AVL's Reimagine Mobility Podcast

From Diesel to Electric Navigating the Shift in Heavy-Duty Transportation w/ Phil Stephenson

• AVL, North America

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In this episode of AVL's Reimagined Mobility Podcast, Phil Stephenson from PACCAR delves into the electrification and alternative propulsion systems for heavy-duty trucks, emphasizing the industry's shift towards reducing CO2 emissions. Stephenson brings his extensive experience in diesel engines, thermal management, and battery systems into a discussion that covers the challenges and strategies of electrifying heavy-duty vehicles, the potential of hydrogen fuel cells, and the role of policy and industry collaboration in overcoming infrastructure and technological hurdles. This conversation provides deep insights into the future of sustainable heavy-duty transport and PACCAR's approach to navigating these changes.

 

Dr. Philip Stephenson is General Manager, PACCAR Technical Center. He has held this position since 2012.

 

Prior to his current position, Dr. Stephenson was Vice President, Exide Technologies. Before joining PACCAR, he worked as Director of Product Development and Engineering with A123 Systems where he led engineering teams in the US and Germany. Dr. Stephenson was also Chief Engineer for product development and validation at automotive supplier Behr and was instrumental in the expansion of Behr’s test facilities to support their North American automotive business.

 

Early in his career, Dr. Stephenson worked as a computational fluid dynamics simulation engineer at Mercedes Benz Research in Stuttgart, Germany, an engineering manager at Fluent Inc. (now Ansys) and an executive at CD-adapco (now Siemens)

 

At the PACCAR Technical Center, Dr. Stephenson leads teams responsible for product validation of Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks and for development, calibration and testing of PACCAR diesel and alternative fuel powertrains for North America.

 

Dr. Stephenson earned a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Arizona State University.

 

PACCAR is a global technology leader in the design, manufacture and customer support of premium light-, medium- and heavy-duty trucks under the Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF nameplates. PACCAR also designs and manufactures advanced diesel engines, provides financial services, information technology, and distributes truck parts related to its principal business.

 

