Looking at a map of the Detroit Auto Show, I noticed an odd, unfamiliar name surrounded by some big, well-known names. Right by Chevrolet and Lincoln and Cadillac and Buick was a sizable plot of show floor real estate marked HARBINGER. A Harbinger of what? That’s an ominous-sounding name, Harbinger, most likely because it’s usually followed with the words “of doom” or something similarly ominous. But when our own Mercedes Streeter went over to see what’s going on at the imposingly-named booth, she just saw a very mundane-looking delivery van. So what’s going on here? Who is Harbinger, and what are they doing at the Detroit Auto Show?
That blue van up there looks to be an off-the-rack Grumman MT45 stepvan, also sold as a Freightliner MT45, or a Morgan Olson RouteStar, or some confusing combination of those names; it’s a boring, useful delivery van, and I think that’s the whole point. You see, Harbinger is in the business of making electric delivery van chassis, and I think they’re very smart to make them work with one of the most common van bodies available instead of succumbing to the temptation of making something sleek and cool and new looking that will get a lot of attention, but will be expensive and effectively unavailable.
Harbinger’s goal is to make medium-duty commercial EV platforms that are “priced for zero acquisition premium,” which I believe simply means that there’s no cost penalty for a company choosing to get an EV delivery vehicle over a combustion one.
Harbinger’s main product seems to be this chassis, designed for Class 6 19,501 to 26,000 pound medium-duty trucks – think FedEx or Amazon trucks, beer trucks, school buses, that sort of thing. Motorhomes sometimes used these chassis, too, so perhaps that could be a use case for these in the future as well.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s going on this chassis – which appears to be made to be compatible with the same hard mounting points as conventional step-van chassis like the GM P30 or Chevrolet W-series chassis. That seems to be confirmed by Harbinger:
Harbinger’s scalable stripped chassis has been built to support all of the popular medium-duty body types available today, including commercial walk-in vans, recreational vehicles, box trucks, and others. The front overhang is reduced by Harbinger’s innovative independent front suspension, and the tight integration of battery, powertrain, and frame allows a best-in-class floor height. Steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire systems offer greater flexibility for driver positioning and prepares fleets for future innovations in autonomy and advanced safety.
Oh, right, I promised a diagram:
As you can see, it’s fundamentally fairly simple: a ladder-frame chassis with up to four 35 kWh battery pack modules (so a maximum of 140 kWh) housed in between the main chassis rails. The electrical system is 800V and uses readily-available 21700 lithium-ion cells, and the battery packs themselves look to be fairly easily removable and replaceable, which I suspect is a factor in the planned 20-year service life for this chassis.
It’s leaf-sprung at the rear and has coils and independent double-wishbone suspension up front.
The motor unit is housed at the rear axle and is entirely below the frame rails, allowing for a fully flat floor. The motor unit is integrated with the necessary power electronics and makes 470 horsepower and 13,700 pound-feet of torque, which seems plenty.
So, with all this in mind, I think I’m getting a good idea of what Harbinger is: kinda boring. But, in the best possible way. This is exactly what the delivery market needs if its going to move to electrification: something that works with equipment that’s already in place: loading docks, racks and other interior van organizing systems, has driver and operator familiarity, and so on.
They’ll look like the same vans as before, and, if Harbinger is able to pull off what they’re claiming, they won’t cost any more than an equivalent gas or diesel van. If you’re not paying attention, you probably won’t even notice the difference, except the vans will be quieter.
This is exactly what this segment needs, not an all-new EV van platform that optimizes everything. Harbinger’s approach allows for quicker transformation of existing fleets, with the biggest change needing to be the addition of charging infrastructure, something that one would hope could be paid for by the offset in fuel costs.
Really, this delivery segment is perhaps the best suited to electrification compared to almost anything else: mostly set, pre-defined routes of known distance and mileage that end with the vans back at a central location for recharging. Like school buses, this medium-duty delivery application feels tailor-made for the benefits and limitations of electric vehicles, and once you start thinking about how many gas and diesel-burning vans like these are out there, the scale of the benefit to local air quality and other environmental and resource-use factors is considerable.
This is one of those rare times I’m happy to see something boring at an auto show. Good job being dull, Harbinger!
21700 cells? 20 year service life?
Color me skeptical.
If the cooling system is sized for the largest battery combination … maybe? But these things should be sized for a near full discharge every day?
250 charge cycles per year and that’s 5,000 over 20 years. The only current affordable technology with that type of cycle life is lithium iron phosphate.
