Cherry pickers go from seeing red to ‘green'

(NECN: Peter Howe, Framingham, Mass.) “Hybrid” doesn’t just mean “wimpy little Prius” anymore. As this year’s AltWheels convention at Staples Corp. world headquarters here on Monday showed, all kinds of vehicles are going green, including utility-company cherry pickers, garbage trucks, and state police cars. One star attraction at the AltWheels gathering, attended by more than 300 corporate fleet managers, was an Eaton hybrid cherry picker. It both saves fuel driving around town, and workers can operate the cherry picker bucket for hours on batteries instead of running a diesel engine. AltWheels founder Alison Sander said this year’s version of the event, which began five years ago, show how quickly technology has advanced that most fleet operators have moved from being skeptical of the technology in 2004 to now seeing how quickly they can adopt it for their fleets. “Everybody knows about Toyota’s hybrid Prius, but not many people realize it now comes in a class VI 50,000-pound truck mode, or that you can get a 100 percent electric truck,” Sander said. “These are no longer play vehicles. These are actually serious vehicles being mainstreamed into fleet operations.” Click here to view a Picasa AltWheels slideshow. Staples, which is hosting the event, owns North America’s first 100-percent-electric-powered class VI sized delivery truck, scheduled to hit the road next month in Ontario, Calif. It gets charged up overnight with electricity. “Almost any fleet out there could benefit from electric technology to handle the routes that run under 100 miles a day,” says Mike Payette, Staples fleet manager. While they now cost twice as much as diesels, Payette says he dreams of switching a third of his trucks to electric. “Besides the fuel savings and the emissions controls that you do away with over the life of this truck, there’s four hundred miles of motor oil that will never be introduced into this body” and no need for other toxic chemicals like transmission fluid and antifreeze. “As battery technology develops, I fully expect there will be something out that will give us double the range half the charging time and last twice as long.” Also on display was a garbage truck whose brakes charge up hydraulic wheel power to cut emissions as it stops and starts. The truck runs on hydraulic power from about 0 to 5 m.p.h before switching back to diesel. Other unique vehicles: A Porsche 914 that MIT geniuses turned all-electric with batteries under the hood; an 85-mile-a-gallon diesel three-wheeler that legally can be registered to drive in 49 states, all except Massachusetts; and battery-powered Massachusetts State Police three-wheel T-3s, a little bigger than a Segway, which can go up to 18 m.p.h. The State Police got 3 of the units this summer — great for crowd control at events like July 4th on the Esplanade, and proof that “green vehicles” now come in all shapes and sizes.