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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to remind people that heavy trucks that make fairly regular and predictable journeys between fixed points with fairly rigid timing constraints lend themselves very well to all sorts of solutions that wouldn't work for your work/soccer/whole foods type trips.

I wouldn't bet my money on hydrogen being the way of the future but I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong when it comes to predicting the future of heavy industry on a timeline longer than a couple quarters.

Batteries are getting better and look promising but all new tech does that until it hits a wall (then it generally progresses slowly until some development in a different field enables further development in the stalled field). What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

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I worked in the commercial trucking EV space for a little bit and I don't know anyone in the commercial trucking industry that genuinely thinks batteries will be the solution for long-haul, class 7 & 8 trucks. At least not in the next decade or so, if ever. Elon and Tesla will tell you otherwise but there's a reason their Semi has been delayed for 3 years now...

Short haul, drayage, etc. is definitely workable with current tech.

They batteries you'd need for 6-700 mile daily drives would mean you're carrying a tiny fraction of what a ICE truck could haul due to weight constraints. We are making strides in this technology but are still nowhere close.

Almost everyone I've spoken to believes hydrogen is far more feasible, but it still has its own issues most importantly the massive infrastructure investment to support it.

The only way to make electric long haul trucking work out is overhead wires. Trolley buses in some cites do this, (the latest have enough batteries to run for ~5 miles without a wire which is useful for a lot of applications)

Or better yet the freight railroads need to figure out how to serve their customers better. They are already more efficient than existing trucks, and overhead wire locomotives are already on the market. The US has the best freight rail in the world - and they still lose a lot of potential customers because their operations are so customer unfriendly.

Wire trucks are tested in Germany and Sweden that I know off. I too think that it might actually be really viable to avoid tons of batteries - unless there is some technical issues I am unawere off.

An inductive system under the road surface would seem easier to install and would work better with different vehicle sizes. Suspending lines across a multi lane highway would need a lot of structures.

There is no way you could pass enough current via induction without setting things on fire or microwaving the occupant of the cab (or both). If it was viable, people would be pursuing it already.

Even if it was safe, the efficiency is much lower, and it is a lot more expensive. Wires overhead are much cheaper than than wires in pavement. It is more expensive to put the wires in pavement, and you need a lot more to get the induction to happen.

Not induction but conductive rails are already in use on test stretches of road a few places.

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

I cannot comment on efficiency and the like but today in Milan, Italy the first few new on-the-road public buses "fast" (200 kW) charging stations went into operation:

In Italian but with images and videos: https://medium.com/lineadiretta/installati-i-primi-charger-h...

This is the solution Volvo has proposed except with guard rails instead of overhead wires because they are incredibly brittle. Almost anything can tear it down in inclement weather. At first glance it seems impractical because there are so many roads, but 95% of the time freight trucks say on the main highways. So you only need to electrify those.

As an added bonus, it makes self-driving trucks much much easier to implement.

The hardest part is probably standardization. You'd need buy-in from the US, the EU and probably most of South-east Asia for it to be practical.

Eh, electric trains still use incompatible standards for different regions of the same country due to historical inertia. In comparison selling trucks with a different electrical pickup for each continent wouldn't be a big deal.

Overhead wires work fine with the railway network but somehow I think that having all these independently operated trucks drawing power on one pair of wires might be a challenging problem.

A single train draws a lot of power (several MWs) but it's one entity and as such can easily be managed in respect to having the power system functioning. But having tens, maybe hundreds of vehicles draw power on the same wires would need to be coordinated somehow.

I think a hybrid concept of electric trains for the long haul and electric trucks for the last miles might be promising. Possibly with autonomous freight hand over.

I think the efficient option is electrified roads you can drive over at 70+MPH. It’s simply the evolution of trolleys, but the chicken and egg problem is huge. ~15-50kw per car/semi takes a lot of power infrastructure. Still in road charging at say 20-30c/kWh could be extremely profitable and still much cheaper than gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

A huge upside is in road charging is nearly perfect for both load shedding and self driving cars.

I'm still going with batteries for the short haul trips, with trains for longer. There are too many roads to cost effectively electrify them all, that means there will always be short trips (my driveway at least) that need battereis. While we can electrify freeways rail is cheaper by far.

The point is electric cars with a 200 mile range and a significant electric road network simply makes internal combustion engines obsolete in a way that even a 500 mile EV doesn’t. Semi’s are a bonus at that point.

Anyway, electric rail is just down to the standard rail vs road brake down we already have. Roads are point to point without extra loading or unloading steps. Even with expensive gas and cheap electrified rail you still see a lot of long distance trucking. Long term with either electric highways or self driving trucks it’s going to favor roads even more let alone both.

It works out until you account for economics. It is cheaper to electrify a length of track vs a length of road. Rail also implies some form of planning to make the trip more efficient (rail works best with long trains - a situation that is unsafe on roads). Rail also allows a lot more cargo per lane/track and so it a lot cheaper - but only when you can take advantage of that. And so the real analysis is a lot more complex than could go into a 100 page report (much less a comment box).

Efficiency is always a function of usage. Electric rail lines have a much lower average demand for electricity. Here the efficiency of rail actually works in the opposite direction where battery power trains and electrified roads mean significantly less total battery needs.

