Since the article is short on details here is the Volvo trucks page.
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e...
They appear to be in the testing stage
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e...
They appear to be in the testing stage
There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.
Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it.
Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need.
Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed.
Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts.
Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
At some point, the cost of the mechanisms and staff to swap the battery is more than the cost of the rest of a second vehicle.
JB Struble just gave a great analysis of this at a Standford talk where he explained why the dropped it.
It actually makes the vehicle more complex and importantly heavier.
It also prevents further improvement, Tesla just showed of their new Cell-to-Structure concept, where the cells themselves have load on them. This fundamentally is incompatible with fast swap. Such a architecture is really great because it negates the 'penalty' of carrying around a battery compared to an ICE vehicle. In fact you might end up lighter, because you don't have the heavy engine and the battery is not so much heavier then the structural steel you would have used otherwise.
You can charge trucks during breaks, or during loading and unloading.
“ZES (Zero Emission Services) supplies interchangeable energy containers for new and existing inland vessels. These containers – called ZESPacks – are charged using renewable power.”
I've seen other more permanent container solutions retrofitted on ships, though mostly passenger ferries with set schedules. Also only as auxiliary power allowing to eg. maneuver when docking without having to start another genset or capture excess energy from required gensets running in inefficient ranges.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog...
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-batter...
Is there any video of the swaps actually working, outside of the promotional stage-show?
YouTube doesn't have anything, which is odd...
Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads.
This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk.
Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Funny then that many large companies disagree with you have have order literally 100s of electric trucks from Tesla.
> If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move
For a truck, you are gone have body-on-frame anyway so the battery would probably not be structural. And it wouldn't be 'critical' to make the truck move, it would be a weight optimization.
> If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option.
Lots of companies transport thing between their own facilities and lots of companies have long term costumers. Adding the charging equipment is relativity cheap and could be built to you.
> If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Go check out how complex these battery swapping robots actually are. Having those at your facility is very costly and need a lot of space. The are prone to break down because they mechanical machines are moving around heavy batteries.
Also, so far nobody has even demonstrated this type of battery swap device for a large truck. Current system drop the battery from under the vehicle, this however is not possible in a body-on-frame construction, and a different method would have to be found. Non of the electric truck vendors have announced or even talked about such a system.
I'm sure this will change soon but until it does, there's still a lot of wasted transit time.
Honestly one of the bigger issues is upgrading the electrical service at the depots to support the chargers. I worked on a prototype EV truck, and they had to software-limit the charger when first installed, because running flat-out it could draw more power than the entire rest of the prototype facility. They had to get the utility out to drop a new transformer before they could unleash the charger's full power.
The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
But yes, hydrocarbon chains are damned energy dense for chemical reactions.
Pretty much any time fissionable material is moved probably beats it.
1 Liter per second ~= 38.6 megawatts, for diesel.
I’ve never bothered paying attention to the flow rate in a fuel station, but it’s really fortunate that electric cars are fundamentally more efficient than combustion engines.
> Image result for gas station pump flow rate Light passenger vehicle pump up to about 50 litres (13 US gallons) per minute (the United States limits this to 10 US gallons (38 litres) per minute); pumps serving trucks and other large vehicles have a higher flow rate, up to 130 litres (34 US gallons) per minute in the UK. and 40 US gallons (150 litres) in the US.
So roughly 80 megawatts coming out of that diesel nozzle. Most impressive!
I've heard of CCS chargers in development that'll push 350kW (920V, 500A), which involves crazy stuff like liquid-cooled connectors. They flow 3M Novec through the cable.: https://ittcannon.com/core/medialibrary/ittcannon/website/li...
Was not disappointed. The Volvo page is very Volvo and the Tesla page is very Tesla.
I'm not a fan of pages that try to do the whole dynamic immersive full screen huge picture thing.
On the Volvo page, I do not see a single piece of information before I scroll. Instead I see fluff like "We know that many transport operators work hard to reduce the environmental footprint..."
On the Tesla page, I see four pieces of information right away. Acceleration, energy consumption, drag coefficient and that it has four independent motors.
Volvo’s ‘fluff’ at least hints at “this truck may be allowed to enter city centers” and “disability payments to drivers may go down”.
So ~33% of a truck's cost is spent on fuel.