There is this channel on YouTube named "Bruce Wilson", which I've got pushed onto my recommendation feed lately, and I've watched some of the videos:
This guy drives a Scania in the US, and it feels like he is more like a marketing stunt for Scania. He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.
It should be easy for Volvo and Daimler Trucks to do the same, but I do not know why they don't do it.
> He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.
As a European visiting US/Canada I once struck a conversation with a truck driver who had a really cool vintage semi, with lots of chrome and flare. I told him that I really liked the look of his truck, but that vintage trucks of that age would never be allowed on the road again in Europe, at least not for commercial jobs.
He then told me his truck was basically brand new...
Besides me making a fool of myself, I really grew an appreciation for the EU having rules about semis, especially in the noise department. Yeah, US domestic semi trucks are cool in their own way, but the constant noise of clutch fans, air brakes, 'jake' brakes, 'stack' exhaust with no of mufflers, etc. would drive me insane.
In (most of) Europe, all vehicles are subject to strict noise and emission rules, and many larger cities are now congestion zones which prohibits larger/older diesel powered vehicles from entering the city. Same for my city, where most trucks and busses are now electric. Since it happened gradually the change wasn't all that noticeable, that is until you go somewhere else and hear (and smell!) a diesel powered bus/semi drive by... We like to complain about all the 'stupid' government rules, but when you go to a place without those laws you really start to appreciate them, it truly feels like taking a step 'back' for the worse.
For some reason, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, even brand new electric trucks in the US look very vintage, with their giant chrome grill and fender flares, compared to European and Asian trucks. [1]
Maybe everyone in this thread knows this, but it hasn't been mentioned: US trucks are all cab-behind-engine, and European trucks are all cab-over-engine. That's why they look so different. The US style supposedly has some benefits in maintenance and maybe efficiency, but the European style works much better in cities with narrow streets and tight turns.
This might be completely wrong, since my understanding is based very much off of Truck Simulator games, but isn’t one of the reasons aerodynamics as well? The US is huge, and trips can take several days at high speeds, so aerodynamic improvements can save quite a bit of money, whereas EU is smaller, the trucks do not go at large speeds for as long and have to navigate tiny city streets, thus being more compact is an advantage there.
It's more that the EU regulations on the total length of the articulated lorry include the tractor, but American regulations limit the length of each part.
In my layman pov… A diesel engine can take the least aerodynamically shaped body and move it at 60 mph for 1k miles no problem. As an American, I guess it’s just natural to me that if it can move, then it should move with glory!!
The range only needs to cover the period between mandated brakes. Everything over that is wasted weight, as the weight of the cargo and the weight of the truck share a weight budget.
Speaking of “complaining about stupid government rules”, I’m currently waiting to board a flight back to SFO from Europe and one thing that I have missed through my southern Europe vacation are the rules prohibiting smoking in or around the restaurant.
This is what I got used to in California but unfortunately should you find a fantastic outdoor restaurant table to enjoy the European sunset, chances are somebody will be smoking right next to you and your kid.
fwiw and not to diminish your point, semi trucks in Canada are rarely heard, they mostly drive along our massive highways, they are generally not allowed in cities, and you can drive from one end of Canada to the other (east <> west) on Highway 1 without entering cities/big towns, the most populated area you have to drive through is at the Ontario/Manitoba border. (Source, I've driven Canada fully, end to end e->w)
My family has owned a excavating
business since the 60s and you would see my pop and think he is some typical backwoods Mainer, but we have always purchased Volvo, Hitachi, Komatsu. A few times at our peak Volvo even invited us down to their US test facility to dig wholes all day. That was fun. Ive owned several Volvo cars, PV544, P1800, 240, 740. I tell you- Its great they are back in the hands of the Swedes. We love a classic Peterbilt, but they are not worth their cost in this day.
We have a tunnel nearby that was built with a grade that’s too steep. Every year there’s a large ICE truck that overheats, catches fire and shuts the tunnel down for a while. This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.
In Norway we’ve also already seen that tunnels and garages require less ventilation as the share of EVs gets higher, saving millions on new construction. Electric semi trucks will unlock the full benefit.