Consider in terms of electric highway usage, a car every 100 feet isn’t that dense and get’s you to a steady state of ~20kw * 5280/100 = 1MW of power for several hours a day. Electric trains have higher peak demand vs cars, but it’s on a very infrequent basis.

Of course every car isn’t EV and right now ~0 cars can use in road power delivery. But, that’s just a chicken and egg problem not an issue with the technology.

It's amusing to watch folks bend over backwards to propose workarounds for the hard thing that solves the problem: developing a sustainable, energy dense fuel.

We already have it, it’s called electrically synthesized methane/propane.

If the carbon is captured from the atmosphere and merged with water via renewable sources, that is it. We don’t do it and it isn’t proposed because the efficiency losses are crazy, and we aren’t in a world with over-abundant renewable energy widely available for pennies on the dollar (yet)

Yeah, with the addition that if you're going to go the synthetic hydrocarbon route you might as well go all the way to a fuel which is a liquid at normal operating temperatures to simplify logistics (and which isn't a massive GHG when it accidentally leaks like methane).

Advantage of shorter carbohydrates (like propane) is that they're made up of less carbon relative to the hydrogen (compared to longer chains), so for the same amount of energy stored, you need to capture less CO2 from the atmosphere or from wherever you're taking it.

Propane can relatively easily be compressed to be liquefied at room temperature. Takes just a few bars of pressure.

Let us quantify your statement!

By my calculation, you need to capture 0.9176 carbon atoms from the air to make propane whose energy content is the same as octane made from 1.0000 captured carbon atoms.

I used the "Std enthalpy of combustion (ΔcH⦵298)" of the 2 fuels from Wikipedia in my calculation.

... which of course requires hydrogen.

Biofuels are one way. Basically get algae to absorb CO2 and produce fuel.

Especially interesting because you can just mechanically press the oil out, which is very easy to turn into diesel. Unfortunately the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be there yet.

I could reframe your statement like so:

~~ = strikethrough, italic = my inserts

"I worked in the commercial ~~trucking~~ EV space for a little bit and I don't know anyone in the commercial ~trucking~ industry that genuinely thinks batteries will be the solution for ~~long-haul, class 7 & 8 trucks~~ practical, affordable, long-range cars. At least not in the next decade or so, if ever. Elon and Tesla will tell you otherwise but there's a reason their ~~Semi~~ Model 3 has been delayed for 3 years now...

More often than not, innovation comes from industry outsiders. You can think whatever you want of Musk, but I think he has more than proven that he eventually gets the shit done he has talked about.

> practical, affordable, long-range cars

We don't have this in EV yet, or is it your perception that we do?

We do not. Most cheaper EVs are ~200 miles of EPA estimated range which here in the US limits the use of the vehicle significantly. You also have to account for the fact that EPA estimates tend to be fairly optimistic for the way some people drive.

A Model3 AWD (non LR) will struggle to hit 200 miles of range at 75+ MPH with the heat running and temperatures near freezing. For anyone in New England cold weather and prevailing highway speeds of 75+ are fairly standard.

> practical, affordable, long-range cars

I've been driving only EVs or PHEVs with big batteries for last 5 years. EVs are practical for my specific use cases. But it's a lie to say that we have EVs that practical, affordable, and long-range.

They're practical for people with garages. Affordable, only if you don't cross shop them same price point for hybrids, and don't compare what you get for the money. And none of them is long-range - ok range, at best. And not a single car comes close to being both affordable and long-range.

Emphasis on the "don't compare what you get for the money". The Tesla Model3 is nice, but once you get close to $50k here in the US you're up against much much nicer vehicles to spend a few hours in.

I bought a car 2 years back and test drove the Model3 as one of the contenders. The two things that led me to skip an electric car this go around was the poor dealership support that I had a couple of owners warn me about and the fact that the Model3 interior is pretty awful compared to what you get in most entry level Japanese and German 'luxury' cars. I'm a car guy, I can't justify spending that kind of money on something I don't absolutely love.

I'm excited to revisit the decision a couple of years down the line.

Unless you look at Japanese or German cars I think you'll be disappointed. It's not that Tesla has poorer interior than other American cars. In general they all have plastic-y, toy-like interior. Even cars more expensive than Tesla have this problem. And then there's the interior design. Cars half the price have much higher interior quality in German and Japanese cars (and Korean and French and Chinese and...). It has always been like this for some rreason. Have you seen a Mustangs interior? Yikes!

Lithium batteries have tripled in energy density since 2010 while the price has dropped about 90% I believe.

I was pretty skeptical when Tesla announced the Semi but the trend lines are there if not on Elons over promise timeline.

I agree it will be some time before they are viable for long haul, but a lot due to charging infrastructure.

Weight is the big question mark, I am anxious to see the Tesla semi battery weight and final capacity to see how viable it is. My guess is around 10,000lbs and a megawatt-hour capacity for 500 mile range. I imagine them trying to do a structural battery to try and make up for its weight. The equivalent diesel drivetrain is under 5000lbs including engine and can have up to 2000 miles range.

“Lithium batteries have tripled in energy density since 2010”

No they have not. My 2021 iPhone does not have triple the energy density of the 2010 iPhone.

The battery cells have improved but that is a packaging improvement, not battery improvement. Other companies are doing pouches for example. And then there is the question of cooling, do you include it in the weight calculations?