If you would like to be a guest on the show contact: namarketing@avl.com

Welcome to the AVL’s Reimagined Mobility Podcast series. Super excited to have Phil Stephenson from PACCAR are here with me. Thank you all for joining me. And maybe, Phil, before we start kind of re-imagine mobility here together and certainly with a focus on where you and park car is, is operating in when it comes to the mobility space, give us a little background of what you've done, where you're coming from and what today your responsibilities are. PACCAR And then let's jump right into it. Sure. Okay. Well, I started my career in diesel engines and thermal management and simulation and spent a lot of time there. I've been a visiting scientist at Daimler Research Center during my Ph.D. I worked for AVL for a short time. I was chief engineer at Behr America. I was director of engineering at A123 Systems, working on lithium ion battery systems for heavy duty. And I've been general manager of the PACCAR Technical Center for the past 12 years. Excellent, perfect cell wide variety of experiences, heavily in simulation. You work in batteries. Let's take that clue and jump right in it. What do you see? Because you and I have talked about this over the last many years, right? This this was a step we see globally now clearly in the U.S. as well over the last three, maybe four years of electrifying as much as we can. Let's leave passenger vehicles out. Let's leave medium duty vehicles out. And let's talk about heavy duty trucks. What do you see? And again, with the theme of the podcast, Reimagine, what do you imagine? What do you see in the future happen as it relates to electrification or propulsion systems as a whole? Hydrogen, including fuel cell, whatever? What do you see? Phil Yeah, well, I think it's important to think about what's driving all of this, and that's a big push globally to reduce CO2 emissions. We more or less salt or 99.9% solve the criteria pollutant emissions from internal combustion engine. So we're looking at CO2 now and a lot of the methodologies you mentioned, whether it's electrification or whether it's hydrogen fuel cells, even hydrogen combustion, they're all different approaches to eliminate CO2 from the tailpipe of all vehicles. But of course, we're focused on medium and heavy duty vehicles. PACCAR, and it'll be interesting to see what combination of technologies wins out. I think that you have to look more broadly than the individual vehicle, more broadly than fleets. You have to really look at the energy system as a whole, as the energy being generated. How is it being transmitted? How is it being stored or there is a liquid or in a battery or is it gas? And what's the efficiency of conversion? It along all those steps, all the way out to put in power under the wheels that drive the vehicle on the road? So there are a lot of challenges to be solved and we're living in a time in a lot of countries and jurisdictions where technologies are being selected. Maybe not taking that whole system point of view and mind, maybe looking at a smaller piece of the puzzle. And I think over time, we're going to realize that we need to look a little bit more broadly to make the best overall decision as engineers and policymakers. Phil That's a it's a great point, I think, and I'm going to call it out, right? We have we have government and rec regulators on a on a local and a state, maybe even a federal level here in other countries as well. And a sort of coming in and saying, I like what I'm hearing that I just saw in this presentation on, let's just say hydrogen. I'm going to legislate it now And then also, engineers are kind of looking each other and like, well, hold on a minute. I don't think that's necessarily the best way of doing things, but that's sort of where we're at. What do you see, generally speaking, and again, not pointing the finger at anybody, but what do we as an industry leaving government out for a moment in the regulations? I know that's a big piece of it, but us leave that out. What are we doing wrong? What can we do better? Phil As, as as an organization and as an industry in, in, in focusing on the sustainable ability of our planet, yet still do what we need to do for our customers, in your case, for fleets moving of goods, etc.. Share a little bit your vision there. Yeah. So I'll speak from the point of view of a truck manufacturer, so I'll leave out all the other modes of transportation. I will say briefly, of course it makes sense to use the most efficient modes of transportation and make sure the interface is between ships and trucks and rail and whatever else makes sense. But focusing in on commercial vehicles, first of all, we need to be offering solutions that meet the requirements we have today. We can have a long discussion about what the right way to do things is, but in the meantime, we have customers that need to move goods and need to get need to satisfy demands of their customers. So, you know, I think we need to continue to work on all of these different systems. First and foremost, the internal combustion engine is going to be the solution for a good portion of our customers for a long time for we just got diesel to the point. We got it and it is still the system. We know how to operate. It's still the infrastructure that we have optimized. We know how to make fuel, move it around, burn it efficiently and cleanly, and we can't lose sight of that. So now we're talking about other future powertrains. I'll leave that. I'll leave the discussion about internal combustion for another day on. But as I said, our strategy at PACCAR is really to look at, you know, hydrogen. How do you how do you use it to make energy? Do you put it in a fuel cell, make electricity, and essentially drive a hybrid vehicle? Do you burn it in an internal combustion