Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi
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This guy drives a Scania in the US, and it feels like he is more like a marketing stunt for Scania. He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.
It should be easy for Volvo and Daimler Trucks to do the same, but I do not know why they don't do it.
As a European visiting US/Canada I once struck a conversation with a truck driver who had a really cool vintage semi, with lots of chrome and flare. I told him that I really liked the look of his truck, but that vintage trucks of that age would never be allowed on the road again in Europe, at least not for commercial jobs.
He then told me his truck was basically brand new...
Besides me making a fool of myself, I really grew an appreciation for the EU having rules about semis, especially in the noise department. Yeah, US domestic semi trucks are cool in their own way, but the constant noise of clutch fans, air brakes, 'jake' brakes, 'stack' exhaust with no of mufflers, etc. would drive me insane.
In (most of) Europe, all vehicles are subject to strict noise and emission rules, and many larger cities are now congestion zones which prohibits larger/older diesel powered vehicles from entering the city. Same for my city, where most trucks and busses are now electric. Since it happened gradually the change wasn't all that noticeable, that is until you go somewhere else and hear (and smell!) a diesel powered bus/semi drive by... We like to complain about all the 'stupid' government rules, but when you go to a place without those laws you really start to appreciate them, it truly feels like taking a step 'back' for the worse.
"In contrast, European regulations are much stricter regarding the dimensions of trucks. In European Union member countries, trucks cannot exceed 18.75 meters in length, which prioritizes the maximum use of available space for cargo. Manufacturers resort to solutions such as the use of smaller cabs and flat bodies to comply with these regulations while still maintaining cargo capacity."
https://www.sgibinc.com/en/differences-between-american-and-...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1996/53/oj/eng
I tried to find some official document that properly explained how and why they agreed on these values, but it's really hard to find proper documents. After all, the directive was agreed on in 1996...
Here's a link to perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/why-is-the-length-of-trucks...
To sum it up, it's a mix of everything: Safety (for infrastructure and humans), efficiency, and of course EU-wide harmonization of standards.
Even a brand new electric cab over garbage truck looks vintage: https://www.peterbilt.com/trucks/zero-emission/520EV
Interchangable standardized parts are a bad thing now?
Most EU trucks are GOVERNED to 56 mph. American trucks are high performance racing machines by comparison.
Only when you look at governed speed. If I remember the aforementioned Bruce Wilson videos correctly, his imported truck has something like 120 horsepower more than the local counterparts.
Weight-wise, American trucks are limited to 80.000 lbs. The EU allows 88.000 lbs everywhere, but heavier trucks are becoming more and more common. For example, short-distance transport to and from sea ports can be 97.000 lbs, they are exploring raising the EU-wide limit to 132.000 lbs, and Finland and Sweden already allow 165.000 lbs for long-distance transport with trials for 194.000 lbs. That's over twice as much cargo per truck as in the US!
And going fast is one thing, but you need to be able to do so safely. I've heard plenty of stories of American truckers complaining about it being "impossible to stop quickly". Meanwhile in Europe things like radar-assisted emergency braking are becoming the default, and the trucks are able to stop on a dime. Kid suddenly jumps in front of a truck? No problem, they'll live [0]. The driver is going to need a new pair of pants and the trailer is going to be an absolute mess, but that kid hasn't been turned into physics!
150,000lb B-doubles however are common nationwide.
https://www.nhvr.gov.au/files/201707-0577-common-heavy-freig...
Overall its a net benefit to all of society, including the truckers that cant be pressured to go faster to meet a target.
You'd literally need to build more roads, as long haul trucks would be on the road, literally, for an entire day longer per load. Speed is efficiency.
A lot of driving is actually done at night. Fewer cars.
Not as much as you'd think, though. At higher speeds you need more distance between individual vehicles, as the vehicles need significantly more time to stop. The rule-of-thumb is that you should keep a three-second gap between vehicles - which if followed would mean speed is completely unrelated to road capacity [0].
The higher speeds are also going to lead to more frequent and nastier incidents, which means more traffic jams. Once the roads get full lower speeds might even result in a higher average throughput!
[0]: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/analysis-road-capacit...
Resistance at 60 is a huge amount higher than at 50.
Go 10% faster if you want, but you'll use 30% more fuel over the same distance.
Numbers are approximate.
The numbers you quote don't show math, and even if they did, the math is different for each vehicle airflow.
Regardless, efficiency has many properties.
Time means more labour cost + cost of spending another day on the road, plus time not shipping something else.
I sometimes, in my car, drive from Quebec to California. It can take an extra day to make this drive, if I must drive slower due to weather, traffic, or construction.
EG 60mph vs 80mph average (yes, average without stops).
A little more fuel pales in comparison to these costs.
https://www.marketurbanist.com/blog/why-americas-freight-tra...
That depends a lot on how you look at it. The US got screwed by geography and doesn't have a lot of inland waterways. This means that rail freight is the only viable option for a lot of bulk cargo. The US is sending an awful lot of coal and grain via train, but in Europe most of that is done by river and canal.
