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Volvo Trucks to launch full range of electric trucks in Europe in 2021

234 points by BigBalli 6y ago

c0nfused 6y ago
Since the article is short on details here is the Volvo trucks page. https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/electric-trucks.html https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e... They appear to be in the testing stage
- alex_duf 6y ago
  I wonder what kind of charging speed these will have. I'm guessing a refuse truck doesn't need to charge very fast as it sleeps in a depot, but a delivery truck might do a few shifts a day so that requires fast charging.
  - SimonPStevens 6y ago
    Or easily swappable battery packs. There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.
    - Gwypaas 6y ago
      I wonder if battery swapping is a red herring which always will be talked about but never realized? Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it. Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need. Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed. Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        I honestly don't see the issue for industrial type machinery. It's not like some Tesla that has to have a sleek body and beautiful styling. Trucks are already big boxes that carry giant boxes behind them. Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts. Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
        myself248 6y ago
        At some point aren't you just swapping the entire horse? Just transfer the rider and the saddle bags.
        spockz 6y ago
        Who don’t we do this? Driver makes it to the way station. Has a chat with the next driver while refilling and that driver takes it for the next four/six hours.
        signaturefish 6y ago
        That /is/ how "we" do it with trains. The difference is that long-distance truckers generally live in their cabs for weeks on end, so they can't easily hand it off to another driver.
        spockz 6y ago
        Ok. So then the lorry and the driver stay behind and the lorry/payload get switched. But apparently there is no such need for speed for road transport and otherwise they would use a plane?
        throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    - noisy_boy 6y ago
      I think standards about battery swapping will evolve which will make infrastructure around that to develop easier, quicker and be more interchangeable.
    - kalleboo 6y ago
      It wasn't just a concept - Tesla actually commercialized battery swapping because by doing so you got some California subsidy. Tesla drivers who applied could do a battery swap in 7 minutes at their one swap station. It was discontinued when the subsidy requirement ended. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-program-for-superchargers/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog... https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-battery-swap-harris-ranch-20150310-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-batter...
      - itsoktocry 6y ago
        >Tesla drivers who applied could do a battery swap in 7 minutes Is there any video of the swaps actually working, outside of the promotional stage-show? YouTube doesn't have anything, which is odd...
        maxdo 6y ago
        not sure about tesla but in china they have commercially operational swap stations. plenty of videos
  - benplumley 6y ago
    If you operate a fleet of trucks, battery swapping becomes a lot more viable because you don't have to worry about swapping your good, new battery for a worn-out old battery.
    - beamatronic 6y ago
      Came here to say, I hope someone has given some thought and planning into the full life cycle of the battery - infrastructure is needed.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - nickik 6y ago
      If you have a fleet of trucks, having battery swapping batteries also means you need to have more batteries then trucks. Meaning extra capital cost. Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads. This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk. Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
      - evgen 6y ago
        Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage. Weight is one point against battery packs, but easy refill/swap and maintenance are two points in their favour. When you start to deal with volume commercial vehicles the cost of maintenance and repair adds up and is considered a part of doing business. If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move are an item my depot mechanics cannot touch or repair I am going to show you the door. If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I would assume the light delivery trucks, the ones that go door to door dropping off e-commerce parcels don't do much mileage at all.
    - brewdad 6y ago
      Largely depends on the neighborhood and existing infrastructure. My suburb is reasonably compact and Amazon and UPS have large facilities at the edge of town, right off the freeway. FedEx still has to process everything through a facility in the city center. It's a 30 mile RT for them just to begin delivering packages here. I'm sure this will change soon but until it does, there's still a lot of wasted transit time.
