Germany is opening its first electric highway for trucks | Hacker News Reader

Germany is opening its first electric highway for trucks

edition.cnn.com

140 pointsmariushn161 comments

So basically they reinvented the trolleybuss[1] that's been around for over 100 years and still popular in some European cities by putting a tram pantograph[2] on top and moving them on highways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram

Exactly. Trolleybus had been popular in my city when I was a child. Then declared obstacles and replaced with oridinary buses.

Time to bring trolleybus back instead of EVs that as any individual cars have no place in a city.

Is there a such thing as a cargo trolleybus, or are they strictly for passengers? Maybe such a thing could be useful in cities?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleytruck

Head over to Solingen, they still have some there. ;-)

> (...) as any individual cars have no place in a city.

That's one view. The other is that cities are too dense. There is no reason, in the era of fast digital communications, to pack humans so densely that we are discussing the right to use an 8m² space in the city for personal use. It's an attack on the symptom rather than an attack on the cause.

What's the maximum density? I live in Montreal, which is a medium-sized city, not particularly dense, but cars don't scale as well as humans. The city has become gridlocked, noisy and dangerous, with roads full of potholes no matter how much money we throw at the problem.

I'm not a city planning expert, so I have no idea. It's a fun problem, though:

From Wikipedia, Montreal seems to have a lower density than my home city (Porto), at 4k/km² vs 7k/km², but higher total urban population (3.5M vs 1.5M). Porto has very decent traffic (rush hour lasts 2h, entry/exit times peak at 30min).

It's either the total population that is causing stress in Montreal, or traffic planning. Porto did a very thorough change in traffic in the 90s, to great effect. Outer rings to avoid passing traffic going into the city, an inner traffic distribution ring, channels to have traffic avoid the old city center (centuries old, poor fit for auto traffic).

I had misread your initial comment. As a north-american, I often hear people arguing in favour of more sprawl. A detached house and minimum two cars for a family.

I think we agree that we can have nice 'small' but dense cities. We don't all need to be New York, but we also don't want to clutter the planet with suburbs.

> Outer rings to avoid passing traffic going into the city, an inner traffic distribution ring, channels to have traffic avoid the old city center

It's funny how it look like a quick description on how traffic is organized around Paris, which is heavily gridlocked. Of course, that's two different metro area and I'm not a specialist on why we have traffic issues here in Paris.

Scale destroys all planning. Paris is ten times the size of Porto...

I guessed it was something like this.

Not a matter of taking 8m2 for personal use but rather of eliminating 8m2 for green, parks, pavements. Adding friction for pedestrians with unnecessary traffic lights etc.

In a city bikes and public transport should be all you need. Cars do not belong in the city.

Of course the question is painted as competition for space use. It does not change my original reasoning.

>In a city bikes and public transport should be all you need

Agreed! And what better time to get rid of those diesel-belching, noisy buses and bring back trolleybuses? The problem is in the UK (IMO) is that politicians generally can't think beyond the next election, so anything like this gets ignored.

There's plenty of non-dense places for people to live in, yet for some reason more and more people move to cities. Maybe it's because of the density and its benefits, not despite it?

It's because cities are where the jobs are, not necessarily because people want to live in cities. But cities have more jobs precisely because of that density.

Lots of people do explicitly want to live in dense cities. And it's very freeing not having to own, maintain, and pay for a car. That's a huge benefit of living in a dense enough city that has had viable mass transit.

There are plenty of reasons. Infrastructure is much cheaper per citizen in denser cities. Schools, doctors, supermarkets are all more efficient in denser neighborhoods. Public transportation makes much more sense in denser urban areas.

That's true, but that effect follows a Pareto curve. Medium sized cities (1M to 3M inhabitants) reap most, if not all, benefits of density, without incurring the worst of the downsides.

In other words, I'm not advocating large sprawling cities, nor am I advocating a return to rural population distribution, but rather saner sized cities.

> Medium sized cities (1M to 3M inhabitants)

That's medium?!

What do those cities have which a city of 100k inhabitants does not have?

Culture, diversity, variety?

Not to say that a city of 100k lacks any of these things, but a place far larger can have much more.

Jobs for software engineers for example.

Nowadays, that's medium. Large is 10M.

I've lived in a 100k city for a few years. It was a fun time, I liked it a lot, and you have access to most amenities, but you do notice it is a small city. Fewer different restaurants, very limited selection of bars and night clubs [1], much limited selection of cultural events.

[1] This has an unexpected upside: you can go out on a whim and expect to find your friends at the usual places, in a Cheers like fashion.

I guess, size-wise, those are USA definitions.

Not in Germany [1] (which is the topic here), nor in The Netherlands (where I'm from). Amsterdam doesn't have 1M, yet it is very culturally diverse. Zaanstad (containing Zaandam) is 'only' ~150k, and has the most cultures of The Netherlands (a total of 135 different nationalities).

