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.
It's not just time but cost of building out charging infrastructure and grid connections. I looked at some numbers on this a couple of years ago and the costs back then were big enough to make anything medium or long distance non-viable absent either huge amounts of subsidy or a big shift in the relative price of electricity vs diesel (which is realistically only likely to happen via big taxes on truck diesel).
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.
True, most people don’t drive that much at once.
BUT
When I need to drive a lot, then I want to be able to do it. Driving for 600km / 6 hours, taking few hours break and coming back 600km the same day is easily possible with a gasoline/diesel car. It’s a pain with an electric one.
Modern luxury EVs have a range of close to 500km, and they are able to charge at over 1000km of range per hour. Split that 6-hour leg into two 3-hour legs with a 15-minute charging session & pee break, and you can easily do that.
Besides, why optimize for the absolute best experience on your once-a-year trip? What about the _other_ 300+ days of the year? How much time are you going to save by plugging your car into a charger when you get home once or twice a week, instead of going to a petrol station to fill it up?
Sounds good, but it's not reality, at least not for now. What you're describing is the absolute best scenarios - most expensive cars and MW charging stations. These I can't afford and the charging stations don't exist or are very rare (at least here in Europe).
If it would be true, that'd be great.
For me saving time on the gas station is negligible. I drive around anyway, but yes, I agree with you - charging at home is very cool. Just plug it in when you get home and you can drive in the morning.
The only way I see this, have 2 cars. One for longer trips (diesel), one for shorter, every day usage (electric). But this needs 2 parking spaces, insurance, taxes etc. I can't affor this either.
I randomly picked one charging station. Here are the reviews:
> The charging station was not working, even though it says that it works. Thanks to that, we had to use slower chargers and wait for our rental EV to charge for quite a while.
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.
According to the electric trucker channel there are rumblings about altering the last clause, because currently if you end your day at a charging station you can’t free it up and go to a regular parking space when you’re topped up.
The problem is that it is still going to interrupt your rest, and therefore your focus while driving. Getting woken up at all is a problem, the fact that you can go back to sleep after 15 minutes doesn't really matter. I would be quite surprised if the EU was willing to mess with that.
A better solution would be a truck stop with a charging connector per parking spot, and a way for the charger to dynamically connect to the trucks one-by-one. The driver can plug it in when they arrive, and the truck stop will handle the rest.
Alternatively, build a bunch of low-speed chargers instead of a single high-speed charger. When it comes to overnight charging, everyone is going to be there for at least 9 hours anyways. No need to hurry up and finish that charging session in 30 minutes.
> The problem is that it is still going to interrupt your rest, and therefore your focus while driving. Getting woken up at all is a problem, the fact that you can go back to sleep after 15 minutes doesn't really matter. I would be quite surprised if the EU was willing to mess with that.
The problem is that sleeping is not the only activity during the rest period. A "standard" rest period by EU law is 11 hours. Going for a run, getting dinner, doing some life stuff, then moving the truck a few meters, is not going to kill the driver's focus, but currently it's either limiting (because you're now on reduced rest, or you need to rest 11 hours from moving the truck) or illegal.
> Alternatively, build a bunch of low-speed chargers instead of a single high-speed charger. When it comes to overnight charging, everyone is going to be there for at least 9 hours anyways. No need to hurry up and finish that charging session in 30 minutes.
That has its own issues, because it means you need to electrify essentially every truck parking spot where truckers might overnight.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
The statement was pretty clear, right? Most European countries are less than 500km wide is almost certainly true, no matter how you define width. There are only 8 EU countries that are larger than 500km^2. And that includes the vast spaces of Scandinavia where no one lives.
Driving from Warsaw to Lisbon, 6 countries, and crossing 4 of the largest, is 3.300km.
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...
Running overhead wires cross country in the US would be exorbitantly expensive. In the city? Sure, though it would be ugly. In the countryside, not a chance of it being workable.
You don't need it in the city or in the countryside, you just need it on the highways. The overhead wires will directly power the cross-country legs, a small battery can cover last-mile delivery and interruptions in overhead wire coverage due to things like complex highway interchanges.
Besides, it's not like this kind of electrification is unheard of. Most of the world has electrified rail with a density higher than the US highway system, and India has been electrifying its railways at a pace of over 4000 miles per year. Electrifying the main cross-country freight corridors by the end of the decade should be quite doable.
Electrifying railways seems easier than doing it to the US Interstate, since the railways control what goes on their tracks. The US has roughly 50K miles of Interstate highway. From what a cursory search showed, electrifying rail is roughly $1m/mile. So it would cost at least $50B to electrify, not to mention converting the semi trucks to use it. Considering how much of a hot topic EVs and alternative energy sources are, this is a non-starter in our current political climate.
And forgetting the practical components, the highways would look really bad with wires overhead...
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.
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.
Which is exactly what is happening. It makes sense for cars as well, as they need to top up more frequently highway carge stations become a regular service rather than an overpriced emergency one.
Good luck with that. The reality is their aren't enough toilets for truck drivers nevermind building a whole suite of rest stops up and down the country.
This audit put the number of overnight parking spots at "on-site locations" within 5km of the strategic road network (so not even the whole country) at 16,761. With the remainder of the report concluding that the usage was at or above capacity in much of the country.
Milence's first site in the UK, opened in March this year, provides 8 charging bays with 4 chargers shared between them. So to provide a similar number of overnight parking spots a further 2000 need to be built. Or to put it another way, these charging stations would need to be approximately as frequent as McDonald's restaurants in the UK. Not accounting for the areas of the country located further away from the strategic road network and the other 35% of the vehicles they surveyed parked in lay-bys and industrial estates.
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.
These do exist already. The Electrictrucker also has a video about this. They can be combined with a EV truck as a range extender or with a regular truck to save on gas/diesel.
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.
(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.