  - myself248 6y ago
    The usage model they're targeting is trucks that return to a depot overnight. Local delivery and drayage routes have ample time to charge. Honestly one of the bigger issues is upgrading the electrical service at the depots to support the chargers. I worked on a prototype EV truck, and they had to software-limit the charger when first installed, because running flat-out it could draw more power than the entire rest of the prototype facility. They had to get the utility out to drop a new transformer before they could unleash the charger's full power. The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
    - rkangel 6y ago
      It's the new version of the old 'the fastest data rate is a truck full of harddrives'. Now we can say 'for transferring energy, you can't beat a petrol pump pouring fuel'
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        MOX fuel pellets do slightly better. Tritium-lithium may, some day. But yes, hydrocarbon chains are damned energy dense for chemical reactions.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >for transferring energy, you can't beat a petrol pump pouring fuel Pretty much any time fissionable material is moved probably beats it.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering. 1 Liter per second ~= 38.6 megawatts, for diesel. I’ve never bothered paying attention to the flow rate in a fuel station, but it’s really fortunate that electric cars are fundamentally more efficient than combustion engines.
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        For comparison, a high speed train is around 10MW according to a quick search.
  - hindsightbias 6y ago
    specs in the brochures.volvotrucks link above.
- Softcadbury 6y ago
  This link is a bit hidden, but quite interesting: https://brochures.volvotrucks.com/hq/product-guides/electromobility-en-en/ https://brochures.volvotrucks.com/hq/product-guides/electrom...
  - qwertox 6y ago
    These appear to be old trucks. In the brochure there is a link to a YT video which then links to a playlist. This playlist contains the following video "Volvo Trucks - Say hello to the future - Volvo FL Electric & Volvo FE Electric" [1] which was posted on May 14 2018. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIIhkqRc-_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIIhkqRc-_Q
- TooCreative 6y ago
  As a web designer, I had to compare it to the Tesla truck page: https://www.tesla.com/semi https://www.tesla.com/semi Was not disappointed. The Volvo page is very Volvo and the Tesla page is very Tesla.
  - Unklejoe 6y ago
    The Volvo page is so much better in my opinion. It's neat with decent information density. I'm not a fan of pages that try to do the whole dynamic immersive full screen huge picture thing.
    - TooCreative 6y ago
      The Volvo page has a lot of text. But does it have information? On the Volvo page, I do not see a single piece of information before I scroll. Instead I see fluff like "We know that many transport operators work hard to reduce the environmental footprint..." On the Tesla page, I see four pieces of information right away. Acceleration, energy consumption, drag coefficient and that it has four independent motors.
      - Someone 6y ago
        On the other hand, I don’t think any of the numbers Tesla gives is of direct interest to those who buy such large trucks (with the exception of the D energy consumption, which implies “cheaper to operate”, but what fraction of a truck’s cost is spent on fuel?) Volvo’s ‘fluff’ at least hints at “this truck may be allowed to enter city centers” and “disability payments to drivers may go down”.
        kungtotte 6y ago
        Roughly 1/3 of the operating costs of trucking is the fuel, another 1/3 is wages, and then the remaining 1/3 covers everything else (facilities, maintenance, repairs, purchase cost of vehicles, insurance, etc. etc.). So ~33% of a truck's cost is spent on fuel.
      - deleted 6y ago
tpmx 6y ago
Video from Volvo Trucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYA1PjEkH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYA1PjEkH0
grecy 6y ago
With more and more brands jumping on the BEV train, it really seems like battery cells are going to be in extremely short supply. Tesla are literally building enormous factories around the world. Are other brands?
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  Yes, some quick searching will show you that quite a few major brands are in the process of either building battery factories, or about to be building battery factories. Reference for easier searching: Northvolt (new manufacturer) is working on a major factory with VW, CATL is building new factories, daimler is about to have a new factory come online, etc etc.
- beamatronic 6y ago
  I like to think that a lot of jobs will be created when it comes to recycling and refurbishing the batteries.
- nickik 6y ago