[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-biggest-cities-in-ge...

EDIT: Ah, now it makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up! :)

Sorry, there's a bit of misunderstanding here, my fault. I'm referring to metropolitan area population, not the specific city population. My city, Porto, for example, has less than 300k inhabitants. The metro area is, however, about 1.5M. In the context of auto traffic, or city services, the relevant number is the metro population, not the city proper.

That's....silly. By that definition most EU countries don't even have a "large" city. Warsaw and Krakow are both huge cities and they have 2M and 1M people respectively.

Tokyo does work quite well for a city of 37.5 million (metro area).

That's 12 million more people than live in all of the continent Australia. It always boggles my mind.

Good God, I can't imagine having this view. The good part is that if you do, the more sparse places to live than dense.

As for myself, I found Taipei to be the perfect density.

That's assuming everyone can telecommute or has a non-physical job. We have already tried suburban sprawl in many cities, and I'm not sure it worked. It's also assuming that people only live in cities because of work. A lot of people live in cities because they don't want to own a car, and like what they have to offer for community, lifestyle and culture.

Suburban sprawl, office parks and shopping malls don't offer much in the way of cultural and community development and they are very heavily focused around those who own an automobile and get everywhere by driving. Riding a bike or walking in a busy CBD is usually much more productive and practical than riding or walking around a sprawling suburbia. Getting any meaningful distance takes far longer in a suburban sprawl and often your destination is in the center of a completely different suburb, with it's own gigantic sprawl to cover before you get to the businesses.

I am interested in what your solutions to the symptoms would be, I think I'm probably doing you a disservice by assuming your solution is more suburbia.

I'll refer you to my explanation on another thread. I'm in no way advocating urban sprawl:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868072

I think I actually live in a city like you speak of. 1.5m people. Our car commutes are between 20-40 minutes long from the majority of suburbs, and our CBD is small with lots of shopping precincts dotted around the suburbs but most of the action taking place in the CBD. Few restaurants in the Suburbs for example, and most residential is in the suburbs.

You are 20 minutes from hills, rural towns, or world class beaches from the CBD. We have dozens of national parks and outdoor activity areas (lots of Mountain Biking for example). I enjoy good cycling once nearer the city, although I am definitely at that limit I was talking about where it's too far to cycle practically to stuff in the suburbs. Cycling to the CBD is fine, because once you're there everything you need is in the same place.

I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you, with a modifier that it would be nice to have medium residential density in the suburbs as well so that it was more affordable to live a saner cycling distance from the city. The issue is that while it's fine to cycle to one destination in the suburbs, if you need to be in two different locations in one day plus work you can't really achieve it. That's where a strong CBD helps a lot.

> Time to bring trolleybus back instead of EVs that as any individual cars have no place in a city.

If a city / transit agency does not have overhead wiring infrastructure already, I do not think they will have much interest in setting it up from scratch.

It's probably a lot easier to either (i) have a few charging spots on a bus route, (ii) use hybrid buses, or (iii) have EV buses with range extenders where needed.

Trolleybus can charge while moving. Or while staying at a charging spot.

In St.-Petersburg, Russia we had trolleybus all the time, but lately they got batteries and it was a mind blowing experience to see a trolleybus going without wires. The next surprising thing of that sort would be a tram going without rails.

That will not be called tram. Whole point of tramway is it trams a fixed path.

Berlin ran the first experimental Trolleybus in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromote

From the article

"In English language use, the Kontaktwagen was later named the "trolley", giving the trolley car and trolley bus their names."

Not exactly. A trolleybuss will not run at 90km/h.

Nor do trucks in the city. Put trolleybus on a highway and it could do 90km/h.

Do you know of any existing system of trolleybuses running at highway speeds? Equating the tech here is like equating trams with long-distance trains.

Well, it's city transport so they're installed in cities. But I don't see any technical issues to install them on highways if it proved to be cost-effective.

My city got a significant trolleybus network. It's on slow streets only because that's where public transit stops are. But from technical perspective, there's nothing stopping from putting them on a highway. The biggest issue is tight intersections downtown. They go painfully slow at those. Straight line? No problem at all and they can safely floor it. And boy is there a difference between flooring a trolley and a diesel bus...

Without evidence, I'm not at all convinced by your claim that there is no technical issues to doubling the speed and handling heavy freight. There is a reason trains are different than trams.

Just like there's some difference between trains, high speed trains and freight trains, there would be some differences between trolleys and freight-trolleys or high speed trolleys. But the fundamental design is +/- the same.

An articulated trolleybus having 1'A+A' axle formula (UIC carriage notation if you read it correctly) can easily exceed 100km/h.

And how often will it do so? Use case is somewhat different. Not that I am in favor of it. I would like to have trucks only for the last mile.

