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Comment by extrapickles | Hacker News Reader

Truckers are even required to take a federally mandated 30 minute break[0] during the day, during which the truck can be recharging.

Industrial applications already consume much more power than an entire Megacharger site, so supplying the charger with power is an already solved problem. Getting power from the charger the truck is again, a solved problem in the industrial space. I can order an off the shelf industrial connector [1] that does 1000v @ 400A, which means you might need two of them. Truckers already use 2 pumps to fill their truck, so even that is not out of place.

[0] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-... [1] https://www.connector-techals.com.au/manufacturer/rauscher-s...

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The regulatory info only gives information on the way things should be with regard to how truckers and the interstate highway system works, but I would suggest that before you invest on this hypothesis, talk to some truckers earning $0.50 per mile. And look at where semis actually park when they're taking their 30 minute and 11 hour breaks, before deciding how fast this transition will occur and how much infrastructure will have to be in place along the major cross country interstates like I-70, I-80, I-35, etc., before a trucking company or an independent trucker decides to go all in on electric.

(I don't know the answer, but I strongly suspect that regulations are not going to be the driver of the adoption of this tech. Short haul or "hot shot" could be better suited for electric and autonomous. Show me some progress there first and I will buy into some actual disruption. If you want a research assignment, take to the interstate back and forth across a couple of flyover states and stop and see where the trucks actually are.)

I’d argue that these trucks would be a much better fit in Europe than the US. Here truckers can drive a maximum of 9.5 hours a day with a 45 minute break. These are mandated by law and the pentalties are severe for going over these limits.

The range also lends itself nicely to this. Over the course of a day a trucker would drive a maximum of 855km (they are limited to 90/h), so with a short fast charge during their break the 500 mile version could easily achieve this, then over night it could be charged slower.

In the UK we also have very narrow delivery windows e.g. Be at Tesco in this 30 minute slot or pay a steep penalty. Scheduling a charging slot will not add much difficulty.

Logistics researchers have also been working on this problem for years. You can find paper after paper in the literature.

On other hand it looks to be about a meter longer than most trucks in Europe so that would mean it has to use shorter trailers, and I do not think the weight has been released yet, but I think it is going to be more than trucks now. And the maximum permitted weight in EU is 40 (except if you transport containers then it is 42).

>And look at where semis actually park when they're taking their 30 minute and 11 hour breaks

and you believe either the Trucking companies, the Regulators, or Telsa give a shit what works for Actual Human Truckers....

Telsa is looking ahead to full automation anyway so humans are seen as a inconvenience, and if they make it hard on Truckers that will just give them addition ammo for any concerns regulator have in replacing Truckers with Automation. To these companies The fact that is might be hard for Truckers to find a Charging station that falls in line with Hour of Service rules just proved we need to eliminate the humans

Good point, I guess, although I was responding to the parent's post that cited meatworld-based regulations as a compensatory excuse for the need for frequent recharging.

Sure, many electric and autonomous vehicle problems go away if we "simply" re-engineer millions of miles of roads and infrastructure in the country. Now you've got two problems.

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