I believe the chassis is supposed to have a 20 year service life, the batteries are expected to be replaced at some point.
Disappointing.
This would be perfect for David’s FC170 conversion though.
As someone who worked for Fedex Ground for over 15 years; I really wish we had these back then.
I wonder if you could drop a 1970s car body on one of these and call it a day. There have to be some models across automotive history that have the right mount points.
Mid ’60s DeVille, or a suicide-door Lincoln? Hell yeah. Even a ’50s or ’60s pickup cab and bed.
Genuine question: did any production car (or production vehicle of any sort) ever have double wishbone independent suspension at the front and a solid axle/leaf springs at the rear?
Ford Ranger, Mazda BT-50, Nissan Navara, Mitsubishi Triton, Toyota Hilux, VW Amarok and most of those “small” utes/pickups that probably don’t exist in the US come with double wishbone independent fronts and live axle leaf spring rear.
I thought a bunch of older muscle cars did. I know my F-150 has that suspension setup.
Most American cars from about the mid-1930s onwards, with freqeuency decreasing from the 80s or so onwards, have SLA suspension in front and a live axle in back. Proportion of leaf springs to coil springs for the rear axle, I don’t know.
Also, to be a bit pedantic, this chassis has a dead axle, not a live axle.
As for putting a car body on top of it, well, it would like a car sitting on a truck. And not even a Cadillac Fleetwood 75 limo has a wheelbase as long as 158″. If you wanted to get goofy like that, you’d need to find a crew cab pickup.
As much as I dislike EVs in general and think that they are a terrible idea overall, this is finally an EV that makes some sense.
Looks like it’s not an over-engineered, over-complicated expensive tech-showoff project.
I think it’s a good recipe: take a well-established delivery vehicle that has very typical, repeating usage patterns and try to electrify with that in mind the simplest way possible.
Still a challenge, but much easier to design a vehicle for a narrow use case.
I especially like the leaf springs: they’ve been around since forever, work well enough for this purpose, why reinvent the wheel?
Unrelated to the (admittedly neat) article, does Autopian plan to add a report/flag feature for comments? Every article had some damn bot promising me (1) easy money from home, or (2) sexy sexiness. Even just to hide them would be nice. Or to flag certain, ahem, Daves that feel the need to type every sentence they can think after rubbing their two braincells together as a separate comment.
This makes perfect sense, especially in cities where you are stopping every 50 yards.
This is how I feel about the F150- bravo on just being a really solid F150.
Gah, the electric F150
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First of all, when looking at a chip truck, it’s actually called a hamburger of doom.
Secondly, when will we see Mercedes’ article on how she would convert one of these into a motor home, mobile auto repair and fish gutting shop?
Maybe it is time to kick this Dave Horchak guy off the island?
Someone finally decided to not fix what wasn’t broken. Sounds like an automotive company doing what it knows instead of a tech company deciding it can make a whiz-bang delivery van with all the fancy googaws that doesn’t actually deliver packages that well. Now when will they decide to design battery packs that are hot-swappable so you can maximize the time on the road for your fleet instead of having a bunch of expensive rolling stock tied up for hours charging? Might work for a 9-5 job but the big guys run all day and most of the night, especially in the more densely populated areas. And please someone who knows better than me correct me if I don’t fully understand the electrical engineering behind a battery powerful enough to drive a van. I’ll assume it’s not like swapping out a duracell in a flashlight, but how could it work? (And use small words. I dropped my EE major when I was flunking Thermogoddammits to switch to accounting, thus the lack of battery knowledge but focus on keeping the trucks productive and earning money.)
“Just not workable”? How come you didn’t have this objection to Tycho’s article about the apparently booming business of swappable EV batteries in China from a couple months ago?
https://www.theautopian.com/china-is-already-doing-ev-battery-swapping-and-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-it/
I have no doubt that companies might tend to be a bit less worried about risk management and liability in China, but with the Chinese company NIO having announced its 500,000th successful battery swap over two years ago, it looks to my unlettered eyes that serviceability might indeed be a reasonably solvable problem. (But for all I know, all those NIO-powered vehicles could have gone up in flames by summer 2020. I have performed precisely zero followup research.)