I am too in favor of trains in this regard but there are terrains that you can have a dual carriage road but have it impossible to make a standard gauge railway, even with racks.

Don't think it ever went away in Germany. Solingen, a German city close to where I live, have been running trolleybuses for many years now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Solingen

Esslingen too.

We have them in Cambridge/Belmont Massachusetts though I didn’t know they were called trolleybus

Setting the title would probably do a lot. They do occasionally come unhooked and the driver has to hop out and reconnect.

Trolleybuses are operating in a couple Polish cities as well. IMO they’re great - clean like a tram (which are very widespread in Poland), but make less noise and vibrations (as they ride on rubber, not steel) and don’t require the tracks. Also, one tram’s failure causes entire line to shut down, which is not the case with trolleybuses. I really like them.

Putting batteries in trolleybuses could help mitigate this problem.

Trolleybusses DON'T have that problem - they can easily pass another failed trolleybuss. Having said that, there are trolleybusses with batteries already (operating in Gdynia, Poland for example) - they're being used to service routes which are not 100% electrified.

Still big in SF.

The differences of this proposal are the distances and speeds, and that I assume the trucks are multimode (so can use electric on the Autobahn and then ICE elsewhere.

Yeah, the article states that these are hybrid trucks.

Trolleybus cannot operate at highway speeds or handle detachable trailers.

A problem they are solving is that this requires a closed electric circuit.

Trams solve that with a pantograph and steel wheels on steel rails. Trolley busses use two collectors tied to the independent overhead lines.

This system uses two pantographs with a control system pulling them back when he truck leaves the lane and pushes them up when entering the lane. Doing that on highway speeds is a bit more complicated.

Seattle has had them for half a century or longer too.

It seems like it would be to expensive to build and maintain this kind of cabling over a significant portion of the highway, but it would be interesting to have it over smaller sections so trucks can re-charge without stopping.

Naively, the ability to re-charge without stopping seems of limited value. Given predictable routes and the existing network of specialized stops for trucks, I expect that battery swapping and overnight charging of trucks is sufficient, and does not require maintaining expensive overhead wiring infrastructure stretching over miles. Just consider what is going to require more hardware: a single battery swap station, or miles and miles of overhead wiring necessary to recharge a truck battery given known limits to battery charging speeds.

Battery swapping is an inefficient use of resources.

Batteries are expensive assets and make up the bulk of the cost of an electric truck. You want to have all your batteries inside trucks, working as much as possible, not sitting around stored at swap stations waiting to be used.

Fast charging infrastructure beats battery swapping, and recharge times aren’t really an issue. In Europe, truck drivers are required to take breaks every 4.5 hours anyway.

> You want to have all your batteries inside trucks, working as much as possible, not sitting around stored at swap stations waiting to be used.

Batteries don't sit at swap stations just waiting to be used, they sit there charging. (The big difference is that the vehicle, which is also an expensive asset, doesn't have to be attached to them while doing this.) Stations will have the minimum number of batteries on hand to ensure there is always one available to swap in.

Insofar as you need extra capacity to handle fluctations in usage, leading to charged batteries sitting around, you have a a strictly worse problem if the batteries are permanently attached to vehicles (since vehicle demand fluctuations don't go away, and you have the additional problem that you can't remove batteries from vehicles that aren't going to be used for a while). Another way to see this is that swappable batteries is just an extra ability; you can always charge the battery attached to the vehicle if you want.

If you have a link to a technical argument for what you're trying to gesture at, I'd love to see it, but the argument you've given doesn't hold water. Arguments relating to the cost of the swapping infrastructure are at least plausible.

> and recharge times aren’t really an issue. In Europe, truck drivers are required to take breaks every 4.5 hours anyway.

In that case, there is no point to the overhead charging system discussed in the OP article.

”Stations will have the minimum number of batteries on hand to ensure there is always one available to swap in.”

Therein lies the problem. You may be able to optimise your network, scheduling truck routes according to availability of swaps, etc. But it’s always going to require a substantially greater number of batteries than trucks.

And for what gain? Time savings are zero-to-minimal, and fast charging is cheaper, easier, and more flexible than swapping.

Also, truck batteries are going to be much bigger than car batteries. A long-range truck pack will weigh several tonnes. A station that can swap these quickly in a semi-automated way is likely to be a substantial, expensive undertaking.

Trucks already have a mechanism to attach and detach their cargo trailers, I'd imagine any battery swap feature would use this as a starting point.

> But it’s always going to require a substantially greater number of batteries than trucks.

I already addressed this is my comment. It's a loss that applies just as well to batteries that cannot be attached to vehicles, so it's not an argument against detachable batteries.

> Also, truck batteries are going to be much bigger than car batteries. A long-range truck pack will weigh several tonnes.

