Walking home the other day, I thought 'wouldn’t it be great if we could cheaply and easily boost fuel efficiency of big old trucks and SUVs by adding in a power-assist hybrid motor.' Once again, someone has beat me to the idea, and created a start-up company. For $60 000 USD the company HEVT will make your Ford F-150 a plug-in hybrid electric, boosting fuel efficiency to 5.7 L/100km (41 MPG) from the typical 14.7 L/100km (16 MPG), for the first 50 km (30 miles) which is what the average North American drives in a day. After that, the heavily modded pick-up truck should get 11.2 L/100km (21 MPG). I thought this price point seemed prohibitively expensive for most F-150 drivers. The big question is, how long does it take for this costly hybrid to pay off?
Assuming you drive the average 50 km/day, you will be saving 4.5 L in gas every day. At $1.30 CAN / L, that is a savings of nearly $6 daily. This means it would take 28 years to pay for this fuel economizing add-on (probably a lot sooner if you consider where gas prices are heading). But I have a feeling that F-150 owners drive their trucks more than 50 km/day…this is a utilitarian vehicle, built for doing work. A quick check on autotrader shows that indeed, most F-150 owners drive about 100 km/day. If we add on the extra savings of driving past the all-electric range of 50 km, we bring our savings up to $9.50 daily (the more you drive the more you save!). This brings the pay off time down to 17 years.
It seems the only reason that someone would pay $60 000 USD to make their pick-up truck a hybrid would be to simply reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since it is not an economically viable option at this price. However, HEVT is still a start-up company; the cost could be reduced after manufacturing is scaled up beyond a pilot program. More realistically, the price of gas will continue to increase and this retro-fit will almost definitely pay off much sooner.
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