Man, your absolutism and certitude are only matched by your word count. I suppose it’s easy enough to discount the Chinese claims simply because they’re Chinese, but maybe we could ask Tycho about the veracity of the claims, because I guess he’s over there and put in a modicum of research into his article. I’m not going to bother calling into question your own expert opinions because I don’t know who you are, but I’m also disinclined to believe that the entire battery-swapping industry is vaporware chasing a pie-in-the-sky illusion of sustainability based on your mistrust of the durability of various sight-unseen swappable battery connectors. It just doesn’t make sense that any company would long pursue swappable batteries if the contacts are a wear item that can only last fifty cycles or so… unless they are a cheap and trivially replaceable wear item. Because if swapping can’t be made more cost efficient than the hourly cost of recharging, nobody would do it, in China or anywhere.
Tycho, you reading this conversation? Got any insight?
I am *not* an expert, but I do work with high-voltage DC all day in the form of solar arrays and battery backups. The following is just my own semi-informed conjecture:
I don’t see why replacing a modular EV battery pack should have to be so different from replacing similar components on the systems I build and maintain. That is to say, it needn’t be all that complicated. Here’s the general procedure in my world:
First you isolate the device, which means either flipping a disconnect switch, triggering a relay, or just going into the software and changing a setting. (Either way, you’re creating a condition that tells the unit’s internal electronics to power down to safe-to-touch voltage levels.) After waiting a bit for the unit to power down, you then pop open the service panel and disconnect its electrical and communication leads. The electrical connectors are beefier than what you’d find in a flashlight, but often not too different from what you’d find on a 12V car battery—we’re talking some kind of lugs that you undo with a screwdriver. In some applications, and I imagine with an EV battery, you’re looking at some kind of cable connector that is comparable to the many clip-on connectors you’ll already find inside your car, just beefier and more weatherproof. After undoing that (and disconnecting the aforementioned comms, which in an EV may or may not be integrated into the same cable as the power) you are ready to physically unbolt and remove the device.
Installation of the new unit is as they say the reverse of removal, with the additional step that once you’ve turned the new unit on you need to go into the software interface for the system (i.e. open up the app on your phone and scan a QR code to connect to the system’s internal WiFi) and register the new unit. Some systems can pair automatically, others require you to enter a serial number. Then you can go ahead and tell it to power back up to an operational state, and you’re done.
The biggest differences I envision with an EV is that 1) things are likely to be more tightly integrated, which may mean fewer things to connect and disconnect and 2) there is likely to be some kind of active cooling system which will also need to be disconnected and/or drained, and later refilled as necessary.
Again, this is just my conjecture based on comparable systems that I work on. It’s a bit more involved than swapping out a duracell, but it ain’t rocket science.
Funny thing is military ships that dock on a regular basis would like to have a word with you. Shore power enough to keep an aircraft carrier going gets hooked up and disconnected on a regular basis. Hell, look at the portable larger generator market. There are good high voltage connectors that get cycled daily on and off and they don’t have huge issues (humans doing the work aside).
Also, didn’t Formula E swap batteries for the first couple of years of the series? Yes, I know that was likely inspected by a dedicated connector technician after every swap/charge/discharge cycle, and that it was only used on a sparing basis…
Also, if one doesn’t push on the subject, things wont get better. A single, large, worldwide auto manufacturer could have someone on staff who is working on this connector right now. When they get one that can hit 6sigma reliability, give it a year before a CFR adaptation and then a couple more years before widescale adaption. This statement is coming from watching the Big 3 try and steamroll the trailer industry with things it wasn’t even thinking about. We almost had an adoption date for trailer braking from the vehicle before many small and medium trailer manufacturers had upgraded to axles with trailer brakes.
A bigger problem for this particular design, is that the batteries are all between the chassis frame, so the only way to remove them would be to drop them out of the bottom. (There is one at the back that you could probably slide out, but that’s only 1/3rd of the batteries).
Manager: I need you to design a widget
Engineer: how dangerous is failure?
Manager: I’ll be in jail, you’ll be paying your entire salary from a job you don’t have.
Engineer: How many times does it need to work?
Manager: Oh maybe five times.
Engineer: So we will design it for a mean failure after after 1000 cycles, rate it for 20 and make the customer sign a contract not to use it more than five times.
Manager: I’ll run it by legal and get back to you.
Engineer: Or for 20 percent more it could last forever.
Manager: I can’t hear you. I’m running downstairs to see what that horrible noise is
Engineer: What noise?
A connector is designed for its use plus a safety margin.
Make it big enough compared to the load and it’s not a problem. Compare to brushes on big old DC motors, or the ends of trolley car connectors to overhead wires. For that matter, the plugs on EV chargers.
Comparing to infrequently disassembled systems where compactness and cost are prime considerations isn’t really applicable.
