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Comment by rudolph9 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like people often forget how applicable EVs are to in city heavy commercial vehicles such as garbage truck, buses, service vehicles

The high torque nature and predicable nature (at least in the case of garbage trucks and buses) make them ideal candidates for EV. Arguably much more viable use case (at least initially) than household vehicles.

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EVs are a clear winner for jobs like that. Has the prediction of EVs being low on maintenance bore out? If so, its further incentive for commercial and public use. Municipalities benefit greatly from predictable, constant expenses.

I know Leafs have had their service lives (at least for their batteries) revised up recently. Solid state is where it’s at.

Although I agree, I was interested in the article about how poorly planned EV city owned equipment was a huge strain on the power grid that city planners didn't seem to understand how to do right. I look forward to what I expect to be the near future where cities start sharing best practices on this and collectively we do this right.

Depends on the location. In cities that have trams, metro and electric trains, the infrastructure shouldn't be that far out.

Taxis, city buses, UPS trucks, etc, all tend to be busy during the day. They get charged overnight, when grid demand is lower, and take advantage of low off-peak electricity prices.

The idea that these things place a “huge strain on the grid” as the poster above suggests just sounds like more made up FUD.

No, the poster above is right. There was an article about this a month ago or so. Anyways, the TLDR is that vehicles need to charge more often than just nightly and not just at the main depot. Transit agencies need to build heavy duty fast charging infrastructure scattered across many locations in the city. This has been so far a large upfront cost which holds transit EV expansion at bay.

If their vehicles need to charge more often than just overnight, then they need to consider whether they are buying the right vehicles for the job.

The examples I mentioned are from London, which has a growing fleet of hundreds of heavy electric vehicles (city buses, UPS trucks, etc). All of these charge exclusively overnight.

Why move a heavier battery pack around if you can have a charging station at both ends of your route? Certainly lower weight means lower cost battery packs and overall higher efficiency since you're not dragging around spare energy for most of your day.

We're seeing more and more of these here in Norway now. My garbage is picked up by an electric truck :)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/De7IXxoW4AASSm5.jpg

The postal service here got 4-5 tiers of electric vehicles too, from large vans, to tiny trucks, to "golf-carts", to electric cargo trikes, to a sidewalk friendly electric trolly.

Maybe. Some electric buses have poor range and stall on hills:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric-buses-201...

That's a problem of poor engineering and not a first principles issue.

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