Daimler is setting up a $650M charging network for commercial EVs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Likely being forced to, a reminder this is the same company that deliberately and consistently cheated on emissions tests in the USA.
What EVs would they be. At least in Europe all new EVs use CCS and most of the older ones used Type-2. They can all be charged from an ordinary 230 V, 10 A domestic supply; Schuko in Europe or BS1363 in the UK (and Ireland?).
The good news is that there's an emerging standard for this, so hopefully Daimler adopts it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System
> the low hanging fruit remains the vast numbers of private vehicles not currently served by charging schemes. Those people are basically everyone who doesn't own a house with a garage where they can install the bespoke charger for their particular EV.
I wonder, does it even make sense? Long-haul (electric of course) rail + short to medium haul trucking make more sense - it would be much more efficient.
Do long haul electric truck even make sense? Don't the batteries needed weigh too much?
For long-haul the best may be something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
(Trains have advantages and disadvantages compared to long-haul trucks)
The main mental miscalculation I think people make when they say “why not just trains” is ignoring that rail is a super conservative industry, at least in the US, and in the case of passenger rail (not on existing tracks) that building out new rail infrastructure is super expensive, particularly for HSR where rights of way have to obey Newton’s Laws when it comes to turning radius.
It literally may take more time to do the environmental review for adding, say, catenary lines to existing rail than to just go to electric trucks. Some companies have been really effective at building out charging infrastructure. Additionally, just convincing the rail industry to make changes to enable/allow electrification (especially in non traditional ways) could take a generation.
Additionally, the US has removed a lot of seldom-used rail, so you just need a lot of trucking. Moving cargo from truck to rail to truck just may be a lot more cost and hassle than direct via truck.
Electrifying trucking, even long haul trucking, is just potentially the fastest way to electrify a lot of current logistics given the cultural, infrastructure, regulatory reality we live in today, as opposed to the ideal cultural, infrastructural, regulatory world we’d LIKE at here to be.
Engineering a decarbonization transition with realistic assessments of infrastructure & industry/regulatory inertial as a constraint is very different than “ideally we use trains for logistics as they have a lower coefficient of friction.”
I know that you can go everywhere with your car, but what if I told you not every single person had a car. I know, I know for Americans this is very hard to understand that such a thing is possible. Roads aren't for everybody, roads are for people that can afford cars.
And roads still need to be designed far larger if you also use them for cargo, and because trucks are so heavy the need to be fix these roads very often otherwise they will lose utility for everybody.
And I don't understand the obsession with strikes that Americans seem to have. As if everywhere outside of the US nobody would ever get anywhere because everybody was always striking.
Trains are an optimisation for where there's enough utility to cope with the massive overhead they impose. That's how they're more efficient: they are only built where there's so much demand that it's worth putting a train there. They aren't general-purpose, and they need a lot of top-down control to make happen. They aren't like roads, where you can run a bus service, ride a bike, or hop in a car and go.
Trains are an optimisation for where there's enough utility to cope with the massive overhead they impose. That's how they're more efficient: they are only built where there's so much demand that it's worth putting a train there. They aren't general-purpose, and they need a lot of top-down control to make happen. They aren't like roads, where you can run a private bus service, ride a bike, or hop in a car and go.
Because its generally Americans who think its unfathomable to connect anything other then Tokio and Osaka by train.
We have villages with a few 100 people connected by train. You can transport bikes, cars, and cargo or people on a train. Just hop on.
And building a train isn't much more top down then building a general road. Many train companies historically have run locally with local control. And in rural places there is often a public owned bus running on the publicly owned road.
> hop in a car and go.
.... If you own a car.
Some companies are trying it in the commercial space so far not much has come of it.
https://www.transportation.gov/rural/ev/toolkit/ev-infrastru...
The natural market for EVs is a maximum of 20%. The cost/benefit is only positive for certain use cases.
Ford can't sell its Lightning F150 EVs. They just had a fire on one of the holding lots too that burned a bunch of them down. I guess they'll have to take the insurance.
Fun fact about EV fires: they're a chemical reaction, not an ordinary fire. Removing the oxygen source like you would with an ICE fire doesn't work.
(1) What are the lithium-ion-battery fire risks & safety issues?. https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/battery-fire-lithium-i.... (2) Just how concerned should the solar industry be about battery fires?. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/02/just-how-conce.... (3) Why Lithium Batteries Catch Fire - ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/why-lithium-batteries-catch-fire-6.... (4) Can Batteries Catch On Fire? Do They Ever Explode? - Firefighter Insider. https://firefighterinsider.com/batteries-catch-fire-or-explo.... (5) Lithium Battery Fires: How to Spot the Warning Signs. https://www.erieinsurance.com/blog/lithium-battery-fires.
Aren't all ordinary fires a chemical reaction?
A chemical fire is far more complex and potentially dangerous than a normal fire.
Gasoline is a chemical, however we have a lot of experience dealing with gasoline driven fires and they can be easily doused with water. Large battery driven fires in vehicles are a new thing, and they are not easily doused with water.
And yet countries in Europe have already higher then 20% of new car sales being EV and some of them without subsidies.
Ford can actually sell its F150. And lots of version of F150 and other trucks had issues that stopped production line. Its utterly irrelevant in terms of the EV debate.
> Fun fact about EV fires
Your not exactly breaking news here.