I breezed into the NAPA Truck Show in Christchurch in late November 2022. A two-day event, Friday was poorly attended I felt. Saturday would be huge, they said, but I wasn’t available...

Lots of impressive shiny trucks adorned with chrome, colour, marker and driving lights, stacks of stacks, intakes and truck-bling. All immaculately dressed but obviously working rigs. Full marks to them all. 200 more were expected Saturday!

Tented sideshows (NAPA and BNT were biggies) lined the show streets, offering advice, insurance, navigation, spares, comms, accessories, tyres, servicing, office products, cranes of any sort. Jibs reached for the sky from many a corner and truck deck. There were truck driving competitions for different classes, technical presentations by experts, plenty of tucker but few eaters.

My brief was ‘check out the SEA electric truck’.  This was a fresh-as-a-daisy build, by a dedicated EV team on a Hino cab-chassis, one of about eight on the road. One has already clocked 100,000 km on road.

SEA’s 8.5t GVM (SEA 300-85 EV ) had two battery packs, one within the chassis, one beneath the cab. Motor of impressive girth, built for torque, direct drive to rear axle. A side pod held cooling for motor and electronics, another held computer, electronics and charging gear. I was very impressed by the build, very tidy and well thought out. Turned out there was also a visually similar Hyundai EV displayed.

Hyundai’s was tidy too but had the batteries in side pods, motor and controls within chassis – wrong way round I thought? Specs were similar though slightly smaller at 7.2t GVM.

Talk was that the SEA’s instant and seamless torque (1500Nm) is excellent for exiting driveways into traffic! No gear changes, no spool-down to the next one, no clutch grab! And silent...

By Geoff Anders.