From what we know a Tesla model S in 2020 does not have triple the capacity of the model s of 2012. We only saw an increase from 85kwh to 100kwh in 2020. That is 20% increase not 300%.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...

Your iPhone example is problematic because Apple has so many competing requirements, but ok... Battery capacity from the iPhone 3gs to the 12 increased by over 2X. Sure, some of it is packaging (the 12 is 15% heavier) but the biggest factor is better chemistry.

Would you have been OK with GP saying 2X instead of 3X?

No, because newer iPhones are larger and have physically larger and heavier batteries that help them store more energy. iPhone 11 has a density of 250 wh/kg and the iPhone 4 was around 200 wh/kg.

That is again not even close to 300% increase

I am looking at apples documentation. Not sure where you folks are coming up with your imaginary numbers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191007202842/https://www.apple....

You're comparing less than ten years. Here's what I see, 2009-2019:

iPhone 3g: 4.5 Wh / 0.0335 kg = 134 Wh/kg

iPhone 11: 11.91 Wh / 0.047 kg = 253 Wh/kg

For a 1.9X improvement.

Agreed, consumers aren't seeing 3X. But they should be seeing better than 20%.

Not sure where you found the data for 3g and whether they follow the same methodology as apple (the report shows up to iphone 4 which was introduced in 2010), but even if I assume that they are correct, what you are proposing is even more far-fetched.

That in 2010 something dramatic happened in the battery technology world and they doubled in density overnight. Hint: No they did not.

I'd be curious to get your take on what these guys are doing?

Apparently they have a cost effective way to upgrade existing diesel trucks with battery + LNG to extend the range.

https://www.hyliion.com/

long-haul trucks are capped at 80,000 pounds by regulation. do you happen to know what percentage of deliveries run at 100% weight or close to full capacity?

with further advancements, battery optimists expect the weight penalty compared to hydrogen at around 6,000 - 10,000 pounds.

by your estimate, how much of this weight penalty will translate into actual lost cargo -- and thus lost sales?

> with further advancements, battery optimists expect the weight penalty compared to hydrogen at around 6,000 - 10,000 pounds.

The penalty is unbounded because one has a higher energy/weight ratio than the other.

So with hydrogen at ~ 130 MJ/kg and batteries at ~1 MJ/kg, if you need a mega Joule then the weight difference is ~130Kg. If you need 100 MJ then the weight difference is 13000 kg, etc.

So each energy will have a different penalty. Let's look at trucks.

Today a semi will carry about 1000L of fuel (~260 gallons), which is ~40,000MJ. That would require ~300Kg of hydrogen (plus supporting weight for the container, etc) or ~40,000 kg of batteries (plus supporting weight for coolant, container, etc).

Thus what is economical for cars may not be economical for semis. There is not a single weight difference between cars and trucks.

Whereas a big jet can use 20,000 Liters of fuel which would require 800,000kg of battery + weight of supporting infrastructure or ~6100 kg of hydrogen.

So it makes sense that the two biggest truck manufacturers would be very interested in hydrogen.

There are other costs to weight other than cargo capacity, both for freight companies and society as a whole. More frequent maintenance, slower speeds, inaccessible and/or altered routes, more accidents, more wear on infrastructure.

> Short haul, drayage, etc. is definitely workable with current tech.

What's a rough estimate of the size of "short haul" vs "long haul" trucking segments?

The other difference between trucks and cars is that power/weight isn't really important for the latter, and hugely important for the former. If there's an improvement that allows you to carry 5% more weight in your car, that doesn't matter much. Most of the engine's energy is being used transporting the engine around, and the weight of passengers and luggage is not an operative constraint. For trucks it matters a lot, because they just became 5% more efficient.

Crazy idea: don't store hydrogen as a liquid but as a gas. Hydrogen is lighter than air, so you've just reduced the fuel requirements by making the semi lighter than it otherwise would be.

Or just go to the logical conclusion: make semis blimps that use hydrogen to both float and as a fuel source.

... you're aware a variation of this was tried a century ago, yes?

Yes, but tech has improved a tad since then.

In every flight you take, the wings are filled with highly combustable materials, and yet we find ways to keep them from exploding. The same is true for all those batteries in electric cars, and of course gasoline.

Jet A is really not that combustible; it's very close to diesel/kerosene. If you take a lit match and drop it in a bucket of Jet A, nothing would happen, it'd just burn out. It's way safer than gasoline. It's combustible only when turned into a fine mist.

On the other hand, H2 would have exploded just from the spark of lighting the match.

You'd likely get by with dropping the match into gasoline most of the time too. Its not definite that there will be vapor from it in the right mix for it to catch fire before hitting the surface.

Gasoline also isn't quite as combustible as people imagine.

It's worth noting that hydrogen fires burn bright and quickly, but tend to not be very dangerous to people.

Gasoline and batteries are heavy and tend to stick to surfaces (including people) when they burn, almost like napalm. Hydrogen rushes upwards, away from people and surfaces, as it burns, and is generally quickly exhausted.

I strongly disagree with this statement.

I'm not sure what there is to disagree with. Fire around gasoline is dangerous for a number of reasons, but liquid gasoline pooled just isn't as volatile as people imagine.

The vapors are different. See both sides of this coin here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsZOE1nvlhI

Also, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln5-HZpgcA

Don't try this at home. Vapors can change things dramatically and horribly. The videos lightly demonstrate this too, but it can be worse.