Stations already have massive underground infrastructures for dealing with fuel, which has an effective energy density that is less than a factor of two smaller than batteries. And unlike fuel, which must be stored on-site for the entire time between fuel shipments (~24 hours), you don't need to store a comparable number of batteries on site, just enough to have them continuously charging.

> A station that can swap these quickly in a semi-automated way is likely to be a substantial, expensive undertaking.

Putting in miles and miles of overhead charing capabilities is, I claim, significantly more expensive. But I'm not interested in having a detailed conversation on the expense of swapping machinery if we can't even agree on the simple point about utilization rates of swappable batteries being as least as large as non-swappable ones.

”In that case, there is no point to the overhead charging system discussed in the OP article.”

In the context of long-range, fully-electric trucks, I agree.

This system was designed for hybrid trucks with a short electric range.

My point was that it doesn't make sense for you to bring up overnight charging of batteries in the context of short-electric-range trucks. If that were sufficient, we wouldn't be worrying about swapping vs. overhead charging.

Recharging from these wires may not even be necessary to make this economically viable.

If a truck only needs to take power from batteries for the stretches it rides outside such highways, it can have much smaller and lighter batteries, significantly increasing its cargo carrying capacity.

I mean maybe, but the point of GhostVII's comment was to consider only stretches of overhead power that were just long enough to recharge batteries (because stretches long enough to keep trucks moving on their entire trip would be prohibitively expensive infrastructure).

Near weighing stations/rest areas where they go slowly/park overnight...

There is surprisingly little Highway Miles in most countries.

The US interstate system is only 48,191 miles long. If this cost 1 million per mile per year to maintain that’s only 50 billion per year which is likely far less than the amount of fuel saved.

A larger issue is top speed, this needs to work at 70MPH to be really useful. Though high speed electric trains demonstrate that should be possible.

Another issue is your electricity production. If it comes primarily from coal, I suppose you are better off with diesel trucks.

Actually no, you're not. It's easier and more efficient to filter out pollution at a power plant than in each car.

And it's a lot easier to replace.

Well it has been built in rail networks that are as long as highways.

Which actually isn't that kind of a news. Because the first such thing where deployed in Sweden in 2016.[1]

Sweden even has a second prototype project right now, which uses electric rails which can be used by trucks AND cars.[2]

[1] https://www.scania.com/group/en/worlds-first-electric-road-o...

[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/technology/sweden-gets-the...

Implemented by Scania (owned by Volkswagen) and Siemens. The same are now the main partners behind the one in Germany.

When did Scania (and Saab presumably) ownership changed?

Saab-Scania (70's-90's) was split into Scania (trucks) and Saab Automobile. Scania maintained independent for a long while but is now owned by VW.

Saab Automobile was bought by GM (90's-2000's), who completely ruined the company, sold it for pennies, and now it's bankrupt.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/volkswagen-wins-enou...

They date to the early 20th century, ~1918.

It's a sound concept.

https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/mobility/road-sol...

For those wondering about not electrified sections, trucks equipped with the system use hybrid drives.

There are some points that would need more explanation for me: - I don't see any billing system described here. According to their page this system cut in half the energy consumption so there is still a significant electricity consumption that will be paid somehow. - What's the durability of the truck attachment and the cables ? Cable replacement/maintenance would mean blocking at least one lane for a significant amount of time so I hope it's not a frequent operation.

More specific to Germany, I really don't want to sound like I am against EV but it's something I genuinely wonder about : Say this system becomes popular and tens of thousands of trucks start sucking electricity out of the grid, the electricity demand will skyrocket. Is Germany going to raise the electricity prices to import or build clean plants or just restart a few coal plant ?

In regards to billing, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a combination of strict regulations/registrations about efficiency and then semi-simple toll roads. If you know how much a given truck consumes and the distance it travels, that might be close enough math to not need more detail. I could also see a potential factor of registered load mass having an effect too, but that should be possible to include.

Germany also already has high electricity prices compared to a lot of the world, but I doubt this would be a rapidly adopted thing that is going to cause a massive price spike

If you want to have EV on these roads, pay a fee.

This is a prototype. The billing will be added later, when it is deployed for real.

That is the same with billing at public charging stations for electric vehicles. In the past, you basically got the charge free of charge. The billing, if there was any, was more about the parking. That was to encourage to build up a charging network.

But now, new charging stations are regulated by the calibration rules, like every by law calibrated weighing device you find in shops. That means they now measure the charge and this will be billed. The requirements are strict, because everything as to be reliably recorded, so the proof would stand in court. That makes those systems expansive. That means electric charging at public stations seems to be more expansive than fueling your ICE.

It's a pilot system, so one goal is to exactly answer these kinds of question: durability, maintenance etc. I've passed the installation on the A5, and the pylons are on the side of the road, and I've seen machinery parked on the side of the road without a lane blocked, so possibly they can even do cable replacement without blocking a lane.

