Trucks Could Be Next Electric Power Frontier
With fuel costs a driving factor, analysts see surge of hybrid electric trucks on the road in the coming years.
Don’t expect to see electric-powered 18-wheelers roaring down the interstate any time soon. What you are more likely to see are smaller highly fuel-efficient utility trucks and buses on neighborhood streets, and lots of them. Analysts project that hundreds of thousands of them will be on our roads within the next five years.
A new report by Pike Research, a research marketing firm that focuses on clean technologies, predicts that the global market for hybrid medium and heavy-duty trucks and buses will increase from 9,000 vehicles in 2010 to more than 100,000 vehicles in 2015. This year and next year, mainstream truck brands Navistar and Freightliner will even start to offer medium-duty trucks that run on electric power alone,