  Car makers for the most part don't build their own cell factories. They do invest in battery pack factories. However, there are major supply contracts being signed all the time. The major battery producers, Panasonic, CATL, LG, SK, Samsung SDI and even BYD. GM and LG have a major partnership and are building a factory in Ohio. SK is trying to build a factory in the US as well. At the same time you have many new players coming onto the market. Tesla themselves are the most relevant. There are also major European projects, such as Northvolt (former Tesla guys from Giga Nevada) but also others like GigaVaasa. Northvolt will also build a large factory in Sweden, and a somewhat smaller one in Germany. CATL is building battery factories in Czech Republic and expanding existing factories. There represent long term off-take agreements between car manufactures and cell providers. Pretty much all of these have large contracts and are building factories all over the place. All that said, nobody is as aggressive as Tesla with their targets. In fact, a good argument can be made that everybody else is copying the Tesla Gigafactory as a model. Even calling them Gigafactories and targeting the same sort of output levels. In terms of car makers Tesla (and BYD) are the ones vertically integrating the battery.
- 6y ago
LeonM 6y ago
Musk's mission to accelerate the adoption of sustainable transport seems to be working flawlessly. I can't help to think that the existing manufacturers would not have had any incentive of offering electric trucks anytime soon, until Tesla announced their plans for the Tesla semi. I am not in the transport business, but personally I am very happy to see electric trucks arrive in Europe. I live in a city and I can't stand the noise and stench of trucks with diesel engines. Not waking up from a noise of a diesel engine will seriously improve urban live.
- Scene_Cast2 6y ago
  I agree, I think that Tesla's biggest impact on the world has been the influence on car manufacturers, rather than the cars they have sold.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    True, but it's not just enough to prove the market and put in the effort to drive down the cost of batteries. Tesla gets paid credits from automakers who will not build EVs, but someone had to build and sell cars to be eligible for these credits, which is putting financial pain on legacy automakers [1]. This is important, otherwise these automakers would just cruise making combustion vehicles that further contribute to climate change. A former Tesla board member said about ZEV credits: "Tesla is eating the competitors' lunch and having them pay for it, that's a pretty cool trick" [2] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/honda-joins-fiat-in-tapping-tesla-for-europe-emission-compliance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/honda-joi... [2] https://youtu.be/YzztWieFqVM?t=239 https://youtu.be/YzztWieFqVM?t=239
- new_realist 6y ago
  Not at all. Thus is entirely in response to government mandates and the Semi is still vaporware. These trucks are short haul, to boot.
  - tenpies 6y ago
    Exactly. Tesla is a huge benefactor of government credits and programs - not the reason for those programs. Competitors are not jumping in because the market is ready to pay unsubsidized prices for EVs, they're jumping in because the market will pay subsidized prices. We're only just going to see what the EV landscape looks like in the next few years without the hefty hand of the government tilting the scales.
alex_duf 6y ago
2020 is really a (good!) turning point for electric vehicles
codeulike 6y ago
The trucks will have a gross combination weight of up to 44 tonnes, and, depending on the battery configuration, the range could be up to 300 kilometers, Volvo said. About 180 miles. Useful for some things I suppose. Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles. My point being: Its easy to announce that EV trucks are on the way next year, its much harder to make them economically feasible and manufacture them in large quantities.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  They don't necessarily need to be economically feasible if they are enforced by regulations. If major city centres start enforcing tighter congestion/pollution bans, such that last mile delivery of goods to city centres can only be achieved with zero emission vehicles, then suddenly logistics businesses are forced to integrate EV or hydrogen into their fleets. I honestly don't think this is that unlikely in many European cities in the next decade.
  - codeulike 6y ago
    True, I think there are incentives like that in London
  - Someone 6y ago
    I would even say it’s highly likely. For public transport tenders in the richer parts of Europe, emissions are weighted so heavily that many, if not all, winning bids nowadays are for fully electric buses. Older Diesel cars also are banned from quite a few city centers, but I don’t know whether that extends to large trucks.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  That range is perfect for doing deliveries all day long in a city like Denver. A few short runs on the interstate followed by city streets to deliveries is how most in city trucks get about, and 180 miles of electric sounds perfect. And while I can't imagine the cost being competitive, when you factor in smog reduction it could be.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
Ban diesel.
Xophmeister 6y ago
