Re: electrified overland cargo. I'm not fully current on details, but my understandings are that:
- High range usually occurs at low speed and over carefully-selected (e.g., flat) routes. There was a bus range-record set a while back which involved a stripped empty bus running at about 20 kph / 13 mph constant speed. Problem being of course that this is almost the precise opposite of a typical operation cycle especially for urban transit. Commute transit (with its dual morning/evening cycle) or intercity (presuming reasonable range) might be viable. Trolly busses which draw current from fixed infrastructure remain the presently viable electrification option, though perhaps with a small onboard battery capacity to move between conductor segments.
- High-load electrified cargo seems to be based on moving loads consistently downhill while relying on electrified traction for the return, unloaded, uphill segment. I'm aware of a quarry which operates such vehicles, and proposals for lumber shipments. These are effectively gravity powered with regenerative braking and electric storage. Again, a special use case.
- I vaguely recall a European trial using an EV cargo lorry for short-haul deliveries on the order of 4--6 km, which is where my "single-digit" range comment comes from. Not turning up a reference, though I believe that was by either Volvo or BMW.
- Gross vehicle weight is a major constraint for trucking, cuts directly into revenue-generating cargo margins (literally, load that pays), and remains a critical concern for EVs. Again, private passenger vehicles which already have a poor payload/vehicle mass ratio are an easy problem to solve here, and despite that, passenger EVs run heavy compared to ICE vehicles. For either mass transit or cargo freight, where payload mass is far higher relative to vehicle mass, there's far less latitude.
- Aerodynamics are the other concern. Drag increases with the square of speed, and options are for low-profile high-mass loads (e.g., flatbeds and plate-steel or concrete barriers), or low-mass high-profile loads (consumer electronics, light bulk materials, etc.). Each run into issues with cargo.
And with all that, there's what EV-based overland non-tracked cargo competes with: rail, trolly-bus or trolly-truck designs, barge or shipping traffic (where available), etc.
In particular, there's been remarkably little R&D in the conventional rail sector best I can tell (outside high-speed rail). It seems to me that there ought to be considerable opportunity for much greater efficiencies in flexible, dynamic, trainset assembly and re-routing, which would provide for the efficienies of rail transport (energy consumption reduced by a factor of 5x or more per tonne/km) without the consequent challenges of battery-based transport. (This is presuming freight rail is electrified, itself a point in which the US is notably lagging.)
Rail is efficient in terms of energy but not flexibility. Melding that efficiency with the flexibility of last-mile delivery (or last 50-mile delivery) afforded by conventional trucks seems to me a real game-changer. It seems odd that nobody seems to be working on this. Large logistics operators (Amazon, WalMart, UPS, FedEx, possibly existing rail or trucking organisations) might be potential candidates, but again, there's nothing that I'm aware of.
Part of the strong push for the highway self-driving especially in trucking is that you can utilize superhighways late at night for more truck transport, and since there is vastly less consumer traffic inter-city in the US, you COULD drive the vehicles at 40 mph rather than 55-75mph.
People bash Tesla, rightly so, for their exaggerations in timelines and AI bullshit, but one place they have generally kept to their projections is battery engineering, drivetrain efficiency, performance of the vehicles. Tesla says the car does 0-60 in 2.5 seconds? Well, it does. Tesla says the car goes XXX miles in normal temperature, wind, 65 mph? Well, it does.
Here's a teslarati story about the 500 mile trip (teslarati is about as pro-tesla as it gets, but what I care about it the route and battery levels that are there:
There are youtubes as well. Now, it is an EV land demo, so time will tell if there was a hidden fuel cell or a single-use battery. They probably played some games with tailwinds, but there are big climbs in there. And "highway speed" for a semi is different than for a car. On the climb, the Tesla probably gets to do what ICE trucks do: drive at 30-40mph even though the torque in the Tesla can handle climbs far better.
If they were in Colorado, they could be playing some games with the altitude. BEVs don't have the oxygen / thin air problems that ICEs do at altitude, and get the benefit of the reduced drag.
