Ohio-based Horizon Motors wants to do things differently with its upcoming lineup of Class 3-8 EV commercial trucks.
Instead of doing the usual plug in and charge method, Horizon wants to replace a depleted truck battery with a fully charged one. Could this work in the U.S.?
It's certainly possible - just look at China where an estimated 30,000 heavy commercial vehicles with swappable batteries were sold last year.
Clean Trucking Senior Editor Jay Traugott spoke to Horizon Motors CEO Sean Jones at the 2025 ACT Expo in Anaheim, California about his company's upcoming lineup and how it could possible change how we charge and operate battery-electric rigs.
Jay Traugott:
I had like to show you Horizon Motors. They are doing battery swapping and we're about to learn more about what these trucks can do and what some of the competition cannot.
Sean Jones:
When we first started doing this, we knew that we were cab and chassis manufacturers, so we talked to the municipalities, said, what do you need? They said, we need tow trucks, garbage trucks, street sweepers, dump trucks. And so we went ahead and started building completed vehicles. Now municipalities and other general contractors can buy a finished electric vehicle immediately.
Jay Traugott:
What class of truck is this? Right here.
Sean Jones:
This is a class eight semi-truck. Class eight. This is a big boy, 80,000 pound combined vehicle weight. Everybody wants to go to battery electric vehicles on the heavy trucks, the class eight trucks.
Sean Jones:
But the problem is even this truck with 512 kilowatts of battery power can only go 250 miles. So therefore it's pretty much a local delivery truck. It takes a long time to charge up that much battery. If you have that much battery, you have to charge up. You're looking at the amount of power that American home would take for an entire month that you're trying to pump into this thing into an hour. So our solution is battery swap, which is something they've been doing on heavy equipment like forklifts for years. So there's nothing actually terribly innovative about it. It's just that it hasn't been yet done with these heavy trucks. So our battery swap system, the truck driver pulls into the swap station. The station automatically lifts up, unscrews these batteries, takes them away, puts in a whole new set. The whole thing takes less than five minutes faster.
You could fill a truck up with diesel. The driver never leaves their seat in the cab truck and away you go. Now we have a small system that we're developing that could be put in almost any warehouse where basically it's a cart that goes underneath, lifts up, unscrews the battery, and then swaps it out that way so you wouldn't have to have the full giant battery swap system. Also, what we do is on all of our bigger trucks, we have it set up so you have two charge points. So the standard US charging system is called CCCs one and it can handle up to 250 kilowatts of power. Now if you have two charge points, that means you can pump out 500 kilowatts of power, which is fill this battery up and ride around an hour. ChargePoint has a ton of high capacity charge. You can just pull this thing right up, plug in two of them an hour later you're ready to go.
Jay Traugott:
So basically you don't even have to necessarily swap the battery. You could still go to a regular charging station with these?
Sean Jones:
Yes, yes.
Sean Jones:
By having two cts, one chargers, you can charge really quickly.
Jay Traugott
Right
Jay Traugott
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Sean Jones:
This is a baby tow truck. This is class four. We also have class five, six, and seven on all of our smaller trucks, the class 3, 4, 5, the battery is actually mounted in the middle between the frame rails so the entire outside is available. So in this particular case, we built a tow truck and a vocational truck. They would want to have a big toolbox in this area. By putting the battery in the middle, you free up all the space for whatever they might need.
Jay Traugott:
And it looks like outside from the battery swapping, it's still a very typical battery electric truck chassis,
Sean Jones:
Right? It is. Trucks are very much standardized. The frames are always very the same, the width, and so it's very easy to build a battery swap system that will work on multiple different trucks. Hopefully what will eventually happen is other body billers will realize that yeah, it can be done and then start following after.
Jay Traugott:
So when the battery swapping station say other companies start doing that too, will they only be unique to Horizon Motors or are they going to be something a little more universal? We are trying very
Sean Jones:
Hard to work with the other companies that are starting to do battery swap so that we all have the same standards so we don't end up with something goofy like Tesla and CCS one chargers and other things. I think that we can probably all come to an agreement on what the standards should be. Hopefully we will. It just would seem so silly to have three different battery swap standards.
Jay Traugott:
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