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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> electricity prices per mile of transport per ton were about 25% that of fossil fuel prices per mile of transport per ton

In shipping and logistics, time is money. Fuel can be dispensed in the US at a maximum of 10 gal/minute. Factor that against the largest charger you can find and see why the single cost difference doesn't matter yet.

> They should really move all long-haul trucking to electric as well

Reduced capacity from doing this requires additional vehicle time to haul the same amount of material. This isn't a single factor equation. Plus, over the road drivers sleep in their vehicles, and not always at truck stops. They're only allowed to drive for 10 hours, so it's not always as convenient as you might expect.

Consider the weight of 600 gallons of fuel vs. the reduced hauling capacity from using an electric truck and see why we're a ways away from this yet. Have no fear; though, the moment this is logistically favorable, they will switch.

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> In shipping and logistics, time is money. Fuel can be dispensed in the US at a maximum of 10 gal/minute. Factor that against the largest charger you can find and see why the single cost difference doesn't matter yet.

You charge the mail trucks overnight, when they aren't being driven. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a postman out in the evening or nighttime. I also don't know about you, but I don't stand next to my car when I charge it at a rapid charger. (I stop where I can run an errand or use the bathroom.)

In comparison, it takes time to get gas. You have to go out of your way to get to the gas station, go up to the pump, pay for it, and then get back on your way. It always takes me 5-10 minutes to get gas.

So, time being money, what makes the most sense is to install a charger at every parking space that a mail truck occupies overnight, and getting rid of the trips to the gas station. The time it takes to plug the car in is negligible.

No one is claiming electrification isn't practical for mail delivery vans. The grandparent comments are discussing long-haul trucking.

This a post about USPS delivering? Grandparent comments are off topic

USPS also does long haul.

USPS generally contracts out long-haul.

The 9,250 vehicles the article discusses are for local delivery.

Long haul trucking is solved by electrifying US highways. Trains can charge from overhead lines at 200+MPH doing the same for trucks at highway speeds is relatively trivial and allows for on trip charging.

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

An EV semi with a relatively modest 100 mile range battery easily solves the last mile problem off highways while weighing the same as a traditional ICE engine + fuel.

>this is relatively trivial

No it is not.

Why do you assume that?

We were doing this 100 years ago for inner city trolly’s. Trains travel 3x the speed of highway trucks, vastly higher power draw, and we solved that decades ago. There’s even been successful demos of actual highway trucks and power delivery. With modern battery technology we don’t even need a continuous system just enough to keep trucks topped off on highways so maintenance is easy and existing automated toll lanes even cover billing.

So, yes it really is trivial as shown by how cheap existing demo’s have been.

e.g., the system deployed in Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg&t=193s

C'mon guys. "Relatively trivial" is not the two words I would use to describe electrifying highway grids.

And to convert road vehicles to conduct off that highway? The words I would use to describe/implement that is "Absolute Taxpayer Aversion". Billions and billions in R&D with no guarantee of adoption and likely greater operating costs for 10s of reasons.(Maintenance, contract costs, accidents, teething.

Many counties, even liberal ones, in the US still have dirt roads. In western ireland it's about half the roads are dirt that I saw. If we can't figue out laying concrete at scale, how can we accomplish this "trivially"?

There is zero need to electrify dirt roads, just specific loans on ~1% all us roads due to that 100 mile range battery I just mentioned.

We had electric trollies 140 years ago and modern trains have surfaces in contact at 3x the speeds and much higher power draws. Trucks in comparison don’t need constant power, so you can maintain the line without interfering with traffic.

But you don’t need to trust me it’s a proven technology with the obvious revenue stream of charging for electricity.

PS: America has dirt roads because dirt roads work well when you have low traffic. Their old, cheap, and therefore proven technology just like electrified roads.

Agreed, my point on dirt roads doesn't make much sense.

But point still stands, if state govt's struggle to repave arterial roads every few years to the standards of our taxes, do we think any national gov't would shoulder paying 10,0000 times that cost yearly to maintain bleeding edge technology across 100k highway miles?

In the 19th-20th century rail/trolley was used in the same way municipal buses are now. Great for absolutely defined schedules across short distances for local residents. Do you see that scaling up to highways though? Even if we used old school powered rail and cable technology to charge up highways for big rigs only, that would be such an unfathomable, enormous cost to implement and maintain. We can't maintain the rail network in this country, which is dwarfed in size by highways.