The US also has a rather poor record quality-wise. Electrified rail basically doesn't exist, precision-scheduled railroading has made delivery times a joke, the infrastructure is crumbling, and freight trains are utterly incapable of playing nice with passenger rail. Heck, they are literally running trains which are too large to fit on the railways! It has been optimized for dirt-cheap bulk transport and as a result it isn't really capable of doing anything else.
The fact that US railways have such high tonne-miles, despite the state of the railways, says more about the complete lack of competition than it says about the railways.
We have some of the largest inland-waterway networks in the world. We just Jones Acted ourselves out of being able to use them.
Trucks can be used for a lot more things. They might not be ideal for long distance routes, but they're often used for them. Dock to dock time is often going to be far less with long haul trucking than truck to local train depot, rail to remote train depot, truck to remote dock.
It's also much harder to build rail capacity than road capacity; certainly that'a a function of our government, but someone with one container to move has to work within the environment.
Trucking also feels like it has more agency. If your truck fails, you can send another to pick up the load; if your train fails, you're at the mercy of the railroad. If there's disruptive weather in the path, a truck can drive around it; almost always a train will have to stay on its route, and may need to stop for the weather to clear. If the shipment needs to be recalled, the truck can turn around; you might be able to get your load off the train, but maybe not?
In someways it seems similar to why the hub and spoke model has fallen out of favor for airlines. It might be more efficient to have one large flight between hubs and two small flights to regional airports, but passengers would rather have a direct flight.
For instance in my country the public train company is absolutely brain damaged as it doesn't have enough bike transportation spots (only some trains do). There are even trains with a bike symbol that you're not allowed with a bike on. Thanks to the EU Green Deal they are now forced to provide them.
Only up to a point. The relationship between speed and fuel burned is not linear, and fuel is the largest cost.
The legislated maximum speed for heavy vehicles in Australia is 100km/h, but most major fleets electronically limit their vehicles to 90 for efficiency reasons.
Every extra km/h over 90 has a negligible impact on trip time while imposing a large penalty in terms of fuel burn.
On the other hand, the highway infrastructure has plenty of space for large trucks. If the roads to & from the main highway network can handle it, some countries will give you permits for all sorts of fancy combinations[1] up to 83 ft long. Considering that it'll still be pulled with a regular cab-over truck, that's a lot of space for freight. They are now even trialing the "Super EcoCombi", which is essentially two full semi-trailers[2], for a total of 105 ft!
[0]: https://assets-global.website-files.com/6424195493a93d7e7fe4...
[1]: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langere_en_Zwaardere_Vrachtaut...
[2]: https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...
If there were any significant amount of a saved money then a 'brick style' tractors like Peterbilt 389 [0] would be long gone purely by economical factors. It's still a brick on wheels which pushes a multi-ton load.
It's more a combination of a lack of a meaningful train system, an overall spareness of the cities and the roads and a male appendage measuring cont^W^W^W^W history and customs around the trucks[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peterbilt_Semi-Tractor.jp... It was introduced in 2007.
EDIT:
The US moves the most freight by rail in the world; seems meaningful…
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/highest-railway-cargo-tr...
https://armyhistory.org/railroaders-in-olive-drab-the-milita...
FWIW, that link notes that over 25,000 miles of track was shipped overseas for the war effort.
The specific example I am aware of was several counties/county seats connected to a small town was 94 miles in length.
I have read quite a bit about WWII from a European perspective but I never read anything that even touched on those aspects.
Yes, it moves a lot. Because there are 300m+ people there[0]. But if you just search for a 'USA train network' and compare that to a 'Europe train network' it would be pretty self evident.
Also take a note of the cargo distribution of the US train traffic in the link you provided yourself:
>> Of all the rail cargo, approximately 91% is made up of agriculture and energy products, vehicles and parts, construction materials, coal, chemicals, food, metal, minerals, and paper.
Most of it is not transported by the trucks in the first place. And what matters the most is what you need a proper network distribution so you only haul the last 50-100kms on the trucks, instead of the "trips [what] can take several days at high speeds"[1]
So you brought the wrong metric in the numbers measuring contest.
[0] and let's ignore what China and Russia has a quite comparable numbers of tonne-kilometers: 2.525, 2.518, 2.222.
But the U.S. train networks primarily serve cargo; the passenger rail network is quite sparse. This is because people in the U.S. prefer to fly or drive or taking the train given the vast distances involved between major cities. (London to Paris is about equal to the distance between LA and Vegas but significantly shorter than the distance between LA and SF.)
Doesn't the USA have the world's largest and most cost-effective rail freight network? This seems meaningful.
In my layman pov… A diesel engine can take the least aerodynamically shaped body and move it at 60 mph for 1k miles no problem. As an American, I guess it’s just natural to me that if it can move, then it should move with glory!!
Edit: my bad I didn’t properly read your post
Yikes 100-250 mile range.
Probably fine for what it is.
