Fine Engineering | Lithium batteries and TCO: the importance of analysing the overall value of an industrial vehicle

When you’re looking to buy something new or want to make a major investment, do you ever wonder what’s behind the price of what you’re buying?

We often consider only the purely economic value, which can sometimes act as the first significant obstacle to making a purchase. But if you slightly expand the aspects to consider you’ll see that behind the price label lies something that’s far more important to take into account: time.

Assessing the total long-term cost of the good or service you’re buying is an essential step in making informed, strategic purchasing choices, an assessment that’s not limited to the initial cost but rather incorporates all associated costs over the entire life of the asset, providing a clear, complete view of all economic implications of the investment.

This approach, known as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), offers a complete perspective of the real costs over time and should be your main focus when making informed purchasing decisions, especially when contemplating the choice of converting your industrial vehicles from endothermic to electric, or if already electric, from lead to lithium.

Flash Battery, an Italian company specialising for over 12 years in the design and production of customised lithium batteries for themachinery and industrial vehiclesector, carried out a comparative study on the total cost of ownership of an industrial tractor powered by diesel, lead-acid batteries and lithium batteries. The analysis was performed over ten years of use, taking into account three essential factors for comparing the overall TCO of a vehicle, namely the purchase cost, maintenance costs and the energy balance or fuel price. What did we learn?