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Where do you charge your wheel loader? Try the Circle K!

As more and more job sites make moves to electrify their heavy equipment assets, there have been more and more questions from those on the outside looking in about how and where those big machines get charged up – which is why I absolutely love this picture of an electric wheel loader charging up at Circle K!

Volvo Construction Equipment (CE) segment leader Gustav Bomberg took to LinkedIn recently with some absolutely fantastic pictures of the company’s L90 Electric wheel loader plugged into a 400 kW DC fast charger outside of a Circle K on a snowy morning.

“It was fun to watch people’s reactions when a wheel loader was charging outside McDonald’s,” he writes. “We charged it there, too.”

Volvo first announced the new L90 Electric wheel loader at last summer’s Volvo Days event, with dedicated electric motors for propulsion and hydraulics, enabling full available power to both systems with a faster response and shorter warm up times than conventional ICE loaders.

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The Volvo L90 Electric wheel loader features a 140 kW (~185 hp) drive motor that draws power from a 180 kWh (153 kWh available) capacity battery pack good for 4-5 hours of continuous operation across heavy applications, and up to 8 hours in lighter duty applications. The machine offers between 2 and 7 cubic meters of bucket capacity and up to 10.1 metric tonnes (~22,500 lb. tip weight) of payload capacity depending on bucket type and material.

It is, in other words, a seriously capable machine, and seeing it plugged in where people – and, especially, kids – can see it and ask about it and get excited about it, is seriously cool.

This first Volvo L90 Electric delivered to a customer was recently put to work at a groundbreaking for a new data center (which, let’s face it, the world needs like a hole in the head), providing all the flexibility and functionality of a diesel machine with lower on-site emissions and significantly reduced noise.

Electrek’s Take


L90 Electric by Fabio G.; via Gustav Boberg.

Volvo CE has one of the most comprehensive lineups of electric equipment in the business, and they’re constantly expanding it. That lineup now includes mobile charging solutionstrailered battery energy storage systems, and on-site power generation.

THAT SAID, it’s a bit disingenuous (albeit smart) to see Volvo plugging in at a 400 kW DCFC knowing that it can “only” charge at 120 kW (10-80% in under an hour), but great photographs are literally all about the optics. Fair play to them.


SOURCE | IMAGES: Fabio G.; via Gustav Boberg at Volvo CE.


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Author

Avatar for Jo Borrás Jo Borrás

I’ve been in and around the auto industry for over thirty years, and have written for a number of well-known outlets like CleanTechnica, Popular Mechanics, the Truth About Cars, and more. You can catch me at Electrek Daily’s Quick Charge, The Heavy Equipment Podcast, or chasing my kids around Oak Park, IL