For the same reason I dont' think they care about billing or huge electricity demand yet (the electricity probably will be paid from the pilot project funds).

But here's an idea: If it's a hybrid system anyway, why don't dump a variable amount of excess electricity generated by renewables into it, instead of selling that at a negative price to other countries in times of low demand?

Take a look at the primary energy consumption here in this chart [0]. As you can see despite 45% of electricity coming from renewables it's still only 14% of the total energy consumption. Just the mineral oil consumption alone contributes 2.5 times more energy than renewables. This looks bad at first glance except you have to consider that the efficiency of ICE cars is extremely low, somewhere around 25% or even less depending on the fuel. Electric motors will massively reduce the total amount of energy needed for transport no matter what the source of energy is.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

> More specific to Germany, I really don't want to sound like I am against EV but it's something I genuinely wonder about : Say this system becomes popular and tens of thousands of trucks start sucking electricity out of the grid, the electricity demand will skyrocket. Is Germany going to raise the electricity prices to import or build clean plants or just restart a few coal plant?

Germany already has increased electricity prices to massively build out its solar and wind turbine network, a lot of those right next to autobahnen. If they can transmit power along those lines, and distribute some storage across it, this could serve as a long-range electricity transmission network for all the renewable capacities scattered over the country.

Germany will use French nuclear power and feel good to have no nuclear plants.

I don't understand how they could justify this investment. Aren't railways cheaper and more efficient anyway?

You can think of politics handing over a lot of money to only a few big companies for a research project. Its nothing more than that ;)

I don't think this is meant as a replacement for long-distance transports (where trains and barges are already well established) but for the "last mile" where you need to transport only a few goods to varying destinations (but along an existing highway).

It looks like the "last mile" problem is not solved if they have this infrastucture only on highways. Probably this project makes sense with large batteries on-board(e.g. Tesla semi).

They have a combustion engine on board that powers the truck when not driving on the highway.

In Germany you're never more than a few kilometers away from the next Autobahn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn

Driving the "first and last" mile on diesel or battery and everything inbetween with electricity from the overhead wire makes a lot of sense IMHO, at least in Germany and countries with similar infrastructure.

Railways are great for bulk transport of goods, but road trucking excels at smaller loads with finer-grained destination selection. The railway equivalent to what these trucks facilitate would be wagon-load freight, which is largely considered impractical in europe[0] and generally lost out to road trucking post war[1].

To explain why this isn't necessarily the case in america [0], it's important to understand that america didn't have a huge rebuilding effort post-war [1] that relocated industry away from the rail lines that had been servicing them for a hundred years. Post-war europe did have that rebuilding effort, and it saw a lot of medium industry spread out as the costs to remain in denser populated areas near rail hubs increase. Thus road networks became the feeders for these industries rather than proximity to rail freight depots and rail spurs. Maintaining wagon-load rail delivery in that environment became much more expensive as a result.

I think you forgot to post the [0] and [1] notes

In this case I was using them as cross-references.

oh ok!

Regarding road v rail freight efficiency.

Most freight companies struggle with empty running on the truck's return leg home. In the UK roughly 30% of trucks on the roads are empty. [1]

I was wondering how this compares with rail freight as I haven't found a comparative analysis online.

[1]https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-gb/blog/post/empty-running...

I would be interested if you have some citations for the idea that "europe post war effort that rebuild industries far from rails".

I wouldn't say railways are cheaper but they are definitely much more efficient and environment friendly.

One of the big issues is it that is very hard to build new railway tracks. The current German infrastructure is already near the limit and the time and cost till a project starts (a lot of issues with people living near it, costs, regulations) is very high.

All in all I think it's a good idea to improve existing infrastructure but not sure if it will scale.

German rail infrastructure is currently shrinking. It is no where near the limit. 2018 we had about 2500km less track than 2005.[1]

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB_Netz#Netzentwicklung

> Aren't railways cheaper and more efficient anyway?

The problem is that railways have massively higher investment costs than roads in construction plus there's roads everywhere but you can't build a freight rail line into the center core of Munich, for example.

Not always -- local service trains were effectively the pickup trucks of early forestry and mining operations, operating at low speeds (5-10 MPH) over temporarily-laid tracks which might be re-laid in a day or two to service new areas. Relatively this was fairly low-intensity, though modern engineering and safety requirements might limit such deployments.

The comparative advantage was over hand- or animal-transport over unimproved or poorly-improved terrain.

Railroads do endpoint delivery -- last mile -- poorly.

The height of the railroad era in the US actually saw the peak of the horse population -- moving goods the final or first mile, or block, to and from the railroad depot was a huge need. The automobile and lorry rapidly picked up this niche, but horses were used well into the 1920s.

