Worried about the range of electric school buses? Do you have a Pilot or Flying J near you?
The network of over 750 travel centers across 44 states and six Canadian provinces will offer public-charging stations for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles as part of a new partnership with Volvo Trucks and Pilot Flying J, the companies jointly announced on Tuesday. The charging stations will accommodate medium- and heavy-duty vehicles of all brands.
The move comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement in September of $900 million in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program funding over the next two years to help build EV chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of highway across the country. Plans for the first round of infrastructure were approved for 33 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
In all, the federal government has allocated $7.5 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to build a nationwide network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers.
Volvo said in a statement that it is prioritizing charger placement at Pilot and Flying J centers “based on current and anticipated battery-electric truck deployment volume, customer charging needs, and patterns, and the availability of federal and state funding to support capital costs.”
The high-performance charging infrastructure to be installed at Pilot and Flying J centers is in support of Volvo’s VNR Electric Trucks that went into production earlier this year at the River Valley, Virginia plant. Volvo said that it expects half of its annual global production will consist of electric trucks by 2030.
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