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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

And now guess how the trucks are powered? Now you use a cobustion engine to power an alternator to charge a battery. What is the net gain, if any?

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It's a more efficient engine, with better particulate filters, a catalytic converter to reduce NOx emissions, and yearly emissions inspections to ensure all of the above is up to standards. It's a gain.

"More efficient" is not a binary thing. Taking an efficient engine that's capable of throwing two tons of steel down a highway at 100 mph and using it to charge a lithium ion battery is like killing an ant with a sledgehammer.

An F150 consumes ~2 litres of fuel an hour at idle and provides 400 watts of power through its outlet. A Bosch leaf blower is 2400 watt. Petrol powered leaf blowers do not use 12 liters of fuel an hour.

Sure, the emissions in some ways will be lower, but it's not an unambiguous gain and it's not anything close to an environmentally friendly way to run a leaf blower.

This is clearly a niche for PHEVs or BEVs.

> An F150 consumes ~2 litres of fuel an hour at idle

Where'd you get this number? AFAICT this is not true.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+gas+per+hour+idling...

More like a little less than 1 liter for a 4.6L V8 motor.

Your link says 0.5-0.7 gallons for the 4.6L V8, which is 1.9-2.6 liters.

Ford is promising to produce a hybrid F150 that would upend your green calculus entirely.

> This is clearly a niche for PHEVs or BEVs.

(And yes it would, and that's great!)

Trucks don't use shitty two-stroke engines.

yes, less noise, and less pollution (by the economy of scale).

Same reason why EVs are a net win even if they are ultimately powered by coal.

My impression is that pollution scales roughly linearly with the size of a power plant, while power output scales exponentially.

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