engine? I think the scorecard on that really has to be related to the overall efficiency at vehicle level and the availability of infrastructure to get hydrogen and put it into your vehicles. Similarly, on electrification, of course, the big pressure these days is on battery electric vehicles or plug in hybrid vehicles that have relatively large batteries. And we need to also be looking at whether it makes sense to put all of our focus on very large batteries, which are currently quite heavy, quite expensive, or if we've got to fix them amount of batteries, would it just as a thought experiment, would it make more sense to advertise everything for a put a small battery on every engine, on every internal combustion power train, or does it make sense to maybe electrify 10%? Good thing is we have all the tools. You know, our engineers, we know how to do system analysis. And I think, as I said, our task is to keep providing solutions, but at the same time provide good data to our decision makers to help them make the right, you know, decision in terms of what they really want to do, which is to minimize CO2 and, you know, improve conditions here on our planet now. Very good. Got to follow up questions. One and Parker, you're truly a I would say, a global operator at a global corporation. What do you see different, if anything? What's going on in Europe and what you have to do in Europe to what you just shared here that you have to do? You're right. At the end of the day, you have a customer that has a need and you need to sufficed as need with as much of CO2 reduction, emission reductions, Whatever you can do to preserve the environment, do what you need to do from a legal perspective. But but what's some of the differences, maybe for some of our viewers and listeners who are not familiar with between Europe and here? Yeah, well, I can point out a few. So on the hydrogen side, one thing that I didn't know until fairly recently in the last year or so is in the United States, hydrogen combustion is not considered, or at least in California, in the carb states, it's not considered zero emission in terms of CO2. That's because there's a little bit of CO2 that can be generated from the lube boil in the engine. And that's because you you are doing combustion, your combustion chamber temperatures, which can create a little bit of an NOX. And although you can treat it and after treatment, you never get to zero. So that's that's one difference. Whereas in Europe, in most in most jurisdiction, hydrogen combustion is considered zero emission technology. I'm on the battery side. I think we've got a lot of similarities. We've got applications for for electric vehicles and for hybrid. Certainly there are differences, though, in how plug in hybrids are handled in terms of credits, in terms of zero emissions credits. So it turns out in Europe, as a plug in hybrid electric vehicle gets more favorable treatment for credits than it does in the United States. And then I guess the third point is, and maybe the most important is the boundary conditions are quite different. You have zero emission zones in cities where vehicles that can operate on diesel most of the time outside the city and then go to a zero tailpipe emissions mode are probably getting more interest in Europe at the moment than in the US. And then add to that, of course, the usual things we face with any kind of powertrain. We have higher speeds in the US than in Europe. We have probably a wider range of temperature conditions, altitudes, grades and that just drives, you know, different designs to term and distances, maybe two or eight of what we drive versus what Europe drives. Yeah, So. Well, and then the follow up question again to to the question before your answer previous to the one we just answered here, I hear a lot of people when we talk about maybe for heavy duty trucks, it's not the right way to go. Electric. You know, they mentioned companies that have tried and sort of failed or I mentioned those. Right. And then the feedback is, yeah, but look at what Teslas do. And Tesla's the most successful in every passenger vehicle manufacturer. They make money, they send they sell hundreds of thousands of vehicles globally now. Right. You're going to come out with a truck and they're going to show everybody how it's done. What would you respond to that? Well, first of all, I do applaud their success in light duty, and they've really shown that it's possible they've done some things outside the vehicle, around infrastructure as well. And another charging network is impressive. They've more or less set the standard for light duty charging interface. Everybody's adopted that. However, they're still subject to the same physics that we all are. And so they, I'm sure, are facing the same challenges that any heavy duty manufacturer is with a full battery electric vehicle that weighs 40 tons, which has to travel maybe 500, maybe more miles. So 800 kilometers on a single charge, which needs to have limited charging time. All of those things generally will drive a much heavier vehicle for the time being. And and so I, I am sure they will they will meet those challenges as we're all trying to do. But they're going to they're going to face challenges in terms of the amount of payload that could be carried on a vehicle which has a battery to to meet that range. They may very well face challenges with fast charging, fast charging as I always like to put it, in terms people can and think about, we talk about charging at one megawatt being sort of the the holy grail for for fast electric vehicle charging depending on the amount of flow you got your diesel pump, the equivalent charging rate if you want to think about it in terms of power, is somewhere between ten and 30 megawatts when you're tanking diesel. And that's really the