The “Break it Down” Blog

Robert Heron sends in an interesting bit of news: UPS has announced the adoption of Hydraulic Hybrid Vehicles (HHV) for it’s delivery truck line. Trials begin with 7 trucks total and deployed in Minneapolis where they will be monitored daily and the hydraulic engine design tweaked and maintained as data is collected about the performance of the vehicles.

Interestingly enough, UPS was approached by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2 years ago to trial the technology; which they had.

The performance results of the hydraulic hybrid technology so far has been impressive, netting:

• 50% improvement in fuel economy
• 30% reduction in CO2 emissions

The hydraulic engine works very similarly to the “Air Car” design we covered back in May (and is being commercialized in the US by Zero Pollution Motors for those interested). More specifically the diesel engine is used to simply re-pressurize the hydraulic system in the vehicle which replaces the classic drive train and is used to propel it forward.

Regenerative-braking (a system of recapturing braking energy popularized in electric-hybrids) is also available in the hydraulic design.

It seems that green vehicles are nothing new to UPS, already using an existing 1600-vehicle fleet of a mix of all sorts of hybrid and alternative fuel technologies like “full-electric, hybrid electric, compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied natural gas (LNG) and propane-powered trucks”.

Given that the cost of these vehicles is likely much more than a cheap diesel delivery truck, I have to applaud UPS’s efforts in sampling all these alternative approaches to fuel to try and find what works best for the company, but also providing a hell of a lot of “real world” testing of these alternative approaches as well. Hopefully this information will feed directly back into a commercialization cycle so you and I can start seeing some interesting alternative fuel cars on the road soon.

Check out the Press Release.