You seem to think this is expensive, but these systems are cheap enough to save money when used infrequently by electric trains. Highways see a lot more truck traffic.

At scale this isn’t the kind of thing state or federal government needs to pay for out of pocket, it’s a revenue generating opportunity like total roads and can be financed as such.

It’s a classic chicken and egg problem where you need enough miles of electrified highways to convince people to buy new or modify old trucks. Realistically if hot swapping batteries or hydrogen was the cheaper alternative that’s the correct infrastructure to build.

Passenger rail largely failed because of the last mile problem, but here batteries solves the issue. A mile of electric highway can easily let you drive several miles of non electric roads.

You have to go out of your way to get to the gas station, go up to the pump, pay for it, and then get back on your way. It always takes me 5-10 minutes to get gas.

Wow. Gas stations are everywhere, conveniently located, and always on route to some place or another.

The mental gymnastics employed, to try to make this seem arduous, does not make for a compelling argument.

Many rural areas have no gas stations nearby, but they do have electricity.

So it's now actually more practical to have an EV in those places.

Only if you don't need to travel further than your available range in a single day. While gas stations might be less common, there are still way more of them than high powered electric chargers.

Having an electric vehicle is not useful if the only "fast" charging available to you as a consumer is a 240v hookup at your home (and you need to drive long distances regularly).

USPS trucks that deliver mail aren't driving more than 100 miles (rarely) a day. I'm pretty sure these trucks can be on a 2-3 day recharge cycle and still have plenty of juice left even if they don't hit those recharge cycles.

Conveniently, gas stations also have small commercial electric, and in some localities are partnering with utilities to provide high speed charging. (solves the street parking and no high amp service issues)

Gas stations also have large flat roofs that some are putting solar panels on top of.

Those high-amp chargers are very expensive. You would need a few of them at every station. Solar panels are not going to be sufficient to power them. To power all these charging stations, you need massive power generation. The USA can't even seem to complete a new nuclear facility in Georgia right now.

Getting gas about every week and a half means about 35 stops a year. If a stop takes me a little over 5 minutes that means about 3 hours a year.

Compared to maybe 10 seconds to plug in my car when I get to my garage.

I spend way more time recharging my ICE car than I do my EV.

Seriously, take a moment to calculate how much stopping at a gas station takes out of a trip.

For example, when I have to get off of a freeway in order to get gas, I usually have to navigate an intersection and might have to sit through a traffic light.

In places I used to live, getting gas meant turning left instead of going right on red. Then leaving the gas station meant sitting through another stop light or two.

You might not have to put up with this if you live somewhere rural, where you're not dealing with divided highways and traffic lights.

Otherwise, getting gas is a chore.

Yes, I’m sure there will be usps charging stations on every block in the near future.

It doesn't need to be USPS specific, but that is an interesting thought. Many new neighborhoods have spots for postal workers to park and distribute the mail on foot. This is typically faster in my experience. I don't think it's a big leap to also have those dedicated spots have chargers.

FWIW:

I just went out to buy gas for my snowblower and generator. The gas station was a mile away. It was 17 minutes round trip.

Granted, some of that time was taken up by opening up the gas can and adding stabilizer, but the point stands that getting gas is a chore.

>You have to go out of your way to get to the gas station, go up to the pump, pay for it, and then get back on your way. It always takes me 5-10 minutes to get gas.

Almost everybody consuming a "your local post office" volume of fuel has a tank and pump to dispense with on site.

That said, consumer shipping has enough regularity that it lends itself well to electrification and electrifying any given class of vehicle in that industry should pencil out a little sooner than the equivalent vehicle in general.

I know it's been talked about a lot and never really implemented, but if you've got a fleet of identical vehicles, then doing battery swaps should be possible and practical.

The economics of long haul trucking make electrification hard.

Fortunately, for local deliveries like the post office, constant stop-and-go means that regen braking can really stretch the range of electric batteries.

Regen braking plus zero-cost idle. Electric is at a clear advantage for local delivery.

Most gas delivery vehicles don't idle these days. But maybe the starter motor requires more maintenance.

Doesn't every gas motor start spew out some uncombusted fuel ?

Maybe? I think direct injection motors are actually pretty good at reducing that. Catalytic converters help too. But yeah, there’s more waste than an electric motor.

