EV opportunities for industry

The future is promising for makers of off-road EVs.

Electric Vehicles in Construction, Agriculture and Mining 2020-2030 from IDTechEx addresses a huge opportunity.

Vehicles for construction, agriculture and mining (CAM) have become one industry served by giants such as Caterpillar, CNH Industrial, John Deere and Komatsu, but also small businesses making the new requirements such as drone systems and weeding and mine survey robots.

“The giants in CAM vehicles are cautiously going electric, but they should learn from the start-ups and the tier one suppliers plunging into the world of precision farming, drones, swarming robots and the moveable zero-emission microgrids to charge them,” IDTechEx chief executive Raghu Das says.

“For instance, parts and systems suppliers Cummins and Dana Corporation are making many shrewd acquisitions while exiting yesterday’s technologies,” he says.

”CAM giants doing the same instead of defending dying diesel genset and vehicle businesses can grow past US$100 billion in 10 years, overtaking shrinking car companies in the process. This industry awaits a Tesla or VW in commitment to electric vehicles. It will roast the others.”

Coping with tougher locations, tougher pollution regulation and lack of staff are part of the new CAM reality, Das says.

“But it is being solved by plenty of investment, radically new technology and strong demand for both new vehicles and moveable zero-emission sun/wind/water microgrids to charge them, all addressed in the report. This is the opposite of the perfect storm faced by the car industry. This is an ‘idea whose time has come’. ”

The report’s executive summary and conclusions cover 40 pages. It also gives 22 primary conclusions split into industry, regional and technology related.

Primary areas of development are revealed by application and technology and heroic advances from deep mining to vertical farming each without people.

Solar driven agribots will replace poisons. The forecasts 2020-2030 are for more than 19 vehicle categories each by number, price and market value. Price parity with diesel is predicted by type and year.

The introduction looks at industry and technology commonalities, the pollution issues, the many drivers of electrification, powertrain types and trends, including how hybrids are sometimes needed as an interim stage.

Chapter 6 gives a thorough treatment of what are now the key enabling technologies of CAM EVs – electric motors/motor-generators, traction battery systems, supercapacitors, power electronics, solar bodywork and zero-emission transportable microgrids for charging.

Add to that autonomy, a subject now so important that Chapter 7 covers autonomy in action with many CAM vehicles and Chapter 8 covers the robotic technology in detail.

IDTechEx hosts Electric Vehicles Materials in Berlin on May 13-14.

A 30% attendee discount applies until February 20.

Contact research@IDTechEx.com or visit www.IDTechEx.com/cam for more.