One operator looking to go ‘fully electric’

During our recent trip to Gothenburg to drive the Volvo FM and FH electric trucks, we took a tour up to Oslo in Norway to visit an operator who has a fleet of tippers that includes a number of electric trucks.

He says that in a short time, he’ll have one of, if not the biggest, fleet of electric tippers in the world.

Gilbert Enkerlin is the Managing Director of Tom Wilhelmsen AS which works in the construction industry in Oslo.

The company currently has a fleet of 34 trucks, seven of which are electric with another three on order, and more to come.

The electric trucks are Volvo FEs with a tare weight of 13 tonnes and a GVM of 27 tonnes, and Gilbert says that the electric trucks are more profitable than the diesels. “The beauty of these trucks is that we can run them at night. We can run them on Sundays, we can run them next to parks… and nobody complains,” he said.

The trucks have four battery packs driving the electric motors and the PTOs operating the tipping function are fully-electric.

“We have one tonne more payload that the diesel trucks, and range is not an issue for us,” Gilbert added.

Gilbert went on to say that the trucks take material from work sites in the city to a distribution centre on the outskirts of town where larger trucks take the material further afield.

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Charging takes place every four and half hours which tops them up to 80 per cent charge and off they go again.

Gilbert says that so far the electric trucks have carried over 218,000 tonnes of material from 70 projects across the city of Oslo.

Asked what the drivers thought about the electric trucks and Gilbert was honest: “Drivers initially didn’t like them,” he said. “They didn’t want to drive them, but now we only have one driver out of 37 who won’t drive them.”

“We continue to be awarded zero emission projects and we even have electric excavators and loaders to till our trucks,” he said.

Gilbert says that the company wants to emission free by 2025, and how they get there doesn’t matter. “We’re energy agnostic,” Gilbert says. “At the moment we’re backing the electric trucks because that’s all have, but if another solution comes in the future, we’ll look at that too.”

“It’s just a different way of doing business in these times,” Gilbert concluded.