Harbinger To Unveil Innovative Platform For Electric Medium-Duty Trucks At Detroit Auto Show

It’s not a sports car, pickup or SUV, but one of the products to be unveiled at the upcoming North American International Detroit Auto Show may very well be the underpinnings for future electric trucks delivering packages to your front door or supporting the electric recreational vehicle transporting you to campsites around the country.

Los Angeles-based startup Harbinger is taking the wraps off a new chassis for battery-electric Class 4 through Class 7 medium-duty vehicles which include delivery trucks and RVs. The chassis is designed to save money, reduce driver fatigue and injuries and improve performance and safety.

Indeed, it’s the newest innovation in the fast-growing medium-duty truck market serving the even faster-growing middle and last mile delivery markets.

Harbinger was created about 18 months ago by three veterans of EV startups including CEO John Harris. In an interview with Forbes.com, Harris explained the idea to create this new chassis for electric medium-duty vehicles grew out of “fascination” the founders have for that market segment, finding it “compelling,” and frustration over existing solutions.

“We thought, someone’s gonna go do it right. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. It just didn’t happen,” said Harris. “The pandemic has driven 10 years of e-commerce growth into 18 months. We decided to do it right from the ground up.”

Doing it from the ground up meant re-thinking key elements specific to electric vehicles. The most prominent innovation being Harbinger’s eAxle which combines the motor, inverter and gearbox into a replaceable integrated unit.

The eAxle is coupled with what’s known as a de-dion beam.

“With the de-dion beam we have a floating beam that carries the bending moment coupled with half shafts, an anti-sway bar system and then leaf springs for suspension. still using rear leaf springs,” explained Harris. “Unlike having a beam axle where you have this sort of monolithic integrated unit we’re breaking that out letting us just optimize each piece individually.”

By eliminating high point gears and u-joints, moving to an architecture that uses entirely spiral beveled gears, “we’re looking at about a 15% improvement in energy efficiency over the incumbent solutions in the industry,” said Harris.

Battery packs are designed to last 20 years, or about the same life span as a commercial truck and are placed within the frame for safety, Harris said.

A key selling point for Harbinger is the intent to make its electric truck chassis available at no cost-premium. To accomplish that, the company is differing its process from the way electric passenger cars are built, meaning saving trucking companies the expense of producing their own batteries or outsourcing them.

What we don’t see in trucking is companies buying battery cells and then doing their own modular integration and own pack integration. The effect is they’re paying complex systems markup,” explained Harris. “We buy battery cells, all higher level integration is done in-house and the effect is our cost-basis for battery packs is anywhere from 50-80% lower than other companies in the trucking space that are buying full packs.”

In an industry where a typical delivery driver may make more than 100 stops a day getting in and out of the truck, Harbinger’s chassis lowers the typical step-in height from 34-36 inches by about six inches when the truck is empty and four inches when it’s fully loaded.

Its steer by-wire feature further aims to reduce the risk of carpal tunnel injuries with the ability to adjust steering ratios to match driving conditions. The risk of tripping in the small space between the seat and the typical large engine compartment known as the “dog house” has been eliminated.

Harris notes the explosion in demand for medium-duty trucks coupled with the way the industry typically operates precipitated the need for a more cost-effective, energy-efficient electric vehicle chassis.

“When we look at electrification, medium duty is where electrification fits most naturally with the way people actually operate vehicles today,” Harris said. “With medium-duty they are almost always fleet operated, almost always depot-based which means they’re almost always parked in the same place every night, those depots are almost always in industrial locations—places where there’s already heavy duty industrial power and single shifts.”

The Harbinger chassis is also designed to be ready to support autonomous electric medium-duty vehicles since Harris believes commercial trucking fleets will be the initial adopters “because of high workload, persistent driver shortages and the opportunity to make real improvements in safety and cost.”

Pilot testing begins mid to late 2023, according to Harris, with deliveries to customers some time in 2024. The company does have customers lined up, but isn’t yet ready to reveal who they are. That’s a harbinger of things to come.