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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Fantasy theories that ignore many of the core transportation facts, which include

very volatile costs of fuel (diesel is nosebleed higher than gasoline in California this year, a disaster for businesses and tradesmen)

Effective, efficient, fast refueling networks

Complexity of fleet equipment, speed to repair

Tires - an 18 wheeler gets through a lot of tires in its lifetime in service. EVs are very heavy unloaded

Fleet trucking is a brutal business where every penny counts and owner/operators are whipsawed by fuel prices, demand waxing a waining and endless politicla meddling.

Once we have nuclear, a credible supply grid and have overcome the battery capacity and fire issues EV will be viable to businesses. Until then it is the unrealistic slow motion disaster being forced through in California.

https://www.freightwaves.com/ is a good site to track developments

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A few things of note: 1. Fuel prices are much higher in the EU, especially in the Nordics due to disincentive taxes (US gas is practically free in comparison), and we simultaneously have vast deployments of renewables and a EU-wide energy exchange that make energy cheaper (heck, electricity cost was negative again today in Denmark). This means that the EV benefit is much greater here. The US really should get their tax game together here...

2. Refueling of long-distance trucks over here are usually done in few, large highway locations that include sleeping areas to comply with driving time limits, and not city gas stations. Fewer locations to equip, making it easier to upgrade for fast charging.

3. Our 18-wheelers are usually smaller and lighter, and while road trains are used in e.g. Sweden, those are only for long-haul with the associated lower tire wear of driving at a constant speed and angle. Short-haul is usually just a light 3-axle box euro truck. But yes, there will be an increased tire-wear which offsets the fuel savings a bit.

Seems to me that fuel price volatility is a point in favor of electric, as grid electricity prices are less volatile cyclic price swings (day/night) can be planned for, and grid energy is fed by an array of sources, which reduces volatility compared to being dependent on a single energy source.

Fuel with subsidies and unmet externalities is already a slow-motion disaster...

Have you checked electricity prices in the last 10 years ? Or just say, 1 year ?

That's volatility

A lot of energy prices are linked together, by the way, because many countries use one to produce the other (burn coal or oil to produce electricity, for instance)

Yes, but I for one welcome the volatile electricity price swings in the Nordics. Electricity cost was negative today in Denmark. Yay for renewable energy.

Despite attempts to artificially stabilize oil prices, volatility there does not spark quite the same joy. Marie Kondo would trash it in an instant.

Sure !

You understand that not all people lives in denmark Here, in France, we have 12 times more people than denmark, the highest point is a bit higher than 171 meters and there is a lot of land not really close to the sea

Point is : good for you, but your country' situation is an exception

You also have nuclear power as 75% of your supply and buy our excess renewable on the energy exchange, so you are doing excellent - just make sure that number goes up, not down, unlike a certain ill-advised neighbor of yours.

Our environment-focused market-regulating taxes are also not altitude dependent.

Fun fact, nuclear power has the lowest direct and indirect (e.g., cancer, pollution) death rate per Wh of any supply source - despite high-profile disasters - beating even wind power which while entirely harmless has a considerably higher deaths from accidents during construction and maintenance. The only negative aspect is high up-front construction cost, but that is a low price for the many human lives saved by reduced oil or coal pollution from the plants that were replaced where wind or solar is not an option.

Here's California electricity prices for the last ten years: https://ycharts.com/indicators/california_electric_utility_r....

There's a clear seasonal pattern and steady increase over time, but isn't particularly spiky otherwise.

And here's diesel, with a nice wall of an increase (~50%) in March last year due to a certain geopolitical event. https://ycharts.com/indicators/california_no_2_diesel_retail...

Electricity went up at the same time from about 21¢ to 24¢, less than half the relative increase in diesel prices.

And this is pretty typical: geopolitical events cause price spikes (or sometimes dips, when the producers happen to try to undercut one another), and then slowly normalize.

Electricity, by contrast, is lots of sources rolled together, spread all over the planet. Shocks in one source will certainly show up, but are stacked by other sources.

Their estimation was based on Swedish gas prices that, like all European fossil fuels, were artificially maintained very low thanks to staggering subsidies this winter.

Gas price volatility is an argument, but one that they ignored and that will never be in the interest of gas engines. Gas can’t be much cheaper than it is: carbon pricing, restriction on new wells, and instability in the Middle East will only make it more expensive.

