I wonder what the longer-term solution is for this? More trucks? Exchangeable batteries? Faster charging?
Now you could say well we made snow plowing worse, and of course in this specific example you'd be right, but you'd be ignoring longer time horizons and not really comparing or accounting for the impact of negative externalities.
An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window. You wouldn't say "things are worse now!", you'd recognize that you're making a change which is better over the long term.
I apologize if that wasn't extremely obvious from what I already wrote.
The concern here is that the stopgap measure (the tarp/electric trucks) are implemented too early. The superior replacement window does not yet exist. There is no need to remove the older window and deal with a hole in the side of your house for half a year while you wait for new windows to hit the market.
There is no way I will give up the convenience of EV for those 5%.
A more apt analogy would be if the new window was not even invented yet.
Or we can just electrify applications that currently make sense and work from there as the technology improves.
I do not see the point in downvotes on this site. It seems like any slightly political article/discussion results in this sort of behavior.
Sorry for the meta comment.
I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".
It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/06/07/mack-t...
The truck doesn’t care if the battery slab is pulled and replaced with another battery or a hybrid powertrain, it just cares it has enough power to accelerate and decelerate.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/r40x15/why_are_...
That's just high tech engineer fantasy though.
Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day. Electrical is great for cyclical but batteries just don't support the energy density to do it all day. You can theoretically bridge the gap real well with a hybrid system but it's only theoretical because in the real world other people's money is not actually an unlimited resource and you're not getting a turbine into anything cheaply. There's a reason you only see them in vehicles that are already fantastically expensive (tanks) and benefit greatly from some of the specific performance attributes. It would be really cool though...
Right now the trucks can do 1/3 of what they need with the batteries they have. Commercial vehicles like this are very much constrained by weight. The "nearly free" and shovel ready solution is to just raise the weight limit for the vehicles in question so they can pack on the other 2/3 of the batteries they need and let them roll around at 120k+ all day like concrete trucks. Sure you'll get a little more wear and tear on stuff but this solution doesn't require an unforeseen technology (battery) or economic (turbines) breakthrough.
Right. This would certainly apply to the mechanically coupled turbine truck prototypes from the 70's.
But if its driving a generator then you can let batteries or capacitors handle the cyclic loads of acceleration and have a computer throttle the turbine according to the overall demand.
The easy solutions will go first, working its way up with better tech and design.
I think car/fleet size batteries isn't really feasible with swapping batteries. Small scooter batteries seems like a no brainer.
Firstly, I know someone who works on Daimler's electric trucks and he assures me that their electric powertrains are EXTREMELY dangerous just from the amount of power represented. Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.
Secondly, the economics - the battery pack on a Tesla already represents over half of the materials and manufacturing cost. And it's the only scarce thing about EVs. If you are a fleet operator and have to maintain a bank of batteries to charge, you may as well just buy the bodies to go with.
So I would guess that in an EV fleet future where the cost of batteries has dropped significantly, you will probably see the size of the fleets increase as operating costs drop.
This is already happening with municipal bus and school bus fleets. The bus count is over-provisioned to allow for the longer electric 'refueling' times.
As fleet managers understand, when a vehicle is being refueled it is out of service.
To be fair, union operators express negative interest in anybody outside their union doing anything that might be construed as otherwise the union's work.
That's assuming you can deal with safety, theft and other related issues.
In seriousness, heating streets with abundant solar energy harvested nearby would be reasonable. But sunshine in winter months is not as intense, and you'd have to build, as usual, a huge battery to keep the energy for the night. (When this is solved, more problems would get solved along the way than just de-snowing streets.)