Electric vehicle startup Chanje on Thursday changed all that, offering me a test drive of its V8070 around Brooklyn, N.Y.
The company’s flagship auto is the first electric medium-duty panel van designed and built from scratch and is targeted for the final-mile delivery industry. Historically, if you wanted to go electric in the last-mile space, you needed a retrofit.
Chanje’s V8070 cargo van takes the aftermarket out of the equation as Chanje CEO Bryan Hansel hopes to capitalize on a waning global appetite for fossil fuels.
“All the trends in diesel are going in the wrong direction,” he says. “They’re more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain.”
Hansel says the company’s electric motors have significantly fewer moving parts than fuel-fired engines, resulting in a maintenance cost that is reduced by upwards of 70 percent. For maintenance, Chanje will leverage Ryder’s 800 location strong footprint. The two companies are already working to train some of Ryder’s 6,000 technicians on how to service the dual electric motor van. The first crop of Chanje-certified Ryder techs graduated last week.
The van’s push-button start was an interesting feature more fitting of a luxury car than a commercial van, but it works and it’s cool. With no engine to turn over, a key-start isn’t really necessary. When you push the button, it’s a lot like turning on a computer. It takes about five seconds for the van to boot-up and offer the driver a display of all the van’s vital signs.
