Battery maker Electrovaya is partnering with diesel-to-EV converter Janus Electric as the latter moves into the North American market.
The pair have entered a strategic supply agreement for initial purchase orders worth approximately $26 million, according to an Oct. 28 news release.
“We're going to be ramping up deliveries starting this month and then carrying on scaling that,” Electrovaya CEO Raj Das Gupta told Trucking Dive in a Nov. 6 video interview.
Initial deliveries mainly involve the Los Angeles-area market, he said.
Janus Electric, headquartered in Fountaindale in New South Wales, Australia, is moving into California and Texas as well as Toronto-area markets with its technology that converts diesel trucks into electric trucks that can have batteries quickly swapped in and out.
“Most of these early applications we're shipping to are port-drayage applications, where it goes from the port to the warehouse, back and forth,” Das Gupta said. “It’s a fairly straightforward route, and it works well.”
Electrovaya, headquartered in Mississauga in Ontario, Canada, has built out equipment for a gigafactory in Jamestown, New York, and plans to bring the plant online in 2027, Das Gupta said.
The lithium-ion battery technology and manufacturing company’s largest customer is Amazon, and the pair executed a deal in July for the e-commerce giant to potentially buy $280 million worth of Electroyaya product through 2036.
Electrovaya has deployed its technology in about 35,000 battery systems with a perfect safety record, Das Gupta said, emphasizing that safety is in the company’s DNA. With heavy-use warehousing applications such as an Amazon distribution center, batteries are cycled all day long, which translates well into safety standards required with Class 8 trucks, he said.
“We want to make sure the product works perfectly” before “scaling it in a responsible way,” Das Gupta said.
