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32 September 2018 | AutoData MANUFACTURERS » BYD The garbage truck was here and no one noticed it Corpus Saneamento e Obras has just received six 100% electric BYD trucks: it is only 3% of the total order, nothing less than two hundred units until 2023. The vehicles will be used for garbage collection. The program foresees the delivery of 21 vehicles until the end of the year, all imported from China. Its managing director, André Lima, considers that the purchase of BYD trucks “involves much more than the vehicles themselves, because it was based on the total operation cost, including fueling, maintenance and other benefits”. According to him, the vehicles in addition to the electric propulsion technology (totally silent), use a new type of compactor, more modern and that, as a whole, reduce the emitted noise by 90% in urban garbage collections. “What happens is that we have received complaints from residents claiming that the garbage truck did not pass on their street, because they did not hear the noise of the vehicle doing the service. But we always check by the GPS and confirm that the route has been totally fulfilled.” The battery has the duration of about 8 hours, the exact daily truck journey time, and is recharged in two hours. The trucks also have energy recovery system by braking. The sales director adds that the com- pany is able to complete the full sustai- nable cycle because “we actually have a unit in China to recycle all the batteries we produce. They are transformed into accumulators, which gives them a second life cycle that can last more from twenty to thirty years”. The number one priority is indeed the sale of electric buses and trucks leaving the automobiles for a second stage. In Bra- zil, BYD has the E5, a sedan that promises 300 km of battery autonomy. Imported from China, it costs R$ 230 thousand and has the taxi and corporate fleets segments as possible customers. Other activities of the brand follow a new business model: the company has, for example, no dealerships or workshops - the vehicles’ maintenance is done in par- tnership with Porto Seguro and Bosch. Roma claims that “Uber, for example, has no fleet. It uses existing resources to reali- ze its operations, and that’s what we have been doing at this beginning, we go from the same logic. Our dealerwould starve.We established these two partnerships to provi- de technical assistance instead of opening a dealership, awhole dedicated building. The dealerships are closing and diminishing in size nowadays. We see a business model for the future, completelydifferent from the last hundred years, with shared resources. We’ve lived tremendous changes in the au- tomotive industry, and soon things will not be like they are today”. Disclousure/Corpus Saneamento e Obras