Trucking like a locomotive in restored 1960s Kenworths: ELD-exempt diesel-electric innovation

We’ve got a bit of a special edition of Overdrive Radio for you this week. There’s a guest host who’s going to walk us through a conversation with Chace Barber, cofounder of Edison Motors. If Barber's name sounds familiar, you may have read Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting of some of what Barber’s been doing with a diesel-electric concept that’s similar to the way locomotives work. The system features an on-board diesel generator serving only to charge a lithium ion battery powering an electric motor capable of monster loads of both horsepower and torque.

In the case of Barber and company's prototypes, that's all inside beautiful and beautifully tough old 1960s Kenworths of the type so many owner-operators and others revere for their styling, among other attributes. 

[Related: Trucking's toughest niche? Inside log hauling, which could be on the brink of a powertrain revolution]

Log hauler, writer, and podcaster Gord Magill recently drew out more of Chace Barber’s company’s origin story and plenty about just where his electric-drive trucks stand to be best applied in the "Voice of GO(r)D" podcast.

Overdrive Radio sponsor Gord’s roots, like Barber’s, are in Canada, though Magill now calls the United States home, as our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer wrote in his Faces of the Road series talk with Magill: As noted, Barber’s Edison Motors has been making a name for itself by taking advantage of big strides in battery technology to repurpose something of an old general concept for a new application, with big potential. And it’s not exactly a hybrid diesel-electric in the manner of much of the hybrid technology in cars today, as Barber told Magill. Over-the-road trucking benefits are decidedly less than more intense applications like log hauling. Yet OTR could benefit in the form of fuel savings to the tune of a potential 5-10 percent or more.