A train is an exceedingly good way to get goods or passengers from near point A to near point B. But if you want specific pickup and deivery, you either need to put everthing at ponts A and B (densification, tower construction), build an immense set of spur line (low raffic, high loal impact, low rate of return), develop an exceptonally efficient intermodal system (goods can coninue across multiple transport modes without major break-bulk costs -- shipping containers are an example). Or you have a means of accomplishing the final and initial delivery legs.

Keep in mind that there are transport needs that concentrate poorly, with agriculture being a prime example. You might even call ag an industrial productive mode dominated by spatial (or areal) inputs. Keep in mind that the fundamental unit of area under old units, the acre, is literally defined as a daily work unit. In German, that is literally true: Tagwerk, a day's work.

Which means that both the inputs and outputs of agriculture must be delivered over a sparse network not amenable to infrastructure-based optimisations. And running rail to every last field is a losing proposition. Asphalt or gravel roads are far less expensive infrastructure, and even electrifying those would be a high challenge.

(Other materials sourcing operations face similar dynamics.)

If you were designing a country's infrastructure and industry with a clean sheet, a railway would certainly seem logical.

This solution is the result of looking at the situation as it is right now (logistics mainly uses trucks, can we avoid changing that? We don't have land for new railways, can we avoid using extra land?) and trying to make an evolutionary improvement.

This isn't production deployment, it's an prototype. An experiment. Those still require justification, but not as much.

Here's some handwaving: "We have a large existing road network and some heavily used spots. How well would it work to charge trucks while driving along the densest 0.7% of the road network?" Does this sound like a question one might spend money to answer?

European trains have some limitations compared which push more freight towards trucks [1]. Compared to North American trains the carry less tonnage per axle, run shorter routes, with small number of cars, and lines are nationalized which limits profitability which in turn reduces the incentive to invest more into using them.

However what is doing them in is the same which will do in most rail, whether cross country or in city. Efficiency of trucks and buses is increasing and the move towards electrification will remove the pollution then combined with autonomy and specialized vehicles will arise to displace both freight and passenger use

[1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...

Trains can't climb hills. Therefore railways can't be built everywhere which increases costs significantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Railways

More context: They use rack-and-pinion railways in Switzerland [0][1] to accommodate the steep grades.

> The trains are fitted with one or more cog wheels or pinions that mesh with this rack rail. This allows the trains to operate on steep grades above around 7 to 10%, which is the maximum for friction-based rail. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_railway

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rack_railways_of_Sw...

I feel this list better convey's what you're going for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steepest_gradients_on_...

Also on the topic: in the central europe there is extensive rail network. The problem is that is already used heavily for the transportation so it cant be used as extensively for freight...

This is less efficient, but also requires a much smaller investment. That makes it viable for routes that aren’t busy enough to warrant building a rail system.

Also, because they can take much steeper inclines and tighter corners, trolley buses can compete with trams in busy city centers if those cities have steep hills.

If these cables could be used to recharge and power trucks then you wouldn’t need total coverage if they were all electric.

This is already being tested and used for buses in cities, where it makes even more sense due to shorter distances on mostly predictable routes.

Right, and gravity can be creatively applied as well.

Short-range (100-1000m) off-grid capability, or unpowered downhill segments (relying on regenerative braking to battery storage) can further reduce infrastructure needs.

There are battery-powered truck schemes relying on empty uphill returns for quarry and forestry applications. Effectively the load itself is the potential energy source and charges batteries via regenerative braking.

Clever, but of limited application.

There's a Civil Engineering professor at Oklahoma State University who's pushing a similar concept to improve America's infrastructure.

It's called the Autonomous Trucking Corridor.

https://youtu.be/_ev6hIQYKYY

Sounds pretty obvious when you look at it. I wonder why it hasn't happened earlier.

It did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

Eh, not really, there's a gulf of inventions involving better pantograph technology, efficient and compact hybrid power trains, sensors and self-driving capability (the trucks will need some form of self 'lane' keeping to stay connected to the power source) and so on that makes the two barely comparable other than at a very cosmetic level.

More relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleytruck

A few questions come to mind.

Can this solution be scaled to higher speeds? (Yes, electric trains reach higher speeds with similar top mounted tech. But, they run on dedicated rails)

What about failure of a line? Could people in cars be electrocuted?

Trucks have 90kph speed limit.

I wonder how many miles you have to drive one of these new trucks before you offset the carbon used to make it rather than continuing to use the old diesel truck?

> Another benefit is a sharp reduction in emissions of CO2...

Yeah... no. Half of the German electricity is coal-based, so electric vehicles in Germany are worse in terms of CO2 emissions than Diesel-based vehicles:

https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/27/1842245/electric-ve...

Combined with the total stop of nuclear energy and the unsolved problem of storing/distributing renewable energy, it's going to stay that way for a while.