While I’m thinking about it, when I worked in a photo studio, we were plugging and unplugging cables all the time that passed 4000 amps and some guys used way more than that.
That’s a 2400 watt second (aka joules) power pack that discharges in about 1000 of a second, or an average of almost 2 1/2 million watts for that thousandth of a second, and 1000th of a second is a generous amount of time for things to go spectacularly bad, which they occasionally would, but it was never the connector that failed.
Lots of guys that shot 8×10 would have 8000 watt second packs stacked up.
Boy would your ears hurt if a switch arced on an old pack.
How big do plane drop tanks get? Cos I’m thinking giant lakester.
I’m the harbinger of your mom. ❤️
WTF? The ad bot is making article-relevant jokes?
Or did the owner of the bot just forget to switch account login?
I’m fairly certain a lot (the majority?) of online discourse at this point is bots replying to bots
That rear axle is interesting. Leaf springs, solid rear connector and CV joints to provide power from the rear motor. Sort of like a De Dion tube with …. wait… that is a De Dion rear suspension.
Not sure why they claim it is a “first of it’s kind” rear suspension. There may be a couple of novel things done in it, but globally it is not a new idea.
It’s hard to tell from the pictures but it sure could be. If it was just a solid axle, the motor, gearbox, and inverter would be quite a bit of unsprung weight.
The pictures on the harbinger website show much more detail. It is pretty neat packaging.
Volvo 3-series used a De Dion axel with leafsprings
Correct this is a De-Dion tube suspension(or at least very very similar), and it’s not even the first factory built EV with it! The Ford Ranger EV has a De-Dion tube rear suspension, also some other cool things like a carbon fiber leaf spring(for one year) and watts link.
Oh no, I’ve played through those games. Don’t need it in reality. Next thing you know, an entire fleet will show up to take over the package delivery business claiming to save us from our efforts to create AI delivery vans….
Good thing this isn’t a Transit, then
This is a perfect solution to fleet EVs. Selling just the chassis might also allow companies to swap any vehicles they were going to retire to this EV platform, might save a buck not needing to buy new bodies and painting them? In any case Harbinger is playing it smart developing something that doesn’t need to meet passenger car safety, not only does a body cost more in materials but adds a lot more difficulty and time designing the car meaning they can get it to market faster and cheaper. (not saying it’s going to be unsafe, but things like this don’t have rollover and side impact tests for obvious reasons)
This is exactly the sort of thinking that has been missing from pretty much every commercial/delivery EV proposal I’ve seen: compatibility with existing shit. If you try to completely redesign a whole new truck, you’re throwing out decades of design work and refinement through use of stuff that just plain works. This is the way. Don’t reinvent the wheel; just create something better to bolt it on to.
It’s not even compatibility, it’s long term sustainability. In the industrial world some of the biggest waste comes when existing hardware that still works is just totally incompatible with the new stuff. You end up with businesses taking on huge unnecessary costs and throwing away lots of machinery that’ll never get recycled or re-used simply because a hardware manufacturer decides to move to a new standard that has no efficiency gains in end-use but makes them more money through maintenance contracts or add-ons. The HVAC world has been a big problem for example, with some businesses having to entirely replace their building’s whole HVAC systems minus the vents because drop-in replacements just weren’t possible.
Yep, that is annoying. At home, my furnace and the inside component of the a/c is still in just about perfect, as-new condition, but the external unit is almost on its last legs. Would be nice to just replace that, but the two sides have to be compatible with each other, so the only option is to rip out the whole system, as it was installed during Reagan’s first term, so everything is long out of production
Sir this is a Wendy’s drive thru.
For the last 10 years I drove a van constantly 10 thousands pounds at all times. It’s stupid to think this van even exists.
Pretty sure idiot followed here.
There is also the harbinger of justice. Just not right here because too young to be right too young too due.
Not sure how many times Drew has been hit in t he head. Hope he is better now.
Regardless of that, you sound like an absolute jackass in these comments.
This is why we need electrification. Breathing diesel fumes can harm brain cells.
A few, actually. Not enough to spam the comments with a reluctance to accept that new technology has plenty of valid uses.
I’ve been around enough trucking all my life to fully recognize this won’t replace every diesel delivery van out there, but it will be great for the uses for which it is intended.
This is exactly the sort of electrification we need: familiar, effective, practical, and far more efficient than what it is replacing. Idling delivery vans going electric will do far more good than swapping a 30 mile commute in a Toyota Corolla for a Chevy Bolt.
Just wrong have you driven a van?
neat