Tesla's 'long-haul' electric truck aims for 200 to 300 miles on a charge

Tesla has demonstrated physically swapping battery packs in cars at least once before. For their demonstration (performance, really), they managed to do it in faster than a gas fill up.

I'd bet they'd work to actually get that production ready for these trucks. Seems like an easier and more useful place to get it working.

> I work in the telematics/trucking software space

Which company, if you don't mind me asking? (I work in the travel center data science space, and we're trying to understand truck traffic patterns.)

I'd also add that virtually the only compelling reason to have a single, large load like a big rig is to minimize the cost of a human driver relative to payload shipped. Without a driver, the optimal load size will likely be much different and will vary more by industry than it does today.

It's still a hell of a lot cheaper to have 2 batteries and 1 truck than 2 batteries in two trucks, assuming switching cost isn't too high.

>It won't make sense to swap a battery pack when you can just park one truck on the charger and let another take its place.

That depends on the relative capital costs of a truck sitting idle for hours while it charges and the costs of the systems for swapping and charging batteries.

It's the difference between making every truck and charging station a little more complex and making every station significantly larger and increasing the number of trucks you need to own.

> It won't make sense to swap a battery pack when you can just park one truck on the charger and let another take its place.

I'm guessing an operator would want 100% utilization from a truck.

If a battery discharges at the same rate as charging, then you would need 2x the number of batteries. You would need more batteries if charging is slower than discharging.

Capital costs? If a truck can only operate 50% of the time because the other 50% is spent recharging, you'll need twice as many trucks to move the same load.

While those trucks are recharging you're still paying for them.

> Once the driver is gone from autonomy, these fleets are going to be dirt cheap to operate.

What gives you the impression that human drivers are such a large part of the costs now?

It is almost certainly cheaper to have big motors centralized at a single unit, because motors scale faster than linearly with size.

It is also almost certainly cheaper to have small batteries spread through the train, because batteries scale mostly linearly, but there are a few problems with dense packs (like cooling).

Thus, if you want to plug the unities one into the other, you will probably have one or two powered unities, many cargo unities, and a few battery unities spread between them. Besides, you will also want dummy unities on the front and back with aerodynamic shapes.

Yes. Scott Perry from Ryder is speculating. But Reuters apparently has an unnamed source.

Here's the news:

> Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) next month plans to unveil an electric big-rig truck with a working range of 200 to 300 miles, Reuters has learned.

I'm thinking trucking companies will start building cab-switching depots. So your truck is almost out of battery juice, just get another, hook it up to your trailer and continue on.

I would assume since these are going to be commercial vehicles Tesla will resurrect or otherwise leverage their battery swap idea. Which fizzled out for private vehicles but would really help extend the range of these trucks. http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-to-debut-battery-swapping-sta...

Also more of the tractor can hang underneath the trailer so there's the chance for a larger battery capacity. Like this extended tractor (the semi painted green not the flatbeds behind it) in this image that is 22 feet long. http://www.bigtruckguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Sout...

TSLA may intend to debut battery swapping with the trucks, where the large physical form factor might be more amenable to swapping. While the range is low, if the equivalent mpg is higher, and the energy recovery from braking significant enough, then it would pencil out as an financial advantage to use the electric truck.

A Yahoo Answers post [1] gives an idea of the kind of metrics TSLA will have to soundly beat. Fuel is the biggest cost. Bring that down and you'll get the trucking companies' attention for the pitch.

Not all semis are long-haul; there are local delivery semis that fit into the 2-300 mile range, and that could be an initial market.

[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100327005347A...

Semis get about 5 or so mpg loaded down and have 200+ gallon tanks, so 1000-1500 miles on a full tank.

> hows does this compare to gas range on current new rigs?

It doesn't come close. Most semis load 250~300gal diesel and have a fuel economy of 5 to 8mpg[0] so you're probably looking at at least 1000 miles, and possibly > double that depending on the exact model, trip and driving style.

[0] though recent full-aero tractors can reach the low 10s, Volvo advertises 12MPG on their most efficient models

Good analysis!

Only:

> Owner-operators can only drive around 13 hours a day anyway.

Let's see how this changes with self-driving trucks in a few years. It seems like electric trucks and self-driving will arrive in the mainstream at roughly the same time.

If it is autonomous (which I still think is years and years away) then you just swap trucks.

I wonder if it's feasible to have swappable batteries. Consumers obviously wouldn't pay for that but businesses might.

I could be wrong, but I am guessing automating trucks is easier than doing it with autos. That's because so many trucks drive standard, well-mapped routes, whereas cars generally have to be able to go anywhere.

This wouldn't be suitable for long range OTR trucking, but great for shorter regional trucking. Delivery drivers like UPS or Fedex don't hit 200 miles a day and other trucks in denser areas also travel shorter distances and diesel fumes in urban areas is a huge concern. There are plenty of use cases for an electric truck that can travel 200 miles, even if it won't immediately replace diesel or gas.

They're targeting local delivery fleets that waste half their fuel idling at red lights, not Swift and Schnider.

This probably makes more sense than it does for consumer-owned vehicles. My guess is that at roll out, the battery may be swappable, but the feature won't be publicized or used for a while.

I've run the numbers before.. and yes, you could do this. It will considerably impact the weight that a truck can pull, though. You're going to sacrifice anywhere from 5,000 lbs to 15,000lbs of load capacity depending on how much capacity you want and how much armor you're going to need (an exploding semi radial is not something to disregard).

The _real_ problem is charging capacity, especially in large depots and yards. You're going to need a rather insane tap into the grid in order to pull the current necessary to re-charge these batteries in anything less than a day, and if you can't do that, you're going to end up with a huge stockpile of batteries and a new set of logistics challenges you're going to have to absorb to make it work.

Part of logistics currently is to track fuel prices across the country, and determine based upon the trucks location the "correct" amount of fuel to put in the truck to get the best pricing given the miles needed to travel. You're going to have to re-build this entire system and track electrical rates.

Finally.. consider that some loads in this country will travel for 2,000 miles or more on a truck before being delivered. A 300 mile capacity battery is utterly ineffective for this mode. It _might_ be better suited to mid-size local delivery trucks that never stray more than 100 miles from their depot, outside of that, it's doable, but it introduces more problems than it solves.

A mile is about 1.7 km, you can double it to get a rough sense

The submission title is the article title, and submission guidelines specify to use the original title (with some caveats). Hacker News also has a large US contingent. While that doesn't mean everything should be converted to imperial units, it also shouldn't be surprising when they show up. I wouldn't expect people to modify their units in this way in either direction, frankly. As you mention, it's not that hard to find a place that does the conversion, and it's also not that much harder to become accustomed to having a ballpark feeling of another unit system.

The title is taken from the headline of the article, which was written by an American news company, about an American corporation, about a product destined to debut on American roads. It makes sense to use American measurements considering the context.

I'll concede that it is a bit silly for America to still be on the Imperial system.

Sounds like a prime opportunity to write a Hacker News unit-conversion bot. Unless bots are banned....

In that case, I bet there's a browser plugin which will convert units for you automatically.