Challenges of Building an Electric Log Truck: The Hunt for North American Axles

we tried so hard to find axles and electric motors and gear driven sets manufactured in North America we could not find a single one in fact we reached out to a company and we say hey we're building an electric log and truck you make axles for log and trucks and you make electric axles can we get an electric axle for our logging truck they said oh we love what you're doing they asked us to promote them on social media I've since deleted it because when I said hey it's time for me to buy that axle can you send me an invoice so I can buy it they said no you're not an existing OEM and we will not sell axles that anybody that wants to do retrofit kits we only want to sell them a new large oems didn't matter if I had the money didn't matter if I could get it and they said even if we could sell it to you it would be up to three years away before we'd sell it and that's after they asked us promote it so I searched all over and I could not find a single axle made in North America that I could buy like turns out everything was made in China even the I believe even the country we were going to go Source from has all their components made in China they just the final assembly here like you're trying to find an axle made in North America you can't you try and find an electric motor made in North America you can't everyone just brings them in from China like you're talking about like a suzu axle is design engineered Finland yeah but you look at all the other axles at the end of the day electric motors like you get that electric motor out of a lot of mobile electric equipment or stationary equipment you just can't find them built here so we literally went had these axles custom specked out they were custom built for us for Edison and yeah that is what we ended up with I because of China I do know the worries there but everything is made in China nowadays as it turns out we just made sure to fly over and personally do the inspection inspect where they're made make sure they were tested before shift make sure that we were happy and make sure that we could secure the supply chain we do have our entire supply chain now secured we need spare parts we can order the part have it air freighted over we are going to carry excess Parts but the entire thing is all now mass produced where we can get any component we need yeah I'm really really happy with these this is the one part that is the Edison part on this Edison truck because it's funny I think they thought they were going to shut us down like I don't think they were happy with us trying to build a truck with no planned obsolescence right to repair common parts I and they basically thought that if no other large electric axle manufacturers in North America would sell it to us I thought if they didn't I think they thought that if they didn't sell us any we would just go away we did we reached out to people and got enough people working we're incredibly incredibly brilliant mechanical engineers electrical engineers they picked the most reliable components set them together and this is now the axle that we have so yeah they told us to go away you can't order them well guess what we are now competing with you as a supplier of axles so you didn't have us go away instead of us being a customer we became competition so you still have your normal differential that you can Source normal ringing gear ring and pinion style gearing they're 4.0 uh rear ends then they go to this set of planetary rear ends which is planetaries built for heavy haul heavy spec it's got one gear and a Sun Gear a bunch of other little gears in there this rear end is also a lot heavier spec than your standard rear end that you would see in a highway truck thicker sidewall thicker casing thicker pumpkin on the back end the electric motor we have 250 kilowatts of power on the front end here which is about 340 horsepower per axle so if you have three axles together on a tri-drive you're looking at a little over a thousand horsepower on a tandem truck you're putting out about 700 horsepower to the wheels there's really no gears there's no drive line so you're gonna get a lot of increased reliability with these things no input shafts no output shafts essentially running this both of these motors are in sync moving at the exact same speed it's like running your interaxle all the time 100 of the time on the top here if we go through some of the parts when you come in here and I'll show you some parts right here these are your high voltage lines your three lines come in power in here on the top these are your coolant lines This is Gonna Keep this axle assembly cool that runs these cooling lines through the electric motors and everything just to kind of take that heat move it away as we know that was one of the issues we had with Carl was uh heating issues when you're trying to pull heavy loads the truck uses a lot more power than a passenger car uh we just got our oil pumps it's going to keep out all your oil circulating so on the back end here a lot of you may not be super familiar with planetaries but these are spec for like Heavy Haul off-road applications what they do is they give you a three times reduction at the Hub so it uh basically it lowers the amount of torque at the Hub and it's great for low speed travel say if you're load at like 200 000 pounds 300 000 pounds on a Logging Road up steep grades and you're moving at low speed this is going to give you those crawling gears now they will overheat four Highway if you're going to be running them at 120 130 kilometers an hour all day keep in mind these e-axles do have with a set of 24 fives on them they do have a top speed of about a hundred and thirty five hundred and forty kilometers an hour that they'll cruise at at 140 all day long you may heat up these planetaries but once again we are expecting this truck to be a more of an off Highway logger right now all you would have to do really is remove the planetaries put on a normal set of Hobs and you have more of a highway tractor we could do that in the future but let's make this truck as absolutely as Skookum as we possibly can yes they add weight no I don't care this truck is an off Highway logger um so for axle syncing that is one of the questions we've been asked a lot is how do they sync now there's actually sensors in the electric motor that will detect the smallest variation in speed differentials between this like you don't really need wheel speed sensors the electric motor will tell you exactly what RPM each electric motor is spinning and it will adjust that automatically to make sure these motors are perfectly in sync be just that is straight up because you don't have any inner axles and you know the cool thing is because of no inner axles because of no drive shaft if you wanted to we could throw these on a trailer and that is one of the projects I want to work on in the future is have a power trailer imagine you're low betting in the bush you're in the mock the mud or on a steep grade you could have your trailer pushing you you're going downhill you can have your trailer holding back like for off Highway applications having an extra 700 to 1000 horsepower on your trailer with that 700 to 1000 horsepower on the truck like in theory with a seven axle truck you could have 2 000 horsepower on a seven axle truck with pushing and pulling so you're not stuck in the mud although there's an interesting that half thing that happened and I'll be honest with you it was unforeseen uh we were talking with some Foresters and a local Mill and we were talking about how well you're coming downhill in the winter time or pulling steep adverses you're gonna have an easier time pulling adverses you're going to be able to have better hold back coming downhill and the very first thing they said to us is oh so we can get into steeper blocks oh well we could put a steeper adverse in the block we could come out a little bit steeper grades and I'm like oh I designed this I'm like oh this is going to make the truck driver's life a lot easier and all the mill thought is oh well now I can get way into Timber that I couldn't get to before or oh we only had an option to heli log that block because it was so steep but if you can give us that power we can get into a block and we were heli logging before so all they're going to be asking the drivers to do is go into steeper so my bad guys our apologies yeah that's uh turns out I thought we were gonna make life easier they came back with oh now we can go into things and now we used to be breakup it was a to get your truck and trailer through the mud and you get stuck in the mud and couldn't make it now with your trailer pushing you you're probably going to be able to go through a more breakout which means that that little spring fall vacation that we always loved is gonna be shorter sorry so all on this first truck they actually ended up sending us drums the future trucks will be disc brakes but we got what we got on this one there's a there was a lot of engineering that went into these axles and that's one of those things that that is what it is it'll work honestly with the amount of regenerative power these things have you should never have to touch your brakes anyway so

Channel: Edison Motors

Views: 179,949

Keywords: Ev, EV, Electric, Electric Truck, Logger, Logging, Canada, Merritt, British Columbia, Truck, Trucker, Trucking, innovation, Axles, Mechanic, Production, Prototype

Id: dhi04e3ZrgU

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023