The reassuring thing to me is that in just over 100 years we made the ICE so efficient. It’s a fundamentally wasteful design and we have taken it very, very far. With another 100 years of battery and electric motor development we will have equally impressive capabilities with the added trick of energy source agnosticism.

When the engine is warmed up starting it doesn't AFAIU cause any big pulse of pollution. Also vehicles equipped with these stop-start systems AFAIK have more powerful starters so they can start faster.

There is a little bit of waste associated with engine start, but it is worth it if you are idling for more than +- 10 seconds.

Wait, "most" (over 50%) long-haul trucks and vans have start-stop functionality?

Am I missing something? This whole thread has been about delivery trucks not long-haul trucks.

I think we are all just talking about start and stop delivery trucks. I know the UPS vehicles as well as the USPS vehicles in my area all stop running the engine when they stop and get out.

This is an assumption without the hard realities to back it.

Plus they aren't driving at high speed between suburban and city houses, plus they aren't actually driving that far (probably 50-100 miles in suburbs, less than 50 in city) so they don't need a huge battery.

They don't need 0-60 in 4 seconds, so a single axle motor is probably all you need.

You don't need NMC chemistry for the range, you can just use LFP or sodium ion when it reaches mass production later this year hopefully.

You can even use a range extender ICE for the rural models like the BMW i3.

Sure, a long haul semi with multiple drivers is a use case that won't be filled by electric trucks anytime soon. But that's a fairly narrow niche. Even on long haul routes it's pretty normal for trucks to have only one driver and stop for several hours for a rest. With a megawatt charger and 500 miles of range on a charge, even long haul trucking is just a mild engineering problem.

For in town trucks the math works out very well, and very quickly. Which explains why there are already multiple entrants into that market niche.

A megawatt charger might not be cheaper than fuel. It's a lot of power to dispatch. It'll also still take longer to recharge at that rate than it does to refuel.

On the other hand, megawatt chargers might get cheaper rates because they're buying in bulk, and it's (generally) easier for power companies to provide service to one big customer than a hundred or a thousand little customers.

(That's assuming the infrastructure in the area can accommodate it. I expect any heavily-used truck charging stations are going to be located where the utility hookups are comparatively cheap and easy.)

Fuel is money as well. Recent diesel price inflation caused a lot of misery for truckers. A full tank of fuel costs way more than a typical trucker earns per day. And most truckers own their trucks and are under heavy debt. 600 gallons is a lot for a truck. Depending on where you get your diesel, you are going to pay 2-3 dollars per gallon at least. Closer to 5 in some places. So even a "modest" 150 gallon tank could set you back close to a 800$.

Recent price fluctuations due to the rise in oil prices have hit that sector really hard.

How many truckers will answer the question "would you like to save more in fuel cost per day than you currently earn per day?" with a "no?. Time loss for charging is maybe inconvenient but the price tag isn't that high for everyone.

Anyway, this stops being optional pretty soon after electrical trucks start undercutting transport prices because they simply have lower cost of course. But while there is still a choice, there are going to be smart truckers and broke truckers. They'll pay the difference out of their own pocket.

In any case, if the vehicle charges at night and has enough charge for the route, there is no time loss.

We're talking mail delivery here not trucking. They are not doing hundreds of miles per day. More like tens. With lots of drive a little, idle, drive a little, etc. driving. This has very poor fuel economy with an ice vehicle. An EV essentially has no energy cost when it is idling. At best you lose some energy to keep the AC and the radio going. Which isn't free with an ice vehicle either.

Mail and package deliveries are an ideal use case for EVs. Most commercial delivery companies have largely completed their move to EVs for this reason and are rolling out EVs as fast as they can get their hands on them. That debate is over and there never was much of a debate beyond "Would you like to cut cost? Yes!". Ancient history, the industry has moved on and the answer was conclusive. If you want to compete in that sector, EV is the only way. There's no case left for ice vehicles in that sector.

Trucking will follow.

According to the USPS, "The longest rural delivery route is in Clarinda, IA. The carrier travels 181.4 miles daily and delivers to 234 boxes." It seems like most electric vehicles should have no problem covering that in a single trip and I assume this was something they tested before ordering.