Doesn't Germany import a fair bit from France(who is oversupplied from their nuclear reactors).

I may be wrong I heard about that a while ago.

The imports/exports are balanced.

The nuclear fear is annoying, but this is still a step in the right direction

The cited study is not peer reviewed, nor does it provide any supplementary data. Simply put, as it is not reproducible, it is not science.

The best studies will be completely open about their assumptions, data sources, approximations, and uncertainties. They generally report (and I find similar conclusions in my research) that in most places where people are buying EVs, given the uncertainties in our supply chain models, they are at par with hybrid gasoline or natural gas cars. And it is difficult to construct consistent scenarios where the electricity grid does not get cleaner over the lifetime of an EV built today and used for 15 years.

A good starting point when exploring these calculations is the GREET model: https://greet.es.anl.gov/.

> Simply put, as it is not reproducible, it is not science.

The study cites its sources and means of calculation and therefore is falsifiable. If there was anything obviously wrong with it, I'm sure it would've been proven wrong by the many people who don't like the conclusion.

> ... in most places where people are buying EVs...

That's irrelevant to my point. These "electric highways" are being built in Germany, so the German energy mix counts, not that of other places.

> Yeah... no. Half of the German electricity is coal-based

And a good third comes from renewables without having any meaningful hydropower opportunities [0].

> Combined with the total stop of nuclear energy, and the unsolved problem of storing/distributing renewable energy

There are still 7 reactors running [1] just like on-going research into nuclear fusion [2]. Both are far more difficult problems to solve than electricity storage, which has comparatively research potential versus nuclear fission projects which have the actual unsolved problem of where to "finally" store that waste for decades and centuries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

You're doing nothing to convince me that my conclusion is incorrect. Yes, Germany still has reactors, which they will turn off, exacerbating the problem.

Nuclear waste storage is a solved problem, just not the "indefinitely" part. That part can be put off for a long time.

By contrast, if you want to replace coal/nuclear with renewable energy, you need to solve the storage/distribution problem first.

What makes you think that Germany will stay on coal forever?

I don't think that. Forever is a long time.

However, so far the "Energiewende" has been a total failure in terms of reducing CO2, despite Germany having a huge amount of renewables and extremely high electricity costs. If Germany had any obvious alternatives to coal, they would've long done something about it.

As it stands and into the foreseeable future, without technological breakthroughs, the idea that electric vehicles could significantly reduce CO2 emissions doesn't stand scrutiny.

They do: nuclear power. Already built, costs already paid, minimal extra costs to be incurred due to running it longer.

> They do: nuclear power. Already built, costs already paid, minimal extra costs to be incurred due to running it longer.

Nevertheless, Germany has already decided to exit nuclear altogether.

Not forever, but way too long: https://i.redd.it/mbhzuqszr7q21.gif

You linked to an article that links to an article that does not link to the source study (which supposedly claims that electric cars including battery manufacture create more CO2 than a comparable diesel car.) I'll list why this is irrelevant and misleading:

- This comment thread is about overhead electric powered trucks. Battery manufacture emissions are irrelevant.

- The article claims a lifetime of 10 years and an annual mileage of 15000km. Those are drastically low for a truck in Germany, and that means it's an inaccurate calculation to spread the manufacturing emissions over the driven distance.

There were a couple more, but without seeing the source study I can't comment on them.

You are of course correct in that these vehicles aren't directly comparable. Particularly, these vehicles will still be spending a significant amount of time just being regular Diesels.

> The article claims a lifetime of 10 years and an annual mileage of 15000km. Those are drastically low for a truck in Germany, and that means it's an inaccurate calculation to spread the manufacturing emissions over the driven distance.

Since there are no battery-associated emissions for these vehicles in the first place, that objection is moot, isn't it?

On the other hand, surely building all this infrastructure will result in CO2 emissions.

In any event, electricity in Germany is far from CO2 neutral, so the claim of "drastic reduction in CO2" with these vehicles just doesn't fly.

> In any event, electricity in Germany is far from CO2 neutral, so the claim of "drastic reduction in CO2" with these vehicles just doesn't fly.

My earlier comment was a specific criticism of how the linked study doesn't apply to this thread. This claim you've just made, however, is different and broader - and disclaimed in an article here [1], and discussed on HN here [2]. I could get into a demonstrative calculation of how a solely coal-powered electric car is still better than the US-average ICE car in terms of CO2-per-km, but that's been done before [3].

[1] https://innovationorigins.com/no-diesel-is-not-better-for-th...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19795481

[3] http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-18_Abstract_Engl...

> This claim you've just made, however, is different and broader - and disclaimed in an article here

There are some numbers in there that I agree would be fair to use in favor of the EV, but on the whole this is cherrypicking in favor of the EV.

