DETROIT – Workhorse Group, a North American OEM and provider of all-electric trucks, shuttles and buses, yesterday announced that its more than 1,100 electric vehicles deployed to customers have collectively surpassed 20 million miles of in-service travel.
With more than 10 years of producing, deploying and supporting EVs, Workhorse has developed a body of data about fleet electrification and fleet management, including:
- Delivering meaningful returns in the total cost of ownership
- Maintaining the high vehicle uptime and deployment success
- Ergonomic vehicle design and engineering, considering the entire truck, not just the powertrain
- Battery chemistry & software design and configuration, including optimization for fleet applications
- Vehicle software, hardware and powertrain expertise and best practices
- Battery and range optimization through smart route planning
- Cost-effective and efficient depot-based charging infrastructure
- Customer service responsiveness & in-house fleet technician training
- Operator training and deployment best practices
- Cold-weather operations best practices
- Maintenance best practices
Workhorse also derives deep operational insights and real-world verifications of last-mile delivery trucks through its ownership and operation of Stables by Workhorse, an independent service provider for FedEx Ground. The business operates a mixed fleet of electric and internal-combustion-engine step vans year-round in Ohio.
All of these experiences and learnings are informing the current design and engineering of Workhorse’s 7th Generation (Gen 7) platform, a software-defined vehicle whose modular/building-block approach features a common set of scalable, interchangeable sub-systems.
The system will enable Workhorse to rapidly create new vehicle configurations without expanding engineering complexity. By commonizing modular subsystems and standardizing parts across classes 4-6, Workhorse believes it is continuing to extend its total cost of ownership advantage over gas- and diesel-powered trucks and progressing toward reducing unit costs to ultimately close the purchase price gap versus internal combustion trucks.
Today, 10 of the largest medium-duty truck fleets in North America have deployed Workhorse vehicles, including Purolator, Vestis (formerly Aramark Uniform Services), Cintas, several FedEx independent service providers and other leading brands.
Workhorse’s W56 and EPIC4 vehicles are currently in production at the company’s commercial scale manufacturing facility in Union City, Indiana. Vehicles produced in the state include step vans, school buses, shuttles, box trucks, stake beds and refrigerated trucks.
Since its inception, the electric vehicles provided by Workhorse have avoided the use of more than 2.3 million gallons of petroleum-based fuel (equivalent to the use of approximately 5,700 cars in a year) and reduced CO2 emissions by more than 45 million pounds (the equivalent of taking approximately 4,500 cars off the road for a year).
