Photo: Lunaz
Lunaz has unveiled what it describes to be the world's first upcycled industrial electric vehicle. The company uses the UEV acronym to describe its creation, which was revealed after the completion of the first funding round for the company that was established back in 2018 and managed to raise $200 million.
While Lunaz was previously known for converting luxury vehicles to electric drive, their latest product is a refuse truck, or a garbage truck if we want to get to what most people refer to these vehicles in real life. The idea is that most of the existing refuse trucks have a diesel engine to power them, even though they are not meant to travel long distances in a single drive, but rather go through predefined routes through cities.
In the UK and Europe, or just in the U.S. alone, Lunaz estimates that there are about 80 million units of trucks like the one they converted to electric drive. Instead of just scrapping old vehicles and building new ones, the British company manages to save a claimed 80 percent of embedded carbon by “upcycling” industrial vehicles like these.
The company has laid out plans for a production hub in Silverstone, where it will also have an engineering and design hub. The facility will employ 350 people, and it will be capable of delivering 1,100 UEVs per year. Last summer, David Beckham invested in Lunaz and he reportedly acquired a ten percent stake in the company.
The first upcycled truck is based on the Mercedes-Benz Econic platform, which is popular on a global scale in this kind of application, but also other industrial use cases. Each upcycled truck is treated to a full bare-metal restoration. Customers will receive a vehicle that will essentially be factory-new, although its chassis and body were no longer new.
The upcycling process involves upgrading all components of the vehicle, including things like seats, switchgear, and passive safety equipment. The upgrades were planned after consulting with fleet operators and drivers.
Moreover, the vehicles will get different sized batteries, depending on the duties planned for them, which would reduce costs when compared to the acquisition of a new truck.
The folks over at Lunaz have not specified how much it would cost to have a truck upcycled, and it is unclear if each customer will have to send their truck over to be upcycled, or if the “donor” vehicles will be obtained from different customers, and the entire process will be comparable to a buy-back situation.
In the UK and Europe, or just in the U.S. alone, Lunaz estimates that there are about 80 million units of trucks like the one they converted to electric drive. Instead of just scrapping old vehicles and building new ones, the British company manages to save a claimed 80 percent of embedded carbon by “upcycling” industrial vehicles like these.
The company has laid out plans for a production hub in Silverstone, where it will also have an engineering and design hub. The facility will employ 350 people, and it will be capable of delivering 1,100 UEVs per year. Last summer, David Beckham invested in Lunaz and he reportedly acquired a ten percent stake in the company.
The first upcycled truck is based on the Mercedes-Benz Econic platform, which is popular on a global scale in this kind of application, but also other industrial use cases. Each upcycled truck is treated to a full bare-metal restoration. Customers will receive a vehicle that will essentially be factory-new, although its chassis and body were no longer new.
The upcycling process involves upgrading all components of the vehicle, including things like seats, switchgear, and passive safety equipment. The upgrades were planned after consulting with fleet operators and drivers.
Moreover, the vehicles will get different sized batteries, depending on the duties planned for them, which would reduce costs when compared to the acquisition of a new truck.
The folks over at Lunaz have not specified how much it would cost to have a truck upcycled, and it is unclear if each customer will have to send their truck over to be upcycled, or if the “donor” vehicles will be obtained from different customers, and the entire process will be comparable to a buy-back situation.
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