last time I’ve seen some implementation of this idea with reasonable capacity discussed - it was toying with underground nuclear explosions to create the chambers with enough capacity to be usable… and practice did not confirm the theory, even in carefully selected geology
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An alternate option to consider for OTR trucks, make the battery removable. You get to the end of your battery, pull into a truck stop, swap the depleted battery out and get it on the charger for another truck to take hours later, you take a full one, and you’re back on the road again. It would require all electric trucks to use the same batteries, but once they figure out which works the best, then you could standardize the entire trucking fleet.
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Correction… end of the first shift.
What incentive does a fleet owner have to switch his fleet over to these quarter-million dollar “one shift wonders” that cannot be used for team drivers, or multiple-shift short-haul work? Owners don’t want to see that much money sitting idle at the chargers especially with the advent of self-driving trucks.
All the proposed solutions use built-in batteries like the cars, not swappable batteries like most forklifts. Most electric forklifts are designed with swap-able batteries because they do work 24-7 or at least have the capability if needed.
edit: @pyrolord314 just beat me to the removable battery point!
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That would be a HUGE battery, a couple of tons, maybe?
Edit - I did some checking, make that six tons, 12,000 lbs, a LOT to swap!
more sustainable energy generators solar/wind have to come out.
Perhaps a short tandem trailer?
The potential of hybrid drive seems much more logical for heavy cross country trucking compared to EV.
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That is going to cut into the cargo capacity a LOT.
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What will Amazon do? They are creating an EV delivery fleet of 10,000 vehicles in the next ten years. I guess they will have a very large charging network, but will it be centralized at the fulfillment center, or will they have charging stations around town to allow them to stay out longer? Maybe they will buy spots on someone else’s charging network. I haven’t read anything about it, except that they will need a whole lot of charging stations.
24,000 kW-hrs delivered in 30 minutes is 48,000 kilowatts of power, or about 64,000 horsepower. I’m visualizing something like this behind the charging station.
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And don’t forget, you will need a lot of extra capacity in those batteries for mountains and bad weather. I would not want to be driving someplace where is is 25 below or worse in a truck that has run out of range and now has no way to heat the cab.
14 hours is the maximum working time for OTR drivers now with 11 of it driving. When I retired it was 10 driving but 15 hours on duty. I had not read about a 16 hour day for local drivers.
Moving freight from port to warehouse shouldn’t take 14 hours in the UK. There are many truck routes that could be completed with an electric tractor. The trucks in use today will be serviceable for 20 years, should there be a transition to electric it will take decades.
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Well that definitely puts a damper on that idea…It’s not impossible, though. You’d need a forklift to swap them, but the size is definitely going to be an issue. Did the concepts for the electric Tesla trailers mention where the battery pack is going to be?
I think short haul drivers will be the first to embrace this technology. It’s not going to be an all or nothing approach. I’m sure it’ll be slowly implemented into a fleets network.
This is the key…RIGHT NOW. This is a new emerging technology that’s changing very fast. New players are coming in every year. There is roughly 200 BILLION dollars being invested into this technology world wide this year alone. The future is extremely bright. Utility companies are also investing into this. They know it’s coming and are looking at ways to fulfill the demand. It’s not going to happen RIGHT NOW. It’ll take YEARS if not decades to accomplish…Comparing what’s available RIGHT NOW to what it will be is just plain stupid.
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Exactly. Y’know, my great grandma was born in 1902, so when she was a kid she still saw all delivery work being done with horse-drawn wagons. I bet there were discussions when she was young that said things like “but where will we ever get enough gas to fuel these new-fangled motor-wagon things? And how will we get it to the trucks? That’s a lot of barrels to ship in!”
Thing is, when something is viable and desired, we tend to figure out how to develop infrastructure to make it possible. Sure, charging stations capable of giant outputs of electricity seem far out of reach now, but then in 1902 it was probably hard to believe that we could possibly make enough gas to replace all those horses, and now we’re doing 40 million barrels a day.
The charging infrastructure will come. It’s already on the way. Back in the EV1 days you had to really think about where you drove those things because you couldn’t charge them, pretty much anywhere. Now there are EV chargers dotting the whole nation, and people can, and do, take cross-country road trips in their electric cars without any real difficulties.
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@MikeInNH and @shadowfax make the right points here. Our grandparents saw massive technological change over their lifetimes. Why wouldn’t we expect similar?
There are no EV semi-trucks right now. None exist. There are essentially no electric delivery vans right now. Tesla was supposed to begin delivering semi-tractor EVs this year (yeah, right!) and Amazon is planning 10,000 EV delivery vans over the next 10 years. 1000 a year? Seems wildly low to me.
We will see this happen. The best first cases are single-shift short-haul delivery trucks from a logistics center with its own chargers - like Amazon. Or local trash trucks. Or store delivery trucks. And the total operating costs of the vehicle matter. If it is in line with IC trucks, it will happen. Right now it isn’t.
This will happen slowly given the 15 - 20 year life of heavy trucks. Slowly enough for the infrastructure to grow to supply the needs.
I doubt it will be an all-or-nothing solution as long-haul trucks will still be diesel for a while. Maybe plug-in hybrid diesel-electrics. Maybe hydrogen fuel-cell powered electric versions as an interim. Short-haul trucks will teach the manufacturers how to build the right product, the buyer what to expect and show the infrastructure market that pay-chargers are a viable business.
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Fleets could use the stage coach model, pull into a terminal, hitch up a fresh tractor.
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[quote="shadowfax,
Exactly. Y’know, my great grandma was born in 1902, so when she was a kid she still saw all delivery work being done with horse-drawn wagons. I bet there were discussions when she was young that said things like “but where will we ever get enough gas to fuel these new-fangled motor-wagon things? And how will we get it to the trucks? That’s a lot of barrels to ship in!”
My grandmother was born in 1904 the Wright brothers flew the first airplane in 1903. I would think there was also discussions about the future of the flying machine,
In The UK, home delivery of milk has been done by battery-powered trucks for decades. As more people have transitioned to buying their milk at supermarkets, the number of these vehicles has decreased, but there are still a fair number of them out on local roads daily. They refer to these vehicles as “milk floats”, and here are a few pics:
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