Yeah, hopefully they tested range for the coldest days in winter in that region as well, considering an aerodynamically optimized tesla gets 200 mile range in optimal weather conditions (i.e. sunny day in Los Angeles/the bay area)

They do not need the trucks to work in the most extreme cold and rural routes. A lot of low hanging fruit in electrifying easy targets: urban delivery in warmer climates. For instance, a delivery truck in LA might only ever go tens of miles per day and never see cold weather. At the scale of USPS, this could bee hundreds of thousands of trucks.

The comment im replying to literally says that theres a route in iowa with a distance is 181 miles. I dont understand why theres so much gaslighting in this whole comment thread.

If the time wasted charging/refueling is super valuable you can fix this by provisioning a few more vehicles than there are drivers, or having hot swappable pre-charged batteries and provisioning a few more of those than there are vehicles. Then your recharging/refueling time drops down to a couple of minutes max because you're either swapping batteries out or hopping in a different truck.

Over-provisioning vehicles has a capital penalty and requires staging areas that don’t already exist.

All of this has a capital penalty and requires stuff that doesn't exist yet. We're discussing exactly what stuff might be worth said capital penalty.

If the basic running costs of these are really 25% of ICE vehicles then there's a lot of wiggle room for some extra "capital penalty" while still saving a tonne of money.

I’m not convinced EVs have a capital penalty over ICE. If an operator already has a truck they aren’t going to be in the market for a replacement, EV or not, until it reaches EOL. The lower cost of operation may move the needle on when ICE trucks reach EOL but not by much. How does an owner-operator justify the cost of buying two trucks and staging them? Even for larger operations how do they justify buying trucks that will sit still? Once EVs can meet the hours per day limits they will be appealing without additional infrastructure or over-provisioning.

he’s suggesting using more trucks to counter the lower range. That’s the capital penalty

Logistics companies currently need 1 truck to go cross country. Why would they opt for 4 instead? That have to be driven to checkpoints and wait. It makes no sense

If your load is cross country, railway might be a better solution.

That creates more overhead, downtime, and complexity. Now you need 3 or 4 additional semis lined up and waiting for a cross country trip.

The thing in the article is a van, not a semi, though.

Implementing a battery-swap system at major truck stops seems plausible. The semi would pull in, its battery pack would be pulled out by a light crane and slotted into a charging unit, and a fresh pack would be installed, no stop-over time needed.

I also wonder whether semis on certain well-defined long-haul routes (I-80 etc) could be partially automated, such that the driver could sleep in the back of the cab much of the time. Not sure if the technology is really there yet, though.

> I also wonder whether semis on certain well-defined long-haul routes (I-80 etc) could be partially automated, such that the driver could sleep in the back of the cab much of the time. Not sure if the technology is really there yet, though.

Sure, it's called a train.

Maybe combined with autonomous electric forklifts to shuttle cargo to/from a waystation.

Forklifts?! No, you either use intermodal containers, or just put the entire trailer onto the train.

Sure containers are the standard... except for the last mile for non-industrial, which is a lot of stuff.

Even at that last mile, you could use trams that take NATO bicons. 80 tonnes per 40ft container, which divides into four equal 20-tonne bicons.

Another consideration might be forklift pallets, except that the market is badly fragmented.

Bicons are forkliftable.

You don't need a swap system even. Just tow a trailer (you know like those multi-trailer semis UPS and others have) but one of them is a battery (or generator if you want), and swap the trailer at a swap station.

Or just swap the whole truck.

I've never seen mail being delivered at night, in any country I lived in.

Plenty of time to recharge vehicles.

If anything, local delivery vehicles are the best thing for EVs as they're inherently daytime use only.

Where I live I definitely see mail delivery after dark but not over night.

This tech is really promising, they can retrofit a battery that can be swapped out for a fully charged one in minutes:

https://www.januselectric.com.au

> Have no fear; though, the moment this is logistically favorable, they will switch.

I think the thing that makes this logistically favorable is electrification of major highways. What I worry about is that this requires coordination between government agencies and car and truck manufacturers and it requires political will to make it happen and find the funding. We could start building it right now, or we could sit on our thumbs for the next twenty years.

(There are several different ways to electrify highways. My preference would be to use something like the system they're testing out in Sweden that uses power rails in slots embedded in the road surface. Cars/trucks have a device that swings down and makes contact. Overhead lines are cheaper, but aren't practical for cars to use. Induction charging is another option but it's much more expensive and power delivery isn't great if there's no physical connection.)

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