Liquid gasoline without the present of vapor is pretty much nonexistent. Dropping a match into some is going to be a problem.

In my experience the combustibility of det fuel and similar petroleum products depends primarily on whether the context of the conversation is praising modern safety engineering or heckling someone for using diesel as a cleaning solvent.

It would be more dangerous when spread over a large surface and allowed to vaporize.

You haven't made them lighter, you've made them more bouyant. A ton of feathers weighs the same as a ton of rocks, but a ton of rocks is far more aerodynamic.

I mean, this is sort of off-topic.... but I just love this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

Sure, but the point is a more buoyant semi would lose less energy to friction between the tires and the road.

You're missing the point. Liquid hidrogen takes much less space, that's all. It is neither lighter nor heavier than the same amount of hidrogen gas.

And for buoyancy to matter, the trucks would need to be huge (zepelin style).

That works until there's a light breeze.

And if you have 20% less weight on the wheels, you now have 20% less traction and thus 20% (or more?) longer braking distance.

You still need the same engine output to accelerate 100 tons, but you only have the traction you would get from an 80 ton load. That's a bad thing. Meanwhile, you save a miniscule amount of energy by having less-loaded tires.

Anyway, you need to compress hydrogen to store any meaningful amount, which increases the density and makes it like a normal gas/liquid instead of making you more buoyant. So it's not even possible.

No, under ideal friction the reduced traction is cancelled out by the reduced mass that needs decelerating, so that braking distance remains constant.

But actually, braking distance vs mass is more like a bathtub curve. With very little weight (talking toy cars here) it's hard to grip a surface, meanwhile very large masses like trucks have huge amounts of kinetic energy to disperse through their contact patches, leading rubber to melt, which reduces its stickiness beyond a certain point. Trucks end up with longer braking distances in practice.

The point is that there is not reduced mass.

You have the same weight, but less traction. That is not the same as reducing weight, in which case the two cancel out as you said.

unless you store them in a black wing shaped bag and let the sun lift the fuel for you

You've confused weight with mass.

It becomes a bit of a transport density problem. A semi does not take up much more room than the cargo it's transporting (if fully packed) but a blimp needs to be significantly larger to carry the same amount. They're big, slow, and require a large amount of space to land on the ground. It just seems like more issues to overcome than hydrogen fuel cell trucks.

Could trains tow blimps?

It gets really exciting when they go through a tunnel or under high voltage lines.

Easy, we just nuke the mountains. No steep gradients and no more tunnels. I’m available for consulting work if anyone at CP or CN need me.

The trailer tail aerodynamic devices are supposed to save 5% on fuel. They remain rare and 99% of those are left undeployed. The trucking companies don't seem to care much about easy cost savings.

From looking at it on Google images, could it be that this device has other downsides? Making doors more awkward to open, increasing turning radius etc?

A significant percentage of semis you see are nowhere near fully loaded.

Especially for local deliveries- the truck is often half-empty.

Don’t you mean half-full?

When you're doing deliveries half-empty is the optimistic take.

Can’t leave me hanging, brofus

Don't you mean twice as big as it needs to be?

The marginal cost of dragging 40ft of air is so small compared to the hassle of trying to determine which truck is the correct one for today’s deliveries and pickups, so the companies tend toward having all trucks the same size.

Or... semi full. Ba dum dum tsss

That's odd. Airlines would kill to install a cheap device on their fleet and save 5% on fuel. If diesel is $3/gal and the semi holds 200gal, that's about $30 savings per fillup and would pay for itself quickly.

Wind resistance goes up by the cube of the velocity, it would be a much larger savings on an airplane.

Still even at interstate speeds a 5% savings pays for itself pretty quickly.

The fuel tanks on an aircraft are a major portion of the weight of the whole craft. So make engines more efficient, and you can take less fuel, which means the plane is lighter, so you use even less fuel and can take even less, etc. As you reduce the amount of fuel needed to go a certain distance you can go further and convert two-leg flights to single hops, which saves all sorts of other costs.

The fuel tank of a semi truck is not an important proportion of the weight of the whole vehicle, so it does matter, but not so much.

They seem to be reasonably popular around here. I see them used on trucks on the Interstate probably more than 50% of the time.

They may not be worth it for short haul trucks, but long haul trucks I bet the savings adds up quick.

I was a semi-truck driver for a while. A lot of "fuel savings" gimmicks amount to sticking a card on your bicycle frame so the spokes hit it a lot and make it sound like you're going fast. It's bullshit. Why do some companies do it? Tax breaks and grants. Do they work. No. Why don't all the companies do it? There's actually a limited amount of companies who can apply for the breaks because the laws are incredibly fucking stupid when it comes to commercial trucks (and to drivers). Similar how there are limited amount of carbon tax credits you can apply for. Some companies just don't waste their time. I have nothing against protecting the environment. But bullshit gimmicks won't do a thing.

>I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong when it comes to predicting the future of heavy industry on a timeline longer than a couple quarters.

You're probably right, although I'd probably go short on hydrogen in trucks. It seems hard to store, transport, requires a new infrastructure, etc. I expect they'll use this new fangled technology called 'diesel'.