Larger vehicles like trucks and buses is also where you get the most benefit of noise reduction.
EV semi trucks are going to improve so many things.
> This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.
I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all, the current through the motor windings will be very high, causing the windings to overheat, potentially fail and potentially short circuit. There's a high risk of damaging the MOSFETs in the motor controller, which very much could lead to a fire risk depending on the failure mode.
There's not really many ways to solve this problem - in a normal 3-phase winding, all you can do is remove the current until it cools down and try again, but that will force the motor to stop and then try to restart, so creating an even larger load. Possibly if you have 6 more more phases and more magnets such that each of the normal 3-phases has multiple windings and magnets, you can cycle through the different ones and still keep applying some torque, but obviously this would still not really solve the fundamental problem.
Essentially the problem is the same for ICE vs EV - if the gradient is so steep and load so heavy that the engine / motor can't provide enough force, then it will be overloaded. Whether that's through pressure / shearing / excess heat in an ICE or through excess current / excess heat in EV, the outcome is failure to continue forward at best.
The only real solution is to massively over engineer the engine for normal situations, but human nature being what it is, there will always push things way beyond the designed limits and safety margins until it fails.
It’s a lot easier to engineer an EV truck to handle steep gradients without overloading. We see from real examples that EV trucks are by default much more capable of driving fast uphill.
One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.
EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box
As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.
>I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all
The problem isn't overloading the engine when you go up, it's overheating the brakes when you go down. The reasoning here is probably that EV semis will use regeneration for some of the braking thus avoiding the overheating to some extent.
To be fair, the parent didn’t specify which direction they were talking about. And is brake overheating a cause for an entire truck to catch on fire? That sounds more like an engine failure kind of thing.
Yes, last time I read about a fire in that tunnel I believe it was the brakes. I don’t know how.
Even if it’s an engine issue, I don’t see how an EV would be more likely to catastrophically overheat. An EV will generate a lot less heat for a given amount of power. There’s also less potential for oil and fuels leaks which exacerbates the issue.
> Yes, last time I read about a fire in that tunnel I believe it was the brakes. I don’t know how.
Friction brakes convert momentum into heat. If you ride the brakes going down a mountain you generate more heat than the brakes can dissipate into the air and the brake temperature keeps going up until they're hot enough to start a fire.
If I were to guess, it's about using "motor breaking" (not sure that's the correct English term for it) that you do if you travel downwards for a long time, in order to avoid over-heating the brakes so they are ineffective. I'm guessing doing motor breaking for too long, in a hot environment, might overheat the engine as well?
I think he's proven that single driver long haul freight in Western Europe (which seems to be a good chunk of truck trips) is perfectly doable. Just two weeks ago he did a 4.500km trip around Europe which is about the maximum you can do given the law on driving times.
The same is then true for the shorter trips (round trips etc.)
And the European Commission has just decided that electric trucks don't have to pay road toll until at least 2031.
Better for the environment, more comfortable, quieter, cheaper in the long run, ... what's not to like.
And yes: There are still some use-cases where non-EV trucks are "better" by some metrics but that's definitely not the case anymore everywhere.
> the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany
2.4%[1], which is more than I would have guessed, but I think that number includes delivery vehicles. For semis, it's 0.4% (and 2% of new registrations in Q1 2025). So, still a long way to go.
That's for vehicles registered in Germany. Half of the heavy trucks on the Autobahn are registered elsewhere[2], which makes sense given geography -- I guess it's similar in the Netherlands.
1. How sure are you? The ones from established manufacturers don't really look substantially different from their diesel counterparts. Unless you're really looking closely you'd have a hard time telling them apart.
2. Electric semi trucks are not ideal for long distance trips, they're more for predictable day routes, so it wouldn't surprise me to not encounter many of them on what was presumably a highway drive.
Similar to cars, it's easy to spot Teslas but other brands don't stand out this much and you really need to know the little details to spot. Same for trucks.
I have trouble calling these "semi". The do good work and are an environmental boon to short hauls, but "up to" ranges of 500km arent really semi territory imho. A better measurment imho is time. These things are good for four or five hours of highway driving, much much less when fully loaded or in mountains. So they cannot sustain a full day of driving without recharge. That is a delivery truck duty cycle, not semi.