That was allegedly a megawatt-hour battery, aka 10x a Model S battery, probably cobalt/nickel. However, 200-230 wh/kg LFP is coming to mass production next year, and since those chemistries are far safer they don't need active cooling, they are a lot closer to NMC chemistries in overall pack density. So a 500 mile truck with NMC might be 400 miles with LFP, and that would be a big thing too.
The trucks are going to delivery with early pilot customer (PepsiCo) and while NDAs will likely about, if the truck range is total bullshit it will get out.
The GVW should be reduced by the heavier semi, but what is critical to remember is that electricity is cheaper than fuel, and with wind/solar continuing to drop in price by almost 10-20% per year, operating costs will drop. IN THEORY the BEV drivetrain has far less components and should be cheaper to maintain. Battery costs will drop substantially in the future (The Lithium and Sodium Sulfur chemistries may double the range of semis or more, or alternatively drop the weight of the semi with smaller batteries).
Rail has pretty good efficiencies with diesel-electric, maybe the sulfur chemistries will allow the trains to switch to all-electric. I am definitely NOT a hydrogen enthusiast, but hydrogen may be the way to go with trains since the refueling infrastructure is so much more concentrated. But rail may be waiting for solid state, sodium-sulfur, or lithium-sulfur technologies, which may deliver densities and cost advantages that even the mature diesel-electric locomotives can't compete with.
Anyway, safe to say that the Tesla will be at least a 300 mile functional tractor for a semi, and that's the 1.0 version. We'll see.
Re: electrified overland cargo. I'm not fully current on details, but my understandings are that:
- High range usually occurs at low speed and over carefully-selected (e.g., flat) routes. There was a bus range-record set a while back which involved a stripped empty bus running at about 20 kph / 13 mph constant speed. Problem being of course that this is almost the precise opposite of a typical operation cycle especially for urban transit. Commute transit (with its dual morning/evening cycle) or intercity (presuming reasonable range) might be viable. Trolly busses which draw current from fixed infrastructure remain the presently viable electrification option, though perhaps with a small onboard battery capacity to move between conductor segments.
- High-load electrified cargo seems to be based on moving loads consistently downhill while relying on electrified traction for the return, unloaded, uphill segment. I'm aware of a quarry which operates such vehicles, and proposals for lumber shipments. These are effectively gravity powered with regenerative braking and electric storage. Again, a special use case.
- I vaguely recall a European trial using an EV cargo lorry for short-haul deliveries on the order of 4--6 km, which is where my "single-digit" range comment comes from. Not turning up a reference, though I believe that was by either Volvo or BMW.
- Gross vehicle weight is a major constraint for trucking, cuts directly into revenue-generating cargo margins (literally, load that pays), and remains a critical concern for EVs. Again, private passenger vehicles which already have a poor payload/vehicle mass ratio are an easy problem to solve here, and despite that, passenger EVs run heavy compared to ICE vehicles. For either mass transit or cargo freight, where payload mass is far higher relative to vehicle mass, there's far less latitude.
- Aerodynamics are the other concern. Drag increases with the square of speed, and options are for low-profile high-mass loads (e.g., flatbeds and plate-steel or concrete barriers), or low-mass high-profile loads (consumer electronics, light bulk materials, etc.). Each run into issues with cargo.
And with all that, there's what EV-based overland non-tracked cargo competes with: rail, trolly-bus or trolly-truck designs, barge or shipping traffic (where available), etc.
In particular, there's been remarkably little R&D in the conventional rail sector best I can tell (outside high-speed rail). It seems to me that there ought to be considerable opportunity for much greater efficiencies in flexible, dynamic, trainset assembly and re-routing, which would provide for the efficienies of rail transport (energy consumption reduced by a factor of 5x or more per tonne/km) without the consequent challenges of battery-based transport. (This is presuming freight rail is electrified, itself a point in which the US is notably lagging.)
Rail is efficient in terms of energy but not flexibility. Melding that efficiency with the flexibility of last-mile delivery (or last 50-mile delivery) afforded by conventional trucks seems to me a real game-changer. It seems odd that nobody seems to be working on this. Large logistics operators (Amazon, WalMart, UPS, FedEx, possibly existing rail or trucking organisations) might be potential candidates, but again, there's nothing that I'm aware of.