I'm not trying to be negative, because I think electric vehicles are a good idea. However, what happens when a fleet of such trucks return to their depot and all need charging overnight? Wouldn't the depot need a lot of expensive infrastructure to avoid overloading the system? (I presume the same applies to the domestic/consumer electrical supply, once there's an EV in every driveway...)
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  “Expensive” is a very relative term — running high capacity power is something we’re very good at and scales well (it’s not 2x as expensive to increase power availability by 2x). Even with dozens of trucks charging at 100+ amps, it’s no more power hungry than your average industrial site - and it has the benefit of off-peak utilization so there’s much more slack before it would require new generation from the power company.
  - fyfy18 6y ago
    100 amps at what voltage? At 220v that's only 22kW which is nothing. This year my city has installed 350kW EV chargers in the old town without digging up the street (other than under where they install it), so the infrastructure must have already been there. I assume in an industrial area it would not at all be an issue.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      Yeah I meant 100kW, but you’re right that even much higher power versions don’t require much retrofitting. A company I worked for had to install power to support 5MW of equipment where there was previously only a few houses nearby and the cost to do so was under $1M which was something like 2% of the total project cost. Incremental upgrades are extremely reasonable from a “capex / useful life” perspective.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
stiray 6y ago
Actually I was quite surprised that those are ordinary trucks without superhero style exterior etc. I think that this is a recipe for success of electric vehicles (and they are hurting EV market on long run) - not that they look like from outer space (at hefty price mark) but comparable to prices of non-EV while driving on electricity. What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for. I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway). And Volvo did it right. Targeting purpose, targeting users and business. Congrats. Finally.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway). I would choose whichever makes sense for my business. Without pricing and reliability numbers, it's impossible to know which that might be. The closest vehicle in Tesla's garage to this is the Tesla Cybertruck which looks bizarre, but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor. If Tesla launched a butt ugly Cybervan which was similarly functional and cost effective, you can bet it would be popular with the class of buyer who are shopping for e-Vans. Right now I'm eyeballing the Cybertruck personally, in spite of it's appearance. Spending $20k to get a more traditional looking truck just doesn't make sense to me. The only concern I have is whether those high truck bed walls will screw things up.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    I like the look of the Cybertruck. It's like the truck Automan would drive!
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      I was probably a bit unfair to the CyberTruck. The big thing for me personally is I'm not flamboyant by nature. Once the Cybertruck becomes more commonplace I'll get over it. It certainly didn't stop me from pre-ordering.
alliao 6y ago
dumb question, is it easy to redesign EV to use hydrogen? Isn't the whole premise of hydrogen being 1. world adopts renewable energy 2. to compensate for lulls, build way more capacity 3. excess capacity bought cheaply to create hydrogen ... 5. profit! for hydrogen vehicles anyway... seems like we're treading down on such path..
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  It wouldn't make sense for the current EV makers to switch to hydrogen. Tesla, for instance, has spent billions of dollars to optimize their battery packs with their lithium-based chemistry and specific cathodes/anodes. To then switch over to fuel cell + hydrogen is a completely different architecture, and Musk is notoriously anti-Hydrogen. There is a case to be made that excess renewables can be used to attempt to generate "green hydrogen" which is then a "storage" of renewables that can also be used for vehicles. I think in practice, it's a much smaller scale than battery electric vehicles.
bash-j 6y ago
I'd imagine you could swap out your current Volvo trucks with these for supermarket DC to store deliveries in Metro areas. The DCs already have electric power on every dock to hook up the trailer's refrigerator while parked. And DCs I know of here in Australia are being covered in solar panels because of their large foot print. The suppliers who deliver to the supermarket DC from their own DCs could do the same. Long distance are usually done with road trains (3+ trailers), using much more powerful trucks, and then the trailers are split up outside of the city area and completed by towing single trailers. So again you could use the electric vehicle to complete the last leg. As someone else mentioned, if they are quieter than the diesel equivalent, you may be able to start delivering to supermarkets in areas where they have curfews on deliveries after a certain time because of the noise.