benchmark we have to compare to. So that's that's going to be a challenge. I also think they've made an interesting decision to go after long haul first, we are certainly approaching that market, but we're also approaching the ones that maybe are better suited, shorter term or better suited. Shorter term for electrification like pickup and delivery, refuse is a very interesting one. Regional haul port drainage. There are a lot of cases where one has emission profile which has a lot of idling, let's say a lot of regeneration opportunity, shorter routes, you know, up to say 1 to 200 kilometers. And that tends to be that tends to drive less battery mass. And and the ability to to do this with less compromise compared to long haul. One thing Phil, related to and you alluded to it and that the weight of those vehicles rates how heavy they are. I talked to somebody the other day and we kind of brainstorm a little bit ride about the infrastructure because we were kind of complaining about our Michigan streets. Right. And you've been here. Pothole is is about as normal here as as somebody with a michigan T-shirt running around or a Michigan T-shirt. So what do you guys when you guys look at these trucks, is there somebody also addressing that, hey, if suddenly everybody drives around with an electric heavy duty truck that still needs to carry a full load is our infrastructure. I'm not talking charging for a moment is everybody towards infrastructure equals charging infrastructure is a whole lot more. When we brought in about our streets systems. Right. Are we talking about this? Is this something you guys are talking about? Because I hear very little about it. Well, we talk about it all the time because it turns out even for conventional power train vehicles, there are different bridge laws, for example, that vary state to state. If you come out here to the to the west, where there are a lot of logging trucks, you'll notice they have very long tongues on their trailers between the lead vehicle and the trailer, and that's directly due the bridge laws. You'll see some vehicles will have what we call a set forward front axle where the steer steering tires are very close to the bumper. Others will have it further back. You may have, you know, tandem axles, you may have dual steer axles. And all of that really is about weight distribution for the payload that the vehicles carry. In terms of electric vehicles at present, they in some cases they will get a minimal allowance for additional Now. So in general, on highway trucks are limited to 80,000 lbs. There's an allowance for electric heavy duty vehicles to go to 82,000 in terms of the wear and tear on the road, you know, that's that's a couple percent. It's probably fairly minimal. The question will be longer term whether there are allowances made to go even more than that. And then I think what you're talking about in terms of infrastructure effect becomes more significant. But right now it's basically just a penalty on payload that's that's accommodating the additional mass. And just to give people listening in on the strip an idea, if you've got an 80,000 lbs gross weight vehicle with a range of, say, roundabout 350 miles, you're going to pay about a 9,000 lbs penalty compared to a diesel powertrain to have a full battery electric powertrain configurations will make that number go up or down, but it's in that ballpark. So it's fair to say, Phil, that from a from a fleet owner. Right. If he or she decides to move over, there is an economic impact to I now have quote unquote, 9,000 lbs less of goods to deliver that. And I may need to have a second truck or a third truck, whatever it is, to to haul. Right. That's a fair statement. Yeah. I mean, it depends a lot on the cargo. One's hauling. We talked about fleets grossing out or cubing out. So if you're carrying steel coils from the mills in Indiana, it's different than if you're carrying potato chips. But certainly if you're you're hitting your your weight maximum, yeah, there will be an impact. Let's go back again to again, we re-imagine mobility here. If I ask you, Phil, and again, we've talked about this, too, over the years since we know each other, we've talked about when we see electrification come common, here it is. We talked about hydrogen, we talked we haven't really talked about e fuels. I think that's a bigger topic in Europe. Maybe that is here is are we in an infrastructure challenge associated with it? But if you look at just in general outside of electrification or outside of alternative propulsion systems next to diesel, anything and everything, what excites you the most? If you look five years forward, what you see happening again in the industry you and PACCAR are in right now, What do you see? Well, yeah, I I'm not sure if this is going to answer your question directly, but I see the infrastructure supporting electric vehicles and electric vehicles developing side by side out of necessity. I'm seeing a lot of progress in the understanding, at least if not the addressing of the need for a better electrical charging infrastructure. We are in discussions and as part of our super Truck-3 programs, the Department of Energy, we're in discussions about microgrids, for example. So providing the charging power for all of these chargers that we're going to need to have with out relying on the grid to provide that power in real time. And I'm encouraged by the companies that are working in that space, by the companies they're working in the high power charger space, because that difference in time between the power being available and the time that it gets to be on the vehicle is critical for uptime. And that's what, you know, really drives the profitability of our customers. So that's one topic. I think there have been a lot of advances made in hydrogen as a