In particular, just because Tesla uses renewables (for which they likely got a nice tax break and/or subsidy) to produce some batteries, we should all be using their numbers to represent the CO2 emissions for batteries? First of all, Tesla may have the single biggest battery factory, but they're not the biggest producers, or at least they won't be:

https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/catl-cars-germa...

The amount of cars they are able to produce is also very small, though in terms of demand for EVs, they certainly have a big market share. This is unlikely to stay true if EVs really go mainstream in Germany, because the EU will likely be favoring European carmakers with subsidies.

> I could get into a demonstrative calculation of how a solely coal-powered electric car is still better than the US-average ICE car in terms of CO2-per-km, but that's been done before

What does the "average ICE car" have to do with anything? EVs aren't "average cars" and even Diesels aren't "average cars" in the US. To quote that abstract:

"The calculated fuel-economy-equivalent values for individual countries vary greatly, depending on the mix of fuels used to generate electricity within each country. [...] The corresponding value for the United States is 55.4 MPGghg (4.2 L/100 km)"

You can certainly get a Diesel that beats 55MPG. It just won't be as fancy as a Tesla.

> What does the "average ICE car" have to do with anything?

Unless you can provide some source that is comparing overhead-electric-powered trucks to diesel-powered-trucks, it's all academic and off-topic anyway. I am just using the sources that are available (those that compare battery electric cars to ICE cars) to show that your claim (electricity in Germany isn't CO2 neutral, so it can't be claimed that electric vehicles will reduce CO2) is not correct.

That study was also promptly debunked.

https://insideevs.com/features/347409/german-study-diesels-c...

I can easily levee the same accusation of cherrypicking the numbers against the sources cited here, like this claim:

"even if it were charged 100% from coal, an EV would still be cleaner than the average ICE vehicle"

...where the "average ICE vehicle" is a car running on 30 mpg of gasoline. However, the point of the study isn't to compare average cars in the gasoline-hungry US. The point is to show which new cars would perform the best in terms of achieving the CO2 goals set by the EU for the car industry. This is important, because it has implications on future taxes and subsidies of car purchases. People focus on the "EV vs. Diesel" part, but the actual recommendation of the study is neither EV nor Diesel, but gas-powered vehicles.

Now indeed if we pick the slightly different numbers that this EV proponent would like us to pick, we may arrive here:

"The Fraunhofer Institute reported in March that EVs typically produce “28 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than a luxury-class diesel, up to 42 percent less than a small car petrol engine.”

The catch with these numbers? They only count for the smallest batteries (200km range). The study also has a graph that shows that at 500km, the advantage is down to 5% and at 650km, it flips in favor of the Diesel.

Has anything been debunked here? Not really, it just shows that different numbers mean different things.

Ultimately, self-driving vehicles require maintenance on the road, meaning a human riding along; if the self-driving capability fails, the human will take over the wheel.

Logistics companies want to minimize maintenance costs, meaning the self-driving truck ends up just a regular truck, except the driver now needs to have a PhD in electrical engineering to do maintenance.

Self-driving vehicles don't seem scalable.

Does the article even mention self driving vehicles?

Eh, the human won't be for maintenance, that's a solvable problem. Truck drivers do basic stuff just because they're there to do it, but logistics companies can replace brakes on a schedule too.

No, the main reason for having a human along will be as a security guard. These trucks are going to be vulnerable to piracy without a hired gun.

> Ultimately, self-driving vehicles require maintenance on the road, meaning a human riding along; if the self-driving capability fails, the human will take over the wheel.

Maybe in the first several years. After that the technology will mature and maintenance won't be needed that often. And if there is a problem the truck can stop at the roadside, like in case of a failure today, and call for help.

I guess logistics companies will keep teams on the road which can respond quickly if a self driving truck has problems.

Unfortunately, some still look at immediate costs instead of considering long-term health benefits (and cost savings) due to lower pollution:

Doubts have been raised about the cost-benefit ratio of the pilot project. Micheal Kraft, vice president of the Hessian Motor Trade Association, considers the technology, which is already used in Sweden, to be uneconomical.

The doubts are entirely warranted. Health effects are externalities, so unless the government puts a price on it, they have no impact on whether something is economical or not.

If something is uneconomical, it simply cannot work unless it is subsidized and then the question is whether there isn't a better use for that money. Cost-Benefit is always relevant. If you just care about the health effects, subsidizing gas-powered vehicles may be more cost efficient.

> If something is uneconomical, it simply cannot work unless it is subsidized

Or alternatively, everything else is made worse. Raise taxes on Diesel, raise taxes on non-hybrid and non-electric trucks, forbid non-electric trucks from autobahns, etc.

If you are a government, you don't have to make this solution better, you can just make all other solutions worse.

This makes sense. Thanks :)

Well since Germany uses coalpower, it will make the environmental gain pretty much non-existent.

I apologize on behalf of our government that is enthralled by the automotive lobby.

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