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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 imh

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.

jdndnen 1y ago
A semi truck is defined by having a separate tractor and trailer unit These have exactly those You might be thinking of long distance haules, but what's long distance also depends on the environment In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe
- sandworm101 1y ago
  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.
  - snaily 1y ago
    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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186 Edit: I see you've replied there.
    - sandworm101 1y ago
      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.
      - IneffablePigeon 1y ago
        Nobody is arguing these trucks can currently cover every single use case. The US long distance trucking industry is an outlier.
        VBprogrammer 1y ago
        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...
        greedo 1y ago
        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.
        crote 1y ago
        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.
- diggan 1y ago
  > In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe 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?
  - quibono 1y ago
    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.
  - Certhas 1y ago
    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.
joshuamorton 1y ago
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.
- VBprogrammer 1y ago
  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.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    If we built charging stations as rest stops then it would work.
    - masklinn 1y ago
      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.
    - VBprogrammer 1y ago
      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.
      - lars_francke 1y ago
        In Europe this is already happening. There are dedicated companies for this (Milence) and the traditional operators have truck charging parks as well.
mattlondon 1y ago
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.
- sandworm101 1y ago
  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.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    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. https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu >>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.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      >Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons Why can't pumping be made safe enough to not require supervison?
      - _flux 1y ago
bob1029 1y ago
> We need far better battery capacities 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? I think this is an example of a "good" outcome: https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fire-us-interstate-highway-i-80-took-189000-litres-water https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fi...
- CraigJPerry 1y ago
  > 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.
  - bob1029 1y ago
    > 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.
- audunw 1y ago
MagicMoonlight 1y ago
500km is enough to drive anywhere in the UK, so it would be plenty for most uses.
- VBprogrammer 1y ago
  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.
jdietrich 1y ago
European perspective: 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.
- tomatocracy 1y ago
  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).
- ta20240528 1y ago
  Europe should 'electrify' their trucking by putting their long-haul trucks on electric trains. Europe's truck haulage is too high. IMHO
rsynnott 1y ago
These are mostly being sold in Europe, so with mandatory break times, the range is likely Good Enough.
crote 1y ago
> Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads. Put the battery underneath the trailers and you've basically solved the problem.
- lars_francke 1y ago
  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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

jdndnen 1y ago

A semi truck is defined by having a separate tractor and trailer unit These have exactly those You might be thinking of long distance haules, but what's long distance also depends on the environment In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe

sandworm101 1y ago
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.
- snaily 1y ago
  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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186 Edit: I see you've replied there.
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    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.
    - IneffablePigeon 1y ago
      Nobody is arguing these trucks can currently cover every single use case. The US long distance trucking industry is an outlier.
      - VBprogrammer 1y ago
        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...
        greedo 1y ago
        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.
        crote 1y ago
        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.
diggan 1y ago
> In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe 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?
- quibono 1y ago
  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.
- Certhas 1y ago
  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.

joshuamorton 1y ago

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.

VBprogrammer 1y ago
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.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  If we built charging stations as rest stops then it would work.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    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.
  - VBprogrammer 1y ago
    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.
    - lars_francke 1y ago
      In Europe this is already happening. There are dedicated companies for this (Milence) and the traditional operators have truck charging parks as well.

mattlondon 1y ago

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.

sandworm101 1y ago
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.
- gambiting 1y ago
  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. https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu >>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.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons Why can't pumping be made safe enough to not require supervison?
    - _flux 1y ago

bob1029 1y ago

> We need far better battery capacities 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? I think this is an example of a "good" outcome: https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fire-us-interstate-highway-i-80-took-189000-litres-water https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fi...

CraigJPerry 1y ago
> 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.
- bob1029 1y ago
  > 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.
audunw 1y ago

MagicMoonlight 1y ago

500km is enough to drive anywhere in the UK, so it would be plenty for most uses.

VBprogrammer 1y ago
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.

jdietrich 1y ago

European perspective: 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.

tomatocracy 1y ago
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).
ta20240528 1y ago
Europe should 'electrify' their trucking by putting their long-haul trucks on electric trains. Europe's truck haulage is too high. IMHO

rsynnott 1y ago

These are mostly being sold in Europe, so with mandatory break times, the range is likely Good Enough.

crote 1y ago

> Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads. Put the battery underneath the trailers and you've basically solved the problem.

lars_francke 1y ago
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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]