(A typical diesel semi does 3500km between fillups, long enough for a few days of driving and about as long as the longest hauls in north america.)
And there is a big push for much larger trucks (net safety, less manpower/maintenance etc). Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads.
A large proportion of truck traffic in the EU is regional trunking - regular runs between distribution centres, typically as part of a hub-and-spoke model. To give an example, If I receive a parcel via Royal Mail, it's likely to have travelled via the Midlands Super Hub to my local mail centre, a distance of about 120 miles. At either end of that journey, the truck is likely to spend at least 30 minutes being unloaded and loaded.
There are many thousands of routes like that, with a constant flow of trucks covering relatively short distances on a predictable schedule. The operators running those routes have fleets of many thousands of vehicles and would have no difficulty whatsoever in managing a mixed fleet, using diesel or electric based on what's most suitable for the role; with diesel costing over $7 a gallon, there's a very obvious financial advantage to electric trucks.
Currently, the rollout of electric trucks is overwhelmingly bottlenecked by grid capacity rather than vehicle range - installing rapid chargers on every loading bay in a medium-sized distribution centre might require 20 megawatts of peak capacity, which isn't the kind of thing you can wire up overnight. Many operators are ready and eager to switch a large proportion of their fleet to electric trucks, they're just waiting for the grid to catch up.
Drivers by law have to take a 45 minute break every 4.5 hours in Europe, with max 9 hours driving a day.
Don't know how fast these things can charge though, but suspect they'll have more than your typical 350kw passenger car chargers.
This is the same argument people used to have about electric cars: if I can't drive nonstop for 18 hours at 95mph up a mountain hauling a speedboat and recharge up to 100% in 30 seconds then they're worthless etc etc. In reality these are not realistic or typical usage patterns.
A good question is then whether a driver can recharge a truck during rest periods. Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.
Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.
Cursory research indicates that in the EU, they are:
If charging the battery of an electric heavy goods vehicle or bus requires supervision or involvement of the driver, then this time needs to be recorded as 'other work.' On the contrary, if the driver can freely dispose of her/his time while the battery is charging, then the time taken for the battery to charge has no effect on the breaks or the daily rest of the driver. Any movement of the vehicle from the charging location would be deemed to be an interruption or an end to a break or rest period.
I only recently got a personal electric car not because they only recently got good enough or only recently made sense, but rather because my last petrol car finally needed replacing. I suspect trucks are similar - they're not going to replace them right away when they have an existing one that is working fine and still has many years of use ahead of it. Keep using the existing ones until they need to replace them, then go EV. Otherwise you're losing that amortization of the capex
"If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately"
Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, torque, reliability etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
"If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately"
Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
Businesses are not suddenly going to dispose of their current fleet because something new comes along. For most, I imagine, their trucks will be on some kind of fixed-term lease agreement.
There is a good YouTube channel of a truck driver in Germany who drives an electric truck and he's been praising it all over. The range is enough to go between pauses, and yes he can charge while resting.
>>Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.
Well good thing recharging is not the same as refueling. Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons. Recharging doesn't have such limitation.
500km doesn't even get me to the capital of my European country. Maybe you're thinking specifically about Eastern Europe or something, where there is a bunch of smaller countries closer together?
Do you mean the Balkans? Since e.g. Poland is bigger than the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and around the same size as Germany (to within 15%). Ukraine is even bigger - larger than all the former.
It isnt about travel distances. Most "long haul" trucks dont go anywhere near maximum range on a given run. It is about driver time. A truck that cannot keep a driver driving for an entire shift (8 or 10 hours) is a logistics problem. At four or five hours, drivers will need to get to a depo and swap out for another truck mid-shift in order to keep driving, which is a wildly inefficient use of expensive human resources.
What is needed are 8 or 10-hour endurance trucks, even if at a lesser load, as that will cover a driver's day and allow recharge during rest periods.
You're right about driver time being the key metric. mattlondon's reply[1] to the GP gives the extra context: the endurance is aligned pretty well with (EU) legally mandated breaks, allowing for mid-day charging.
