To provide needs of food, clothing and infrastructure for growing population of the world, off-highway vehicles such as those in construction, agriculture and commercial landscaping are moving towards electrification for enhanced precision, productivity, efficiency and sustainability. It has also paved way to adopt autonomy of these vehicles to address challenges like skilled labor shortage for timely and efficient execution. There are many challenges and opportunities of electrification in off-highway domain, be it through completely replacing engine in vehicles or efficiency improvements using hybrid architecture for powertrain and auxiliary power demands, electrification being key enabler precision and speed of the complex operations, automation of complex operation.
This paper explains the need of electrification in electric off-highway vehicles and shows how the electrification solves the current challenges faced by off-highway heroes like farmers, construction site owners and workers, commercial lawn and golf turf owners and workers, etc. It first discusses the challenges faced by this industry in terms of scarcity of skilled labor, changing weather conditions, operator fatigue and ever-increasing pressure of productivity, uptime and cost. Then paper presents why electrification is key to solve these issues and how increasing adoption of such technologies becomes relevant .It further explains some architecture/application case studies in farm equipment to cater needs of complex operations like crop care and harvesting, maneuvering through different soils, lands as well as doing repeated and complex operations at construction sites and other type of off-highway applications like oil fracking industry, trucks, water desalination, etc. This case studies describe how electrification has directly enabled more productivity through speed and precision, less operator fatigue, fuel efficiency, farm input efficiency and has become enabler for autonomy.