The electric semi truck market seems to be heating up in Texas, with Wen Han’s upstart Windrose brand set to deploy 10 fully electric Class 8 trucks on the I-35 freight corridor between Dallas and Laredo en route to Mexico (but there are some caveats).
In a press release titled, “DSV Partners with Allogic and Greenspace E-Mobility for 10 Windrose Electric Trucks on the I-35 Corridor,” Windrose announced plans for 10 of its incredibly capable R700 long-haul electric semi trucks to begin operating on the Greenspace “Electric Highway,” a dedicated network of Green Hub charging stations under development along Highway 85 in Mexico and I-35 in Texas that connects the cities of Monterrey and Dallas via Laredo and San Antonio. It’s positive news for the electric truck startup, but comes with some pretty big caveats.
The first is that Green Hubs’ stations aren’t yet complete, with Phase 1 of the buildout targeting 4 Green Hubs locations energized and operational on the Texas side of things by Q4 of this year, with high-power charging from 400-1,000 kW on up available throughout the proposed route sometime thereafter. Once built, each Green Hubs location would also feature on-site solar generation and battery storage for enhanced reliability that’s, “independent of grid constraints on one of North America’s highest-volume freight routes.”
Windrose’s material says that Phase 2 of the planned project is targeted for completion in 2027, and will extend infrastructure into Monterrey and the Colombia–Nuevo León international bridge crossing to complete what the company is calling, “the first fully electric cross-border freight route between Mexico and the United States,” with and additional 25 Windrose R700 electric semi trucks planned for deployment along the route.
Optimistic, but cautious
The second big caveat is that, while news of the planned deployment is certainly positive (and consistent with reports that Allogic received the first customer delivery of a Windrose R700 back in April), nothing in the official press release explicitly states that DSV, Allogic, Greenspace, or any other party has actually placed an order for those 10 trucks. That omission matters, especially in light of the fact that Greenspace E-Mobility is acting both as the charging infrastructure provider and as, “the authorized distributor of Windrose Technology electric trucks in Panama, Mexico, and Texas.”
As the release is written, it’s not entirely clear which company will ultimately own the trucks, or whether the announcement represents a firm vehicle order, a deployment agreement, or the next phase of an ongoing pilot by Allogic, DSV, or some other third (fourth?) party.
That said, I’m pulling a bit of an Agent Mulder here and choosing to believe – and when the trucks start rolling out of Dallas on their way South of the border, they’ll displace more than 1,500 tons of harmful carbon emissions, so I hope Wen can make it happen.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Windrose.ai.
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