Trucks/lorries drive lots of places other than UK motorways, and they are not doing 60mph down the A4.
I was confused there for a second until I realized you meant "breaks."
So it almost seems optimised for the mandated break timing.
On average truck journeys in europe are only 72 miles anyway so...
That’s astonishing. I’d be curious to see the median and mode distances compared between the U.S. and E.U.
Can i go in and order 100 of these? Are they custom/super-expensive?
Tesla: 800km range, 82k lb capacity, 70% charge in 30 minutes (with a much higher capacity battery), $250k
Telsa would also probably have better dealer network, better software (self driving), better charger network
Why would anyone buy Volvo?
But the Volvo VNR Electric can be self-serviced. Tesla Semis can't. And given Tesla's abysmal service history, that's a deal breaker. And it's why no company has actually used Tesla Semis beyond the token trial Semi they purchased using government grants.
Also, have you learned nothing when it comes to announced specs of a new tesla vs real world specs when it lands?
it's not "im buying volvo because tesla semis arent in super mass production yet". it's "i'm going to replace with an EV semi when it makes prudent financial sense to do so". and for some companies that means buying a volvo now, and for others it means extending the lifespan of their current fleet a bit until teslas are more available, and if you can wait, it makes sense to do so
its also worth noting that volvo didn't deliver 5000 semis comparable to tesla's semi. that 5k number includes their entire fleet of trucks, including significantly smaller ones with significantly smaller range and less capacity. it makes sense to out-sell tesla in an area where tesla literally isn't even making a comparable product
Even firetrucks, the ones I saw in SF looked so cool compred to the ones I see over here.
This is what I got used to in California but unfortunately should you find a fantastic outdoor restaurant table to enjoy the European sunset, chances are somebody will be smoking right next to you and your kid.
- many U.S. truckers are owner-operators --- the rig has to appeal to them, and is in many ways, an extension of their self-perception
- bring up a map of the U.S. and plot occupations on it, removing "school teacher" and "farmer" --- for many rural counties, the most common (and one of the best-paying) is long-haul trucker --- I can still vividly recall the elaborate drawings and plans which many of my classmates in a rural school would draw up of elaborate 18-wheelers (that this situation was brought about by the county board of supervisors being comprised of large land owners who wanted an essentially captive population to work their farms is a different discussion)
I live close enough to the Pa. Turnpike that it's not particularly pleasant to be in my front yard (back is okay) and am still angry about a previous set of neighbors cutting down the trees which markedly screened the noise and filtered some of the road dust.
Oh wait, you want government regulating (with massive costs) to apply to other people for your comfort!!!
I wonder why people hate the government and excessive regulation?
So I guess all the cars and trucks should be taken off the road to improve my safety right? How dare they pollute with their engines and break dust, that is harmful to my health! I should not have to wear a mask to bike safety in a city because vehicles emit dangerous emissions and pollution.
FYI the local garage truck is a diesel and I can hear it because my windows are old and crappy
And you should also feel entitled to clean, breathable air while walking and cycling. Any local government that cares about the safety of residents would agree, I think.
Property rights as described by Ronald Coase would help find a near optimum solution.
Part of the reason the US has a problem with too many people being fat and dropping like flies is because nobody wants to go outside. Outside is hot, outside doesn't have enough shade, outside is actively hostile to humans trying to do human things.
Oh? What's that? You want to go walk and get a cup of coffee? How about you go fuck yourself instead?
You want to sit outside and enjoy your meal? Well guess what, it smells like diesel and you won't be able to hear your own thoughts.
Now, not to say you don’t make a good point, but noise pollution is pollution, and reducing it does have benefits.
I severely underestimated how loud a single semi was until I was camping 5km from a highway and couldn’t hear the cars, but could certainly hear the trucks.
For example, I think trucks in california are usually almost new due to regulations.
I’ve recently concluded the reason Waymo is dominating has nothing to do with automation and everything with reliability.
Both Uber and Lyft bet on maximising driver availability, even at the cost of reliability and quality. That left wide open those willing to wait a bit longer for a car that won’t cancel, won’t smell and won’t have someone who drives unsafely while on the phone. (And apparently even willing to pay a premium for it.)
You're not nearly jaded enough. The dude isn't doing product placement for Scania. He's making trucker content for urban white collar demographics hence the direction of the spin to fit that niche.
Because unless someone else crashes that market (Scania is clearly angling to be the one) they get away with selling rinky trucks so there’s no reason to spend more.
In Norway we’ve also already seen that tunnels and garages require less ventilation as the share of EVs gets higher, saving millions on new construction. Electric semi trucks will unlock the full benefit.
Larger vehicles like trucks and buses is also where you get the most benefit of noise reduction.
EV semi trucks are going to improve so many things.
I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all, the current through the motor windings will be very high, causing the windings to overheat, potentially fail and potentially short circuit. There's a high risk of damaging the MOSFETs in the motor controller, which very much could lead to a fire risk depending on the failure mode.
There's not really many ways to solve this problem - in a normal