234 points by BigBalli 6y ago

Since the article is short on details here is the Volvo trucks page. https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/electric-trucks.html https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e... They appear to be in the testing stage

alex_duf 6y ago
I wonder what kind of charging speed these will have. I'm guessing a refuse truck doesn't need to charge very fast as it sleeps in a depot, but a delivery truck might do a few shifts a day so that requires fast charging.
- SimonPStevens 6y ago
  Or easily swappable battery packs. There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.
  - Gwypaas 6y ago
    I wonder if battery swapping is a red herring which always will be talked about but never realized? Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it. Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need. Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed. Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      I honestly don't see the issue for industrial type machinery. It's not like some Tesla that has to have a sleek body and beautiful styling. Trucks are already big boxes that carry giant boxes behind them. Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts. Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
      - myself248 6y ago
        At some point aren't you just swapping the entire horse? Just transfer the rider and the saddle bags.
        spockz 6y ago
        Who don’t we do this? Driver makes it to the way station. Has a chat with the next driver while refilling and that driver takes it for the next four/six hours.
        signaturefish 6y ago
        That /is/ how "we" do it with trains. The difference is that long-distance truckers generally live in their cabs for weeks on end, so they can't easily hand it off to another driver.
        spockz 6y ago
        Ok. So then the lorry and the driver stay behind and the lorry/payload get switched. But apparently there is no such need for speed for road transport and otherwise they would use a plane?
        throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  - noisy_boy 6y ago
    I think standards about battery swapping will evolve which will make infrastructure around that to develop easier, quicker and be more interchangeable.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    It wasn't just a concept - Tesla actually commercialized battery swapping because by doing so you got some California subsidy. Tesla drivers who applied could do a battery swap in 7 minutes at their one swap station. It was discontinued when the subsidy requirement ended. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-program-for-superchargers/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog... https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-battery-swap-harris-ranch-20150310-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-batter...
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >Tesla drivers who applied could do a battery swap in 7 minutes Is there any video of the swaps actually working, outside of the promotional stage-show? YouTube doesn't have anything, which is odd...
      - maxdo 6y ago
        not sure about tesla but in china they have commercially operational swap stations. plenty of videos
- benplumley 6y ago
  If you operate a fleet of trucks, battery swapping becomes a lot more viable because you don't have to worry about swapping your good, new battery for a worn-out old battery.
  - beamatronic 6y ago
    Came here to say, I hope someone has given some thought and planning into the full life cycle of the battery - infrastructure is needed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickik 6y ago
    If you have a fleet of trucks, having battery swapping batteries also means you need to have more batteries then trucks. Meaning extra capital cost. Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads. This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk. Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
    - evgen 6y ago
      Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage. Weight is one point against battery packs, but easy refill/swap and maintenance are two points in their favour. When you start to deal with volume commercial vehicles the cost of maintenance and repair adds up and is considered a part of doing business. If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move are an item my depot mechanics cannot touch or repair I am going to show you the door. If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I would assume the light delivery trucks, the ones that go door to door dropping off e-commerce parcels don't do much mileage at all.
  - brewdad 6y ago
    Largely depends on the neighborhood and existing infrastructure. My suburb is reasonably compact and Amazon and UPS have large facilities at the edge of town, right off the freeway. FedEx still has to process everything through a facility in the city center. It's a 30 mile RT for them just to begin delivering packages here. I'm sure this will change soon but until it does, there's still a lot of wasted transit time.
- myself248 6y ago
  The usage model they're targeting is trucks that return to a depot overnight. Local delivery and drayage routes have ample time to charge. Honestly one of the bigger issues is upgrading the electrical service at the depots to support the chargers. I worked on a prototype EV truck, and they had to software-limit the charger when first installed, because running flat-out it could draw more power than the entire rest of the prototype facility. They had to get the utility out to drop a new transformer before they could unleash the charger's full power. The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    It's the new version of the old 'the fastest data rate is a truck full of harddrives'. Now we can say 'for transferring energy, you can't beat a petrol pump pouring fuel'
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      MOX fuel pellets do slightly better. Tritium-lithium may, some day. But yes, hydrocarbon chains are damned energy dense for chemical reactions.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >for transferring energy, you can't beat a petrol pump pouring fuel Pretty much any time fissionable material is moved probably beats it.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering. 1 Liter per second ~= 38.6 megawatts, for diesel. I’ve never bothered paying attention to the flow rate in a fuel station, but it’s really fortunate that electric cars are fundamentally more efficient than combustion engines.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      For comparison, a high speed train is around 10MW according to a quick search.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  specs in the brochures.volvotrucks link above.
Softcadbury 6y ago
This link is a bit hidden, but quite interesting: https://brochures.volvotrucks.com/hq/product-guides/electromobility-en-en/ https://brochures.volvotrucks.com/hq/product-guides/electrom...
- qwertox 6y ago
  These appear to be old trucks. In the brochure there is a link to a YT video which then links to a playlist. This playlist contains the following video "Volvo Trucks - Say hello to the future - Volvo FL Electric & Volvo FE Electric" [1] which was posted on May 14 2018. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIIhkqRc-_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIIhkqRc-_Q
TooCreative 6y ago
As a web designer, I had to compare it to the Tesla truck page: https://www.tesla.com/semi https://www.tesla.com/semi Was not disappointed. The Volvo page is very Volvo and the Tesla page is very Tesla.
- Unklejoe 6y ago
  The Volvo page is so much better in my opinion. It's neat with decent information density. I'm not a fan of pages that try to do the whole dynamic immersive full screen huge picture thing.
  - TooCreative 6y ago
    The Volvo page has a lot of text. But does it have information? On the Volvo page, I do not see a single piece of information before I scroll. Instead I see fluff like "We know that many transport operators work hard to reduce the environmental footprint..." On the Tesla page, I see four pieces of information right away. Acceleration, energy consumption, drag coefficient and that it has four independent motors.
    - Someone 6y ago
      On the other hand, I don’t think any of the numbers Tesla gives is of direct interest to those who buy such large trucks (with the exception of the D energy consumption, which implies “cheaper to operate”, but what fraction of a truck’s cost is spent on fuel?) Volvo’s ‘fluff’ at least hints at “this truck may be allowed to enter city centers” and “disability payments to drivers may go down”.
      - kungtotte 6y ago
        Roughly 1/3 of the operating costs of trucking is the fuel, another 1/3 is wages, and then the remaining 1/3 covers everything else (facilities, maintenance, repairs, purchase cost of vehicles, insurance, etc. etc.). So ~33% of a truck's cost is spent on fuel.
    - deleted 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago

Video from Volvo Trucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYA1PjEkH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UYA1PjEkH0

grecy 6y ago

With more and more brands jumping on the BEV train, it really seems like battery cells are going to be in extremely short supply. Tesla are literally building enormous factories around the world. Are other brands?

reportingsjr 6y ago
Yes, some quick searching will show you that quite a few major brands are in the process of either building battery factories, or about to be building battery factories. Reference for easier searching: Northvolt (new manufacturer) is working on a major factory with VW, CATL is building new factories, daimler is about to have a new factory come online, etc etc.
beamatronic 6y ago
I like to think that a lot of jobs will be created when it comes to recycling and refurbishing the batteries.
nickik 6y ago
Car makers for the most part don't build their own cell factories. They do invest in battery pack factories. However, there are major supply contracts being signed all the time. The major battery producers, Panasonic, CATL, LG, SK, Samsung SDI and even BYD. GM and LG have a major partnership and are building a factory in Ohio. SK is trying to build a factory in the US as well. At the same time you have many new players coming onto the market. Tesla themselves are the most relevant. There are also major European projects, such as Northvolt (former Tesla guys from Giga Nevada) but also others like GigaVaasa. Northvolt will also build a large factory in Sweden, and a somewhat smaller one in Germany. CATL is building battery factories in Czech Republic and expanding existing factories. There represent long term off-take agreements between car manufactures and cell providers. Pretty much all of these have large contracts and are building factories all over the place. All that said, nobody is as aggressive as Tesla with their targets. In fact, a good argument can be made that everybody else is copying the Tesla Gigafactory as a model. Even calling them Gigafactories and targeting the same sort of output levels. In terms of car makers Tesla (and BYD) are the ones vertically integrating the battery.
6y ago

