Will they? points discussed there,
Extra battery - cost
Fast charging
Heavy trucks consumes more diesel
Switch to Electric will save more
& positive aspect for climate change
Fewer chargers would be needed then for cars due to concentrating them on highly travelled routes and shipping points? What if 10 trucks are waiting to use 1 charger? See, I read story.
It talks about fast charging infrastructure is needed for trucks at key destinations.
Just imagine separate facilities for them with massive counters.
don’t bother on that.
Don’t bother on what ?
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In Europe, maybe… Truckers can drive for 4.5 hours and must break for 45 min. That requires, by my rough calculations, a 700 kW-hr battery. Basically, 10-15x the size of those used in EV cars just to run the truck for 4.5 hours. To recharge that battery to 80% in 45 minutes takes a roughly 800 kW-hr charge rate (BIG wires!) to get another 3.6 hours. Since the driver can drive another 4.5 hours, an even bigger battery (say 800 or so) is required to maximize driving hours.
In the US, a driver can run 8 hours with a 30 minute break and then another 8 hour drive, and the trucks are larger, so the battery needs to be MUCH, MUCH larger. Figure at least 1400 kW-hrs would be needed. At that point, it would be impractical, if not impossible, to pump a 2400 kW-hr charge rate into the battery for 30 minutes to get another 8 hours of drive time allowed in the US.
2400 kW-hr is the electric usage of an average southern US home for the entire month of July. One US truck would need twice this much in one single day.
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“What if 10 trucks are waiting to use 1 charger?”
What if 10 trucks are USING 10 chargers??? 8000 to 24,000 kW-hrs all at once. 100 to 300 homes worth of electricity.
What if they come up with a better technology - fast charging
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The faster the charge rate, the bigger draw on the electric power system, no way to get around that. So 10 truck at 10 chargers for 10 hours each is the same as 10 trucks at 1 fast charger for one hour each, power-wise.
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My statements assume they can fast-charge at these rates right now. Fast charging doesn’t change the need for very large batteries and huge amounts of energy created SOMEwhere by some means.
Randy , I refuse to call anyone Randy boy . Here in the US battery powered large trucks will not be a possibility for years if ever. At night on the major highway between St. Louis , MO and Oklahoma City , OK you will see semi trucks one after another for miles . Also lots of freight terminals with even more trucks. As it is right now our electricity supply system can just barely handle current demands.
Vast majority of trucking in this country is short haul. Each business could setup their own charging stations. The Tesla Semi is expected to have a range of 500 miles. That should be more then enough for long haul or short haul.
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Wonder what Elon thinks standing in front of Tesla semi? He used to work 22hrs a day. 24/7. Call him anytime. He said his brain hurt from overuse. He just loves it. What did Dennis hopper say about Kurtz?
Unless you use capacitors/batteries. Charge 'em up at night when no one’s using the charging stations, then dump the power into the trucks when they arrive. Wouldn’t fix everything but would certainly reduce the need for gobs of power at once.
What if 10 trucks are waiting to use 1 diesel pump?
If the promised range of the Tesla semi is real, and not more Musk, uh… Creative embellishment (and admittedly, the cars deliver on the range promises) then that’s pretty close to the limit of what a trucker should be driving in a day. Which means it should be set up so that the trucker drives to a rest area at the end of his day, and slow-charges overnight.
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If I had a trucks for local delivery (FedEx, UPS, etc), I’d be charging them up at night and have big enough batteries to have them run all day.
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Given energy volumes @Mustangman described above… I would love to see these skyscraper-capacitors 
The energy density in capacitors is still way below the batteries, otherwise who would need the later ones.
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Me too. I was mainly thinking OTR in that last post, but for local delivery there’s almost no reason you’d need to “fill up” away from your home base / warehouse.
To me local delivery is the best first step, combining one-step charging with reducing diesel/gas emissions in the city, a major benefit. Doing that on the interstate away from cities is much less of a benefit.
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Musk is only claiming 500 miles. That is about 10 hours for a trucker currently allowed a 16 hour driving period in 16.5 hours. 500 miles is not going to work. Even worse with team driving.
Who says they have to be electric. Iowa was working on a system which stored wind energy by sealing off underground chambers and having the windmills run air pumps to pressurize them at night when power demands are low. Then you use the compressed air to drive an impeller which generates electricity. Understand that I’m not saying any of this is possible right now, but that’s ok because we don’t have a huge fleet of electric trucks right now either. 
According to what I’ve found, truckers get 11 hours worth of driving in a 14 hour work day before they have to rest for 10 hours. And there’s a mandatory half hour break that they have to take within the first 8 hours of being on duty (which does not stop the 14 hour clock), which would seem to be a good time to top the truck off if necessary.
They can work a 16 hour day if they start and finish at the same terminal, but still only 11 hours of that can be driving. And if they do that they have to have just under 3 days off before they can do it again.
So under a normal 14 hour day, 11 hours at 60mph would be 660, which means a quick topoff during the mandatory rest period should see you through to the end of the day.
And that’s just with what’s out there right now. The trucks are almost certain to gain range down the road.