Which might be OK in Europe. My current area allows for 13 hours of driving during a maximum 14-hour work day. Most semi drivers then maintain a 14+10 rotation for a few days before a "weekend" of downtime. These Volvo trucks are nowhere near that sort of daily endurance and just wouldn't be competitive.
Yes, it's clearly a problem that in some places poor working conditions, risks in road safety due to fatigue and global warming due to fossil fuel use are found acceptable because it allows companies make more profit.
Yeah, in the US they should probably run overhead wires which would be more efficient than batteries. They could also consider coupling together a few dozen trucks on the highway. For the ultimate in efficiency, and to reduce particulate emissions, they could replace the wheels with steel wheels and make them run on tracks...
Who said anything about long haul? A longer workday doesn't mean a longer route. Most trucks do multiple deliveries every day without ever leaving their home area, commonly between ports and warehouses.
I'm getting really nervous as we cross into the megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel isn't exactly a walk in the park during a disaster, but it takes a few minutes or hours to burn off. The battery can dump all of its energy in seconds. Managing a diesel fire is a much more understood artform.
What would a million watt hours look like if released in <10 seconds? How many casualties would we have if this were to occur in a tunnel or other confined roadway environment?
> megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel
A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours
A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.
Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.
It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.
I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.
> A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.
The whole problem with batteries is the oxidizer is already included. When the cathode decomposes, it turns into an O2 factory. There really isn't a limit to how fast this can go if there is a structural compromise of the battery. Diesel fuel requires external oxygen constantly. This makes it much easier to extinguish.
What are you talking about? Batteries don’t dump their energy in seconds. They dump their energy over many, many hours.
The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.
There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.
The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.
Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.
EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.
Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.
Lots of semi trucking is not "long-haul". In many European countries, you don't have need for long-haul routes for port to city or city to port transit.
Paris to Rotterdamn is under 500km, and Paris to Le Havre is much shorter (although these also have train routes).
Similarly, they could serve basically any route in the UK or Ireland.
The majority of trucking in the UK is based on the tramping model. A driver gets in his truck at 6am on a Monday and drives it around the country until Friday evening. Sleeping in service stations, lay-bys and industrial estates depending on where they can find availability (often with difficulty).
The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.
My trip home to my parents is 400 miles (about 650km) and that's far from the the most extreme journey.
Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.
It is a testament to Elon Musk's vast skills at producing obfuscating noise that nearly all of the discussion of electric semi trucks here has been about the Tesla Semi, and not about trucks made by the many manufacturers who will actually sell you an electric semi truck.
Awkward headline, since its not really much of a milestone. The first couple in a region are interesting, hitting significant proportions a year is interesting, a cumulative (relatively) small number is not that interesting.
Since when is 5k a couple? Volvo is selling these while companies like Tesla are cough asleep at the wheel. I think the article mentioned 140 Tesla semis sold.
I don’t know the internals of the holding or Volvo, but the company that I work for is _technically_ American, and we operate like a full European company, developing everything in-house. The only thing the parent holding intermingles with us is numbers at the end of the year and strategic directions.
So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?
> I don’t know the internals of the holding or Volvo, but the company that I work for is _technically_ American, and we operate like a full European company, developing everything in-house. The only thing the parent holding intermingles with us is numbers at the end of the year and strategic directions.
> So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?
Yes, that's the nature of corporate headquarters. If the company doesn't want to be thought of as a Chinese company, it could relocate its corporate headquarters elsewhere.
This says nothing of the ownership structure and so on. A company could be just as Chinese due to ownership and/or control independently of where its corporate HQ is located. I don't think that this framing is especially useful, because there is no such thing as a stereotypical company or person. Individuals make up companies. Companies are just people, acting in concert.
To say a company is Chinese makes me wonder why that is important to the person saying it, and makes me wonder why that is the way they choose to phrase it, and makes me wish they would tell me more about actual individual people that exist and what their views and goals are. Corporations aren't people. People are corporations.
Geely owns Volvo Car AB. Volvo Trucks is a different company and part of the Volvo Group, which is not owned by Geely (but they are a big shareholder).
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