LeonM 6y ago

Musk's mission to accelerate the adoption of sustainable transport seems to be working flawlessly. I can't help to think that the existing manufacturers would not have had any incentive of offering electric trucks anytime soon, until Tesla announced their plans for the Tesla semi. I am not in the transport business, but personally I am very happy to see electric trucks arrive in Europe. I live in a city and I can't stand the noise and stench of trucks with diesel engines. Not waking up from a noise of a diesel engine will seriously improve urban live.

Scene_Cast2 6y ago
I agree, I think that Tesla's biggest impact on the world has been the influence on car manufacturers, rather than the cars they have sold.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  True, but it's not just enough to prove the market and put in the effort to drive down the cost of batteries. Tesla gets paid credits from automakers who will not build EVs, but someone had to build and sell cars to be eligible for these credits, which is putting financial pain on legacy automakers [1]. This is important, otherwise these automakers would just cruise making combustion vehicles that further contribute to climate change. A former Tesla board member said about ZEV credits: "Tesla is eating the competitors' lunch and having them pay for it, that's a pretty cool trick" [2] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/honda-joins-fiat-in-tapping-tesla-for-europe-emission-compliance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/honda-joi... [2] https://youtu.be/YzztWieFqVM?t=239 https://youtu.be/YzztWieFqVM?t=239
new_realist 6y ago
Not at all. Thus is entirely in response to government mandates and the Semi is still vaporware. These trucks are short haul, to boot.
- tenpies 6y ago
  Exactly. Tesla is a huge benefactor of government credits and programs - not the reason for those programs. Competitors are not jumping in because the market is ready to pay unsubsidized prices for EVs, they're jumping in because the market will pay subsidized prices. We're only just going to see what the EV landscape looks like in the next few years without the hefty hand of the government tilting the scales.

alex_duf 6y ago

2020 is really a (good!) turning point for electric vehicles

codeulike 6y ago

The trucks will have a gross combination weight of up to 44 tonnes, and, depending on the battery configuration, the range could be up to 300 kilometers, Volvo said. About 180 miles. Useful for some things I suppose. Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles. My point being: Its easy to announce that EV trucks are on the way next year, its much harder to make them economically feasible and manufacture them in large quantities.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
They don't necessarily need to be economically feasible if they are enforced by regulations. If major city centres start enforcing tighter congestion/pollution bans, such that last mile delivery of goods to city centres can only be achieved with zero emission vehicles, then suddenly logistics businesses are forced to integrate EV or hydrogen into their fleets. I honestly don't think this is that unlikely in many European cities in the next decade.
- codeulike 6y ago
  True, I think there are incentives like that in London
- Someone 6y ago
  I would even say it’s highly likely. For public transport tenders in the richer parts of Europe, emissions are weighted so heavily that many, if not all, winning bids nowadays are for fully electric buses. Older Diesel cars also are banned from quite a few city centers, but I don’t know whether that extends to large trucks.
merpnderp 6y ago
That range is perfect for doing deliveries all day long in a city like Denver. A few short runs on the interstate followed by city streets to deliveries is how most in city trucks get about, and 180 miles of electric sounds perfect. And while I can't imagine the cost being competitive, when you factor in smog reduction it could be.

mymythisisthis 6y ago

Ban diesel.

