This study offers a comprehensive techno-economic assessment of battery-electric trucks, accounting for battery aging in the total cost of ownership (TCO) model. Due to the pressing regulations regarding emissions, battery electric vehicles are emerging as a solution for trucks, especially in Europe. Given the profit-oriented perspective of the customers purchasing these vehicles and the high uncertainty surrounding the cost-effectiveness of battery-electric trucks, several studies have focused on estimating their TCO.
However, these studies overlook or overly simplify the impact of battery aging.
This work introduces cost terms associated with aging, quantified over the vehicle's lifetime through an empirical battery degradation model. These often neglected costs include payload loss, battery residual value, and battery replacement.
A case study was developed with a truck from VECTO group 9 for regional delivery missions, considering different payloads and battery pack sizes. To assess the importance of battery size, costs were divided into two groups, i.e., battery-independent and battery-dependent costs. Battery-dependent costs vary with battery size, including purchase price, energy carrier, time penalty, residual value, payload loss, and battery replacement. In addition to battery aging and replacement costs, the results highlight that the energy carrier cost is one of the most critical parameters in economic evaluation. In particular, different assumptions about the utilization ratio strongly affect that cost term and, hence, the cost-optimal battery size.