Here at The Autopian, we’re big fans of electric vans. From the Mercedes-Benz eSprinter to the BrightDrop, electric last-mile delivery vehicles not only perform their low-speed jobs efficiently, they can also make your neighborhood a little bit quieter and nicer. We’re also fans of weird older cars, so when a friend tipped me off to a strange 15-year-old Freightliner electric step van with Tesla power on Facebook Marketplace in Los Angeles, it had my full attention.
It all starts with Freightliner, specifically the Freightliner Custom Chassis Corporation. During the Recession era, this division of Daimler was working on all kinds of electrification from hybridization to full-on EVs, and in 2010, it unveiled a chassis for the latter that was a variant of the MT-45 WIV step van architecture.
Of course, Freightliner Custom Chassis Corporation, or FCCC for short, couldn’t do it all. Sure, it could do the girders that make up the main chassis rails, and the suspension, and the steering, but electric power? That’s something Freightliner didn’t have a handle on at the time, so it tapped Tesla. As Wired reported in 2010:
The battery is essentially the same as the Roadster’s 53 kilowatt-hour pack. Each module contains 2,000 cells and weighs 300 pounds. The cells are the same kind you’ll find in your laptop — 18650 lithium cobalt oxide. Plug the truck into a 220-volt line and it’s good to go in six to eight hours.
Damn, 53 kWh is less energy than in many current compact electric crossover battery packs, yet 15 years ago, it was good enough for an entire step van. Freightliner Custom Chassis Corporation claimed a range of 100 miles, and while that seems unimpressive today, it would’ve been entirely adequate for urban deliveries on routes with relatively low speeds.
Granted, relatively low speeds may have also been preferred given the rest of the motive power situation. See, Freightliner tapped Enova for an inverter, a charger, and a motor, and the electric drive unit was only capable of kicking out 120 kW of power. That’s not quite 161 horsepower, in a chassis with a gross vehicle weight rating of between 14,000 and 19,500 pounds.
A few months after the debut of the chassis, step van coachbuilder Morgan Olson whipped up a reasonably streamlined body for it. With soft edges, a rounded nose, and a one-piece windshield, it definitely looks better optimized than traditional step vans, most of which look like they were styled exclusively using rulers. Unfortunately, this body would be largely conceptional. Future Morgan Olson electric vans would look nothing like this, meaning you’re looking at a sort of functional prototype.
The result is one neat-looking electric commercial vehicle that genuinely seems like the missing link between an old-school breadbox step van and something like Chevrolet’s BrightDrop. Of course, there is one little problem with this particular Freightliner electric step van. See, it doesn’t quite work right. As the Facebook Marketplace listing states:
It’s not running. Can’t get anyone to figure it out yet. Not reading the batteries from gauges . I believe the low voltage battery solenoid has isolated the batteries. Batteries need to be charged individually to activate solenoids.
While we don’t know much about the history of this exact Tesla-powered step van, batteries don’t take kindly to prolonged periods of disuse, and early modern electric car tech was, well, sub-optimal compared to what we have today. Still, with those 18650 cells being shared with a Tesla Roadster and some third-party support existing around those original Roadsters, getting this van going again doesn’t seem impossible.
However, even if this step van were functional, you’d likely still encounter some weirdness. This van appears to use the weird four-pin charging connector from the Tesla Roadster, so you’ll need an adapter like the CAN-SR to plug into a Tesla mobile connector or the CAN-JR to plug into a standard J1772 connector.
Is it cool? As a weird facet of automotive history, absolutely. Is it $60,000 worth of cool? That’s a far more difficult question to answer. After all, the Rivian Delivery 500 is an electric step van with 161 miles of range, 320 horsepower, DC fast charging with a normal connector, a warranty, and a $79,900 price tag. Sure, it may only have a GVWR of 9,500 pounds, and Rivian’s only selling them to corporations, but now that every company can buy as few as one Rivian van at a time, what’s really stopping you from creating an LLC to buy one?
Still, for the right vehicle historian, this unusual van might be just the thing to round out an eclectic collection, or even a collection of early modern EVs. If this isn’t proof that you’ll never know what you’ll find on Facebook Marketplace, I don’t know what is.
[Hat-tip to Cody Belichesky!]
Top graphic image: Facebook Marketplace Seller
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
The Mercedes eSprinter Is The Best Benz Electric Vehicle And It’s Not Even Close
-
America Could Get This Cool Electric Hyundai Van As A Chevy
-
The Ram ProMaster EV Looks Like A Delightfully Boring Electric Van
-
Brightdrop Zevo 600: GM’s Electric Delivery Van Proves That The Future Is Cooler Than We Ever Imagined
-
Your Next Shipment Of Greasy Car Parts Might Arrive In An Electric FedEx Delivery Van
Please send tips about cool car things to tips@theautopian.com. You could even win a prize!
And here I thought the FCCC was a federal bureau for regulating hardcore communicators.
On a slightly more serious note, has anyone told Robert from Aging Wheels about this thing? This sounds like something right up his alley.
It’s definitely neat.There are alot of strange low production or prototype vans of that era. Half the time you need someone that worked for them to figure out how to fix it. Or you have to find obsure software from a vendor that went out of business a decade or more ago and hope you can connect to the bus. There might be enough out there on the roasters and guys fixing them that it could survive.
Super cool, but needs a 0 dropped from the price.
(tangentially, I looked at electrifying my step van with Rivian parts and uh, don’t have the ~$100k for batteries and motors. So maybe it’s a good deal for the tech?)
Somehow, it gives me sort of a mini proto-Tesla Semi vibe, but that could just be due to the dictates of aerodynamics, like how the DC-9 and ARJ21 ended up looking so similar