fuel, whether you put it in a fuel cell or an engine and you know, you didn't mention e fuels it, it's encouraging to see what's being done to create synthetic fuels which can be transported, tanked, burned, just like any other fuel. I recently had a discussion with a colleague that that works for for one of the oil companies and he he sort of deep down my enthusiasm a little bit on e fuels for highway transportation because he pointed out if aviation is going to go zero net carbon, they're going to soak up a lot of those fuels. You know, they after they can't bear the extra weight of batteries like we kind of can and ground transportation. So. Well, I'm excited about it. I'm not sure how much of a play that's going to be in in heavy duty or medium duty transportation. And if we talk about maybe instead of five years out, fill 5 to 10 or maybe beyond that is is solid state batteries the Holy Grail as it's sort of the loop that for passenger vehicles lighters as it relates to weight, as it relates to size, as it relates to driving this, as it relates to charging time, all everything that we're currently worried about. Is that the same thing for medium and heavy duty trucks that you guys are in or is this this is one piece, but there's still others like the microgrid, which maybe I want to come quickly afterwards. Back. Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of people like to say, you know, there have only been four revolutions or four innovations, big ones in batteries in the last hundred 60 years, lithium ion being the fourth one. I think that in terms of energy density, things like solid state batteries, things like metal in, you know, lithium metal anodes, for example, they do pose, you know, some some promise. But like any battery technology, we're going to have to, you know, see the validation results, particularly for heavy duty work going out to see if they could provide the number of charge discharge cycles that we need. We designed trucks to have, you know, a million miles, 2 million miles of life depending on the on the application. And we expect right now it's maybe an expectation rather than a reality, but we expect that the battery system will live the life of the vehicle. So, you know, when we look at battery technology, we're looking safety. Of course, we're looking at it. We're looking at power and energy density. We're also looking at life. And you really have to meet all of those goals before you say this is a technology which is going to move the needle for us. So, you know, solid state, I think is very promising, but it's probably on the 5 to 10 year horizon before we see it as viable now. Now we see that as well in our studies and our simulations and working with some of those companies. Maybe two more questions. Field One, you mentioned microgrids, and that's almost always comes back to the infrastructure, which definitely is a challenge still in this country. I mean, I just finally bought my first EV I had to convince my wife because she's never seen a charging station in a ten or radius around us. She's like, You might do different story, but this microgrid that you spoke to, you believe talking to those people that she have, we talk I've talked to some of them as well. Do you believe this actually will solve the infrastructure problem not only on a on a private level, but on a different level than private companies figuring out how they can, you know, plug in to the to the grid that it's owned by, you know, DTE Energy and in Michigan and others, you know, Duke Energy and in the South and other places, you feel this could be the the missing piece, so to speak, to accelerate this this infrastructure? Well, I think the solution is going to have a lot of pieces. But I think microgrids are potentially a very important piece of it. The excuse me, the ability to buffer the demand from the supply, I think, is very important. And microgrids are one way to do that. But so are bi directional chargers that allow vehicle to grid connections under certain situations. Those are technical solutions and they're all need to be commercial and policy solutions that go along with that. For example, if I had my F-150 lightning and I can plug it in my house, why do I want to let that power the grid? I know it's more watt hours of throughput on my battery pack, you know, what am I getting back to that as just as an X? And so these things are all going to have to make sense together. But going back to your question, I think microgrids are probably one of the most viable concepts we have right now for decoupling some of this peak demand we're going to have due to charging from the ability to generate transport and distribute the power grid. And the last question on maybe already and answered alluded to it with your F-150 comment, I don't know. We'll see. Phil, what's the next car you're going to buy and why? Well, I, I bought my first EV three years ago and it's got a ten year, 160,000 mile battery warranty on it. And I intend to use all of that warranty. So the next car I'm going to buy is going to be a little ways out. You know, I would love to think that it could be a passenger car version of one of these powertrains we're talking about maybe a hydrogen powered vehicle. I don't think I'll ever probably unless it's not available in the platform I buy, I don't think I'll ever buy a pure icy vehicle again. If I could get myself a diesel electric hybrid SUV someday, I think that'd be pretty cool. Okay, perfect. Appreciate your answer. Thank you so much, Phil. Well, together here, reimagine mobility, shared your vision and from your industry. Super exciting. Very thankful for your insight. Thank you, Bill. Thanks for listening to Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you like this episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.