Xophmeister 6y ago

I'm not trying to be negative, because I think electric vehicles are a good idea. However, what happens when a fleet of such trucks return to their depot and all need charging overnight? Wouldn't the depot need a lot of expensive infrastructure to avoid overloading the system? (I presume the same applies to the domestic/consumer electrical supply, once there's an EV in every driveway...)

mikeyouse 6y ago
“Expensive” is a very relative term — running high capacity power is something we’re very good at and scales well (it’s not 2x as expensive to increase power availability by 2x). Even with dozens of trucks charging at 100+ amps, it’s no more power hungry than your average industrial site - and it has the benefit of off-peak utilization so there’s much more slack before it would require new generation from the power company.
- fyfy18 6y ago
  100 amps at what voltage? At 220v that's only 22kW which is nothing. This year my city has installed 350kW EV chargers in the old town without digging up the street (other than under where they install it), so the infrastructure must have already been there. I assume in an industrial area it would not at all be an issue.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    Yeah I meant 100kW, but you’re right that even much higher power versions don’t require much retrofitting. A company I worked for had to install power to support 5MW of equipment where there was previously only a few houses nearby and the cost to do so was under $1M which was something like 2% of the total project cost. Incremental upgrades are extremely reasonable from a “capex / useful life” perspective.
kwhitefoot 6y ago

stiray 6y ago

Actually I was quite surprised that those are ordinary trucks without superhero style exterior etc. I think that this is a recipe for success of electric vehicles (and they are hurting EV market on long run) - not that they look like from outer space (at hefty price mark) but comparable to prices of non-EV while driving on electricity. What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for. I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway). And Volvo did it right. Targeting purpose, targeting users and business. Congrats. Finally.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway). I would choose whichever makes sense for my business. Without pricing and reliability numbers, it's impossible to know which that might be. The closest vehicle in Tesla's garage to this is the Tesla Cybertruck which looks bizarre, but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor. If Tesla launched a butt ugly Cybervan which was similarly functional and cost effective, you can bet it would be popular with the class of buyer who are shopping for e-Vans. Right now I'm eyeballing the Cybertruck personally, in spite of it's appearance. Spending $20k to get a more traditional looking truck just doesn't make sense to me. The only concern I have is whether those high truck bed walls will screw things up.
- phaemon 6y ago
  I like the look of the Cybertruck. It's like the truck Automan would drive!
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I was probably a bit unfair to the CyberTruck. The big thing for me personally is I'm not flamboyant by nature. Once the Cybertruck becomes more commonplace I'll get over it. It certainly didn't stop me from pre-ordering.

alliao 6y ago

dumb question, is it easy to redesign EV to use hydrogen? Isn't the whole premise of hydrogen being 1. world adopts renewable energy 2. to compensate for lulls, build way more capacity 3. excess capacity bought cheaply to create hydrogen ... 5. profit! for hydrogen vehicles anyway... seems like we're treading down on such path..

WhompingWindows 6y ago
It wouldn't make sense for the current EV makers to switch to hydrogen. Tesla, for instance, has spent billions of dollars to optimize their battery packs with their lithium-based chemistry and specific cathodes/anodes. To then switch over to fuel cell + hydrogen is a completely different architecture, and Musk is notoriously anti-Hydrogen. There is a case to be made that excess renewables can be used to attempt to generate "green hydrogen" which is then a "storage" of renewables that can also be used for vehicles. I think in practice, it's a much smaller scale than battery electric vehicles.

bash-j 6y ago

I'd imagine you could swap out your current Volvo trucks with these for supermarket DC to store deliveries in Metro areas. The DCs already have electric power on every dock to hook up the trailer's refrigerator while parked. And DCs I know of here in Australia are being covered in solar panels because of their large foot print. The suppliers who deliver to the supermarket DC from their own DCs could do the same. Long distance are usually done with road trains (3+ trailers), using much more powerful trucks, and then the trailers are split up outside of the city area and completed by towing single trailers. So again you could use the electric vehicle to complete the last leg. As someone else mentioned, if they are quieter than the diesel equivalent, you may be able to start delivering to supermarkets in areas where they have curfews on deliveries after a certain time because of the noise.