the vehicles that we're demoing here has a range of over 400 miles. So most of the range that you're looking at within the Avista territory can be managed within the day. We do think that most of the charging is going to happen at the business's depot or their place of business, and that's where we have these programs to help them install these charging infrastructures that they can charge overnight. And we cover most of the cost, depending on the program. One of the programs would cover up to 75% of the cost. The other we cover the 100% of the installation and they just provide the charger.
DN: So Dave, what are the range of vehicles available for people to test out and try?
DF: Right now we'll have two. We'll have a pickup truck, a universal work vehicle that, if you're driving around Spokane, you see a lot of them. It's a Chevy Silverado EV. It's got 400 miles of range. It's the fastest charging truck on the market. It has the most power. It can tow the most. When we bought it, we did so because it met all of the technical specifications of a fleet that we've evaluated before.The second vehicle will be a Chevy Bolt, 250 miles of range, and really good for driving around Spokane. It's a crossover SUV.
So there are lots of fleets that have these dual uses, right? You might have a sales guy that drives around in an SUV, and you might have the project manager that's driving around in a truck.
As we talk to fleets within the Spokane and Avista territory, it's really understanding what their future vehicle needs are going to be too, and that informs how this program evolves. Maybe in the future we have a Tesla semi truck. Maybe in the future we have a work van. Maybe in the future we have an excavator. A lot of it is starting this outreach with these fleet customers so that we can better refine these programs to meet the needs of our fleets and really de-risk this opportunity for any business within Avista's territory.
DN: Is your company buying these vehicles then and leasing them? Or is it a joint venture that you're doing?
DF: It's a joint partnership that we have, but for the fleets that are going to be trying these vehicles, there's a very modest fee that we do have as a part of this program. For the truck, it's $600 for two weeks, and all those gas savings go back into the business owner's pocket. So really it's a couple hundred dollars for somebody to try this vehicle out for two weeks and validate if it works for their program.
One disclosure: both Zero Emissions Northwest and Avista are financial supporters of Spokane Public Radio, but we cover them as we cover any other company.