Electric engines are measurably simpler. Every estimation I’ve seen is that maintenance for cars is at least an order of magnitude cheaper. I wouldn’t be surprised if e-trucks were more expensive to maintain than e-cars, but all the things that make trucks more tedious than cars (oil, brakes, clutch) are what makes EVs much better. Every specialist who has used an electric truck is very bullish on maintenance.

I definitely agree that the real issue with trucks is their size: current eighteen-wheelers are to big. It’s unsafe; their tires are expensive and need to be changed often. Brakes too, but that’s something EVs fix. The biggest issue is how fast they damage the road.

Lighter trucks would be the best idea. The solution for me is something that Sweden, California already do, but not enough; something that every modern country should do a lot more: carry goods on (electric) freight trains, and use smaller trucks for the last mile.

> Once we have nuclear,

Nuclear energy is part of the grid mix in Sweden, California, continental Europe… Not sure what you mean by this.

> diesel is nosebleed higher than gasoline in California this year, a disaster for businesses and tradesmen

Diesel at the pump in California costs about 10% more than regular gas, and contains 20% more energy (volumetrically) so it's ~10% cheaper than gas. At the peak of last year's fuel price spike, diesel in California was $7.011 and regular gas was $6.438, a 9% difference, still in favor of diesel.

The rest of your collection of sentence fragments is also a bunch of nonsense, but this is the easiest factual point to rebut.

@jeffbee My diesel truck is mostly parked this year in California due to high fuel costs.

People who need to drive 100's of miles daily in diesel vehicles are having to pass on their increased energy costs to the customers ...which then equals fewer customers.

I cited California because it 'leads the way' in idiotic legislation by out of touch bureaucrats and to some degree influences European environmentalists who are eager to leverage the conceptual idea this is going well. i do know a long distance trucker in Sweden who regularly drives Skorna>Stockholm. I'd be interested to know battery performance on an EV Heavy truck in winter there, at least it's relatively flat.

Gasoline and diesel in California was around $3 3 years ago which has a huge supply chain impact on the overall economy. your suggestion that heavy vehicles going through a lot of tires is 'a bunch of nonsense' demonstrates a lack of real world experiences. Truck tire pollution is a very real problem and heavier EV battery powered vehicles are exacerbating this problem, particularly due to the different torque characteristics of EVs which are similar to diesel engines.

https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...

> Gasoline and diesel in California was around $3 3 years ago

That's just an exercise in cherry-picking a starting date. 15 years ago the price of diesel fuel in California was $5. And California is hardly distinguished by its change in nominal fuel price from 2020 to 2023. Gulf coast states for example saw an increase from $2.18 to $3.58.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...

It is loosely correct to say that on-road diesel prices have been about the same in inflation-adjusted dollars for the last 20 years.

>Once we have nuclear, a credible supply grid and have overcome the battery capacity and fire issues

I'm not wrong right? That's all this generation's Moon Shot in scope.

It should be, but sadly the fantasy of windmills and solar panels continues.

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...

Well, Germany is a pretty special case given the Ukraine war totally screwed them energy-wise.

Oh and you missed performance at extreme weather/temps.

Electric engine performance drop at low temperatures is less steep than for gas engines. It’s just that people generally don’t monitor it for ICE: you have to fill up more often, but individual drivers don’t realize it. Managed fleets do, though but they don’t mind because that usually matches the Christmas season.

When you say engine performance, does that factor in drop in battery capacity? I know diesels also have problems running (and getting up and running) cold.

Current batteries maintain themselves warm with a heat pump to avoid that degradation. The drop is mainly the energy of activating that pump. If you have a Tesla, that’s the fridge-like noise you hear when you warm it up.

Diesel engines typically run (inefficiently) to warm themselves up and be efficient, but that is a larger energy cost, mainly because that process captures a fraction of the heat from the combustion.

Diesel engines have electric preheaters. Electric battery warmers have to use battery power...

Where does that electricity come from?

An inefficient Diesel engine driving the dynamo.

You have it backwards.

Gas engines have a significantly less steep drop in performance than do electric engines, since gas engines generate lots of heat, and electric engines do not.

A gas engine might lose 10% range at 0 degrees F with most of that related to getting the engine up to proper operating temperature, but once up to temperature a gas engine can maintain that temperature with a small hit to performance efficiency. In contrast, an EV will lose over 20%+ range at the same temperature (and can lose as much as 40% of their range at sub-zero temperatures.)

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