I'm surprised when I don't hear more about the lower hanging fruit. The fact that Fedex/UPS haven't gone wholesale into electric is telling at this point, I expect they'll do it when some spreadsheet shows 10 cents in savings companywide. The champions for electric trucks should push for trash pickup, route sales, local delivery, etc. and not bother with long haul for now.

You could argue that a good place for hydrogen would be non-electric trains. When the bugs get worked out of that perhaps long distance trucking might have a chance.

edit: as an aside, I can see where large scale fleet decisions might be held back by fear of technology change. You'd sure hate to buy thousands of trucks only to have them made obsolete by some sort of large underlying change in design that's a no-brainer.

It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't a certain braking effect on vehicle purchases generally because of the advances in EVs. There's a righteous fear in being an early adopter.

I think quite a few countries will tighten their environmental regulations so that some solution will have to be found. Trucks running on Dieses crowding the highways will face strong opposition. The industry has to move somewhere.

Germany might gain it's first green-party led government this year and they are racking up wins in a lot of countries in europe. I even see the rise of smaller "greener than green" parties here in southern germany. This might change the regulatory environment/taxes enough to fuel change.

I don't think Volvo and Daimler make uniformed bets, so there must be some reasoning behind it.

> I don't think Volvo and Daimler make uniformed bets, so there must be some reasoning behind it.

It's probably fair to contrast the EU vs. the USA for this. Given the geographic and political differences, I can see where a European market for trucks might be sufficient for the manufacturers to fund development efforts. I should have been clear that I was thinking primarily of the US, living here and all.

It would be interesting to have a better overview on freight handling in the rest of the world. China tends to be left out of these discussions and I can't imagine wide swathes of Asia or Africa changing anytime soon.

Indonesia reduced plastic bags quite a bit by a decree in a year. One of the great things about (semi)authoritarian states is how fast they can change. So China influenced parts of Asia could move quite fast when needed. And if they make the right bets - you can transform country in a generation. If you don't - well you have former communist bloc circa 1989.

The article is from a British publication and concerns two European vehicle manufacturers producing new vehicles, initially for Europe.

"The Swedish truck-maker is aiming for half its European sales in 2030 to be trucks powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells"

"About 300 high-performance hydrogen refueling points would be needed in Europe by 2025"

I'm sure there's enough of a market in Europe for different trucks — there's already different designs and different fuel preferences (diesel/gasoline).

>I'm sure there's enough of a market in Europe for different trucks

Absolutely. Look at the heavy buy-in on diesel automobiles, and they sure weren't shy about subsidies/regulations to favor them.

Subsidies touting efficiencies that turned out to be fictional due to multiple manufactures committing pretty major fraud for decades that was only recently uncovered.

Yeah, that government intervention worked out well :p

> China tends to be left out of these discussions

Volvo is a Chinese-owned company. While the company is headquartered and led in Sweden, it is safe to assume that the Chinese market is a strong consideration in everything they do.

Volvo sold off their car subsidiary to Ford in 1999 and that was later bought by Geely. Volvo Trucks is still owned by the Swedish Volvo Group.

AB Volvo is owned by Geely. Volvo Trucks is wholly owned subsidiary of AB Volvo.

Volvo Cars is owned directly by Geely, but is not a subsidiary of AB Volvo. Which is probably where your confusion is coming from.

> AB Volvo is owned by Geely. Volvo Trucks is wholly owned subsidiary of AB Volvo.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo they remain an independent company with Geely as their second largest shareholder at 8.2%.

More complete breakdown here: https://www.volvogroup.com/en/investors/the-volvo-share/owne...

You're probably thinking of the car company.

Geely owns Volvo Cars, yes. Geely also owns the related, but legally distinct AB Volvo, which owns a Volvo Trucks, Mack Trucks, Volvo Construction, etc.

They are independent companies, but they share an owner.

Volvo and Daimler cannot afford for someone else to get there and hold all the patents. If it doesn't work out at all they will lobby and get the laws changed. If it works out though they won't have a strong a position to lobby from (someone else proved it works, why can't you?) and risk losing that side of the business.

That is enough reason for them to put money into R&D. It might or might not result in anything for many different reasons.

Who says Fedex and UPS aren't all in on electric? Are you in their corporate meetings? People act like the mammoth transition of a civilization (or even a huge logistics company) would be on the order of 2-3 years, and not a generation.

Public transit in many places has already switched to propane/LNG. Same with lots of municipal work trucks.

Your first sentence is the attitude he's responding to: That trucking/logistics/cityworks are able to make their own refueling stations, build their own support infrastructure, etc. in ways that the public cannot, on the short term.

>Who says Fedex and UPS aren't all in on electric?

Because I haven't seen a single electric truck of any type by any service. Perhaps someone here has, love to hear about it. Since my wife is a shipping manager for a manufacturer, there is some anecdotal backing. (jeesh, why are people so religious about this stuff?).

I don't doubt that they are planning a long term move at places like Fedex, but articles on it lead me to believe they are just dipping their toe in the water. A moon shot to accomplish something by 2040 is the opposite of all-in, they may not exist as a company in 20 years.

In any case, as I was alluding to, short-haul trucking will electrify far before long-haul, for obvious reasons (and if it ever does)...at least for purely economic reasons. All bets are off if the hand of the state dictates a technology.

> Your first sentence is the attitude he's responding to

lol. What? That I doubt that you'll see hydrogen fueled long-haul trucking in the US? Care to make a bet on it? What is your time horizon on the bet?

