Chicago City, Minnesota – Electric vehicle startup Zeus Electric Chassis has recently signed a lease for a production facility to manufacture its customizable medium-duty trucks for commercial and government fleets. Medium-duty work truck chassis developed by the company will be able to be outfitted with tools for a variety of applications such as delivery, service or maintenance and have been developed over the past eight years by automotive engineer Robert Grinstead.
Aiming towards the class 4, 5 and 6 medium-duty vehicle market, the company recently closed its first sale with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, expecting to produce five of their new vehicles at a price of $1.2 million by the end of the month.
“There’s not a lot of competitors that are out there with an all-electric, purpose-built, medium-duty truck that’s designed to easily integrate different configurations with work packages on them,” said Mark Rawson, Chief Operating Officer of the California Mobility Center, a paid consultant and early supporter of Zeus that works to connect electric vehicle startups with California fleet owners.
“I think it’s pretty cutting edge,” said Casey Fallon, Director of Supply Chain and Fleet Operations for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Zeus offered the utility a fully electric vehicle with all the same configuration options standard with conventional medium-duty work vehicles. “It just really made sense.”
Vehicle customizability, known as ‘upfitting’ in the industry, is an important feature that differentiates Zeus from its competitors. Many small fleets look to have a variety of vehicles for different applications, requiring different tools and add-ons that can be easily outfitted to Zeus’s chassis, which will be produced at the company’s new facility in the St. Paul suburb of White Bear Lake.
Zeus aims for its vehicles to have a battery range of approximately 160 miles, achieved through customized batteries for particular applications.
“I think they’re going to have a heads-up on the market as it develops,” said Rawson. Government and commercial fleet owners in California, in particular, are looking for electric work vehicles to help reduce emissions and meet climate targets. “You’ve got a motivated customer base.”
At the moment, Zeus faces limited industry competition, with similar competitors such as Motiv Power Systems, Lightning eMotors and BYD retrofitting gas vehicles to electric as opposed to developing their own chassis. Other companies offer truck models aimed towards niche markets that fall outside of Zeus’s targets, however looking into the future, mainstream auto manufacturers will begin to offer medium-duty electric options.
“Sooner or later they will focus on these specialty vehicles, but right now, if we focus on the specialty vehicles, we can establish a market and we can establish our brand,” said Zeus Electric CEO Wayne Kugel, a former executive at supercomputer pioneer Cray Research.
The company’s 2021 goals consist of continuing to work with SMUD, developing vehicles for their fleet before working with other companies.