When it comes to electric vehicles, it feels like our brains translate v-e-h-i-c-l-e as “car.”
We shouldn’t.
As they can tell you at Lancaster’s Transfer Station, removing an engine that spins by blowing up oxygenated aerosols and replacing them with one that spins from electricity makes sense even when not inside a four-door family mobile.
“I don’t think anybody else has done this yet, although it’s something that every town should look at,” said Rusty Scott, the transfer station manager.
He’s referring to the station’s loader, one of those big machines that move heavy stuff around construction sites — basically a forklift on steroids. The town has replaced a 22-year-old diesel Volvo as well as a smaller Bobcat with a Volvo L20 Electric Loader.
Scott said they tested the system before buying it from Chadwick-BaRoss, a Lancaster dealer of construction equipment. He was leery of new technology. “We wondered was it a toy, was it kind of a junk technology, would it work?”
It passed all tests, he said.
“We haven’t found anything that it won’t do, compared to our much larger diesel motor,” he said.
Scott has to keep telling that to folks whose idea of electric vehicles hasn’t moved beyond golf carts.
The lower cost of operation of electric motors is a no-brainer, even more so for Lancaster, which has had solar panels at the transfer station for years. Scott estimates the electric loader will save the town $4,000 a year in diesel cost.
Maintenance will be cheaper, too: no belts, no oil changes, far fewer parts to fail overall. And unlike diesels, you don’t have to warm it up. “The second you turn it on, it’s ready to rock,” he said.
Scott also pointed to two big advantages that have nothing to with the usual EV topics of torque, range and power.
“Number one, it’s quiet when I’m operating it here. If I yell at somebody [while operating] a diesel, they can’t hear me. With this, when I speak to somebody across the yard they hear me.”
And number two? No fumes. They can drive the loader completely inside buildings to grab a pallet of something or pull out a compactor without stink or health risk.
Incidentally, less noise and no street-level pollution are why you should celebrate when a neighbor gets an EV. Your life just got better.
I mention Lancaster’s loader because it reflects the way transportation is electrifying in ways that many of us don’t notice because we think only of cars when we think of electric vehicles.
The greater efficiency of electric motors — there’s a reason we use the word “waste” when discussing the waste heat produced by internal combustion engines — means they make sense just about everywhere. That includes on the water: At least two companies operating oyster beds on the Maine coast have switched to electric boats.
In particular, two- and three-wheel urban vehicles, the scooters, mopeds and tuk-tuks we love to photograph when visiting developing countries, are switching to electric motors at a furious pace. BloombergNEF estimates their electrification has already reduced oil consumption in Asia by somewhere around one million barrels a day, more than has been avoided by switching cars and trucks to electric.
There one a big drawback with electric vehicles in the developed world, of course: up-front cost. The industry is barely a decade old with technology still improving at breakneck speed, so it hasn’t yet wrung out costs like an industry that’s a century old with stable technology and a legacy of often-hidden subsidies.
China is coming close, but the rest of us are far behind.
Scott says about 45% of the cost was covered by grants, especially from the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, which so far has dodged the Trump team’s frenzied slashing of useful government programs.
Lancaster property tax payers, not to mention transfer station employees, are grateful.