I see electric fedex and ups delivery trucks all the time in several SF Bay Area counties. Anecdotes aren’t very useful in broad analysis.

OK, I looked it up.

The Fedex fleet is a little over 1% electric...and that includes forklifts and airport equipment.

Like I keep saying, they'll be all over this tech when it really pencils out.

I think there's plenty of hints that Fedex and UPS are going electric, but taking time and thought into how it integrates. Not everything is a cloud provisioning script away from rollout.

Fedex Plans to Electrify its Entire Fleet of Delivery Vehicles by 2040" [1]

"UPS Orders 10000 Electric Delivery Trucks..." [2]

[1] https://fordauthority.com/2021/03/fedex-plans-to-electrify-i...

[2] https://www.boston.com/cars/car-news/2020/03/22/ups-orders-1...

They're talking about delivery vehicles (which lend themselves well to electric operation for the same reasons city buses do) not semi trucks.

Delivery and route trucks really are the interesting test case for battery-powered vehicles. Assuming that someone in a government meeting room doesn't dictate their technology via fiat or subsidy, it's a case based purely on economic interests. Double bonus points for being a tolerably straightforward to calculate decision.

I really can't foresee how it turns out, hopefully the battery tech has some room to run.

I think the government could beneficially move the bar with something like large guaranteed EV postal vehicle order with requirements to site key factories on the vehicles and batteries in the US. That would give businesses the order sheet backing to get loans and investment in place to build the capacity to supply the gov't order, but also as a good foundation for other customer uses.

Right, it takes time to rollout, and given battery factory constraints right now, even if a semi were 100% ready, you couldn't supply the batteries for the use for at least another two the tree years I would guess. So I think at best, right now, you'll see planning for delivery vehicles, with semis in earlier development.

Semis are an entirely different equation than delivery vans. They have more constraints around energy density, whereas vans have more constraints around price.

> The fact that Fedex/UPS haven't gone wholesale into electric is telling at this point

Both companies had a huge moat until Amazon came along blew their doors off. And Amazon has been investing heavily in electric delivery vehicles: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/18/amazon-begins-testing-rivian...

This is very different from heavy trucks. These are electric delivery vans. No one is arguing whether electric vehicles can be effective in the small vehicle market; its the semi, 18-wheeler segment being discussed.

True, there is not a viable product that is scalable in the market.

Both Nikola and Tesla are vapourware today. Perhaps they might deliver in a couple of years realistically.

Delivery companies are in no hurry to shift and bet ahead of time, once the technology is readily available and well supported they will move their fleet

I think that MCS will help greatly to accelerate things. Fear of building infrastructure for a new tech has to be a huge part of it.

A lot of folks have toes in the water with Tesla semi orders, though. I expect that to grow pretty quickly if the first ones work well for regional distribution, and that is really their strength.

That new fangled "diesel" stuff is really hard to beat for long distance trucking.

> The champions for electric trucks should push for trash pickup, route sales, local delivery, etc. and not bother with long haul for now.

Indeed, and earlier we discussed plans for battery electric trucks by Volvo (one of the company's described in this article):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999239

Batteries for short-haul, hydrogen (or something else) for long-haul.

We can actually predict when batteries will hit the wall. Chemical laws are known well enough to put a limit. We use lithium batteries for reasons related to physical rules like electro-negativity (I'm too long from my chemistry to do more than throw out the right terms). The periodic table of the elements puts a limit on how much power different chemical reactions can produce. We can thus calculate a theoretical max battery beyond which nothing is possible. In the real world that maximum might need atoms that are unstable (more energy released by atomic decay), but we can ignore that for the theory.

I don't remember enough chemistry to do the above calculations. Someone does though, and they tell me that batteries won't get more than 4x smaller (I of course can't verify this claim - perhaps someone else can).

Electrode potentials are what you’re probably thinking about.

Lithium is at one end, but we could work on the other end to get the greatest difference.

It’s a relative scale. Hydrogen was just chosen as 0, but that’s an arbitrary choice.

Looking forward to lithium-fluoride or lithium-gold batteries.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/electrode-potential-d_482...

Thank you for this info. Now I realize why I heard some chatter about lithium bromide batteries a while back. Probably the "easier" to work with and cheaper instead of gold/chlorine/fluorine.

Sodium-bromide in particular looks like a cheap, highly available, easy to handle pair that can fill every one of those niches that don't really care about energy density.

But current batteries use metal compounds, where the metal itself is never completely oxidized or reduced. Those are much easier to design, as you can simply place an ion exchange membrane separating the poles. AFAIK, nobody has any idea how a metal-halogen battery would work.

Lithium fluoride sounds like battery chemistry that makes things even more fun when things go wrong...

Thunderf00t on Youtube loves these types of analyses. You can find one in almost every one of his videos. He does not have a lot of nice things to say about Elon Musk.

His page: https://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t

Common Sense Skeptic has better arguments against Elon Musk though.

Thanks, just subbed

Yeah, ThunderfOOt isn't exactly a reliable source - especially when it comes to Musk. I'm no Tesla sycophant - I'm plenty of skeptical with much of what Tesla is and how they operate - but ThuderfOOt comes across as someone with an axe to grind. Which is fine - just don't get all huffy when people call you out on it.

Call me out on what? Watching Phil Mason? I enjoy The Flaming Lips too. Should I get upset when people don't like them?

Thanks for the warning but I'm trying to save the huffiness for when people attack my own work. I've already got a backlog there, with just that alone.

Interesting, but I'm not convinced. There is a big different between Musk being overly optimistic, and the ideas themselves being unsound. Musk does have his share of unsound idea, but he also has many ideas that are probably good but ahead of their time. Attacking an ahead of their time idea as unsound is wrong analysis. (I happened to watch the one on hyperloop - which clearly is a lot of vaporware - but don't confuse that with being a bad idea. Also don't confuse it being a good idea with it being something that anyone working on now will make work)

Hyperloop is definitely lower-hanging fruit than Tesla. Of SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring and Tesla, Tesla is easily the least scammy. But this particular energy density argument does come up pretty much any time he talks about Tesla.

Why do you say that Tesla is less scammy than SpaceX?

Because of how scammy SpaceX is. Phil's points that we're just re-trodding the reusable vehicle idea from the Space Shuttle days, but somehow paying more for it, are pretty damning in my eyes [1]. It feels a lot like government-funded rocket shows.

I mean, space stuff happening is fun and I like it. But if it was cheaper to do it through NASA, on even the famously expensive Space Shuttle, what's the point of all of this?

Tesla's stuff is all minor in comparison.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxkE_oYrjU

(Disclosure: I'm from Orlando and almost certainly somehow biased towards the shuttle program, not that I don't think it wasn't an inherently flawed idea. It was an awesome inherently flawed idea. So I actually do understand the fanboyism at play. I just liked NASA's "cool" better than Musk's "sexy." The stuff they've been pulling off remotely on other planets is more impressive than anything Musk is doing. I feel like we're picking corporate propaganda over American propaganda and I don't like it.)

Comparing a reusable launch vehicle (spacex falcon) with a reusable payload (the space shuttle) is absurd.

It might be if the nature of the comparison weren't overwhelmingly favorable to SpaceX.

This guy is a joke, that people on HN use him as a source for anything is sad.

Phil's great! He's funny, scientific and very opinionated. I don't agree with all of his arguments and viewpoints either. I think that's part of the fun.

> We use lithium batteries for reasons related to physical rules like electro-negativity (I'm too long from my chemistry to do more than throw out the right terms).

Electronegativity is the tendency of elements to hold onto elements in a chemical bond, which determines the primary character of a bond (ionic or covalent) as well as things like dipole moments. What you actually want is redox potential, how much energy you can get out of reducing or oxidizing an ion in the reduction or oxidation half-reaction.

California tried to do it for everyone. Arnold famously had an all hydrogen fleet of personal Hummers back in 2004. The state had plans for a "hydrogen superhighway." I think they're up to about 8,000 vehicles on the road now nearly 20 years later, but that is nearly 100% of hydrogen vehicles in the entire US.

I think the actual state-owned fleets mostly switched to LNG by now. Who knows if it'll maybe be feasible soon for long haul trucking? Hydrogen cells started dropping enough in price to at least be feasible as a luxury good maybe a decade ago. This place seems optimistic? https://blog.ballard.com/fuel-cell-price-drop

Any experts in chemistry or industry have any idea how plausible those projections are? It's a vendor, so I take it with a grain of salt. A hydrogen city bus is still more than double the cost of a diesel bus, even before thinking about the need to refuel it.

> What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

Lithium Ion battery costs have improved tremendously over the past few decades, but energy density has not improved at nearly the same rate. Energy density is the primary problem with electric trucking, because it significantly reduces the payload a truck can provide for a given range. I would be skeptical of electric heavy trucks without a real breakthrough in energy density.

I think EV shipping trucks are much more viable a use for automated rapid battery swaps. Extend front cab a bit, put a big rectangle of a battery module behind, or under an expanded sleeper space. If all it takes is rolling through an automated bay for x min to swap out to a new charged pack then you really don't need some superbattery (or hydrogen).

Or while we're at it, a standard energy module that could be a battery, hydrogen fuel cell + tank, or something else.

Well maybe, I wonder about the cost efficiencies of multiple fuel cells in modules (usually they're pretty expensive because of the use of costly metals like palladium/platinum). Moving the cell out of the module obviously makes for a dedicated battery truck or dedicated hydrogen truck, but modular automatic liquid fuel let alone hydrogen links I would imagine is hard to keep reliable vs an electrical interface.

But you don't need to sit them on the shelf recharging, so you don't need to have many extra hydrogen modules (vs your fleet size). So, compared to dedicated hydrogen powered trucks, you'd maybe end up having 110 modules for every 100 trucks, for a modest increase in those costly fuel cells.

Maybe the swapping/charging stations could support both kinds and would prefer to give you charged battery modules, but if running behind in the charging, would switch to giving out hydrogen modules. Or maybe only some routes would have hydrogen equipped cargo stations at both endpoints, so the trucks would get different kinds of modules depending on the route - making a gradual rollout of hydrogen fueling infra easy.

You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire. For bonus points you could put the whole thing on rails, eliminating the need for the truck driver.

I could see all of the above happening with different mixes of needs of routes, infrastructure, and investment.

> You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire.

https://www.engineerine.com/2021/04/germany-opens-its-first-...

Sounds like you're underestimating the underlying logistics of swapping out huge/heavy battery packs.

If you use the throughput (trucks refueled per period of time) of a conventional gas station as a benchmark to compare the battery pack swapping station with and try to think of all the additional difficulties you might see why I'm skeptical about the swapping of batteries, even when automated.

* Handling of liquid fuel is vastly less complicated than moving around heavy battery packs

* Space requirements are much bigger (because of volumetric energy density) with battery packs

* Battery packs may very well need to be transported to and from swapping stations, whereas fuel only goes to stations

All in all, seems to me that the flexibility that everyone is used to with liquid fuels is near unattainable with battery swapping.

I'm very inclined to bet that we'll be relying on liquid fuels for quite a number of years to come.

Might be methanol for electeic vehicles equipped with methanol fuel cells or maybe even formic acid.

Hydrogen, I'm skeptical about it. Too much of a hassle.

Battery consumed storage space and battery swap time are likely very small inconveniences considering we will have to dramatically reduce fossil fuel use (=cost increases and/or subsidies for alternatives). It means they will have to compete with synthetic hydrocarbon fuels made from renewables. But sure they will have to compete with fuel cells.

>Batteries are getting better and look promising but all new tech does that until it hits a wall

between metal-air batteries and hydrogen, i think metal-air is just better density/utility-wise and have higher chances technology-wise. And infrastructure-wise it would be just a continuation of the ongoing electrification transformation whereis hydrogen means totally new buildout for not much gain if any.

> I wouldn't bet my money on hydrogen being the way of the future but I would bet my money on internet comments being wrong

Exactly what I was thinking when I was reading your comment...

I was thinking why not CNG - it's readily available and will probably be the root source of hydrogen in these schemes...

But then - it's not carbon neutral.

There are solutions we haven't tried that will quickly extend the range of an electric truck, like: swap the batteries, don't change them.

Regular and predictable journeys between fixed points with rigid timing constraints sounds a lot like a train to me.

Yes, but you can make the same argument about anything. Why not methanol. Why not battery swapping.

The question is how expensive is the initial investment and how expensive are the operating cost.

Hydrogen trucks will be more expensive, the fuel is more expensive and the operation is more expensive.

> What are the odds batteries hit a wall before they're viable in heavy trucks? I dunno but certainly not zero.

0% as current batteries can already cover the majority of the current heavy trucking market.

The theoretical limit of energy density for lithium batteries is already too low to be economically viable for most trucking applications. I also don't know that hydrogen is the answer, but it almost assuredly is not going to be batteries for anything that isn't for local deliveries only.

> theoretical limit of energy density for lithium batteries is already too low to be economically viable for most trucking applications

Curious to see a source for this.

Economic viability can be massaged through subsidies or taxes, if the break even point isn't too far away from the current point.

>Economic viability can be massaged through subsidies or taxes

Wow - we have subsidies than can alter the laws of physics? Neat! Why didn't we deploy that before now!

No, but just think about an extreme case. What if there was a tax on any liquid hydrocarbon based fuel of $1000/gal starting 1/1/2023? What would the reaction be? Obviously truckers would want to buy something so they didn't have to drive a diesel truck any more. If battery powered trucks were more expensive per lb*mi than the diesel at the old price, the switch would cause general prices for goods to go up, granted, but the case for non-diesel trucks would be there because it wouldn't go up enough to cause the demand for trucks to collapse.

The reaction would be the political party that passed that tax would lose overwhelmingly by a landslide in the election.

If you want to do some form of tax that is large enough to make a difference you first need to make the alternative to paying that tax viable enough that people will switch. Hydrocarbons are massively more energy dense than any other practical fuel. (nuclear is of course more energy dense, but not currently practical for trucks) If you want to get rid of them, then you need an alternative that works well enough for people to actually switch. There are a number of them, but batteries are not one, and never will be.

That’s not true. 500 mile range semi trucks are feasible with careful engineering. That’s long enough where drivers have to stop for regulator rest anyway. See: https://selenianboondocks.com/2017/11/tesla-semi-part-1/

More for lithium sulfur.

What are the chances of a Tesla megacharger exactly at the closest exit when you hit your 8 hour mark, and also not being used by any other trucks? Real life usage requires buffers.

This really isn’t a problem.

8 hour is the MAXIMUM you can legally drive at a time. 11 hours is the daily maximum driving time total. So as long as there’s a mega charger between your 3rd and 8th hour, you’re fine. Then charge overnight slower.

Lithium sulfur (or a smaller load) enables no need to charge during the day at all. Could go the full 11 hours driving each day and charge at mere Supercharger (or CCS) speeds overnight.

Batteries already hit the wall with trucks; otherwise the industry would be all over them. It's highly more likely that hydrogen infrastructure could be built out faster than battery technology could improve for batteries to be effective for trucking.

Hydrogen's biggest benefit is you can quickly tank your vehicle up on energy - as fast as with liquid fuel. Also hydrogen fuel cells haven even less maintenance than battery powered EVs, and while fuel cells do require some maintenance they don't require wholesale replacement like battery packs do. Batteries degrade even faster when under heavy use - and freight puts big demands on a drivetrain.

And for those proposing battery swapping - where you going to get the batteries from? We can barely keep up with EV car demand and EVs are far from ubiquitous. These are serious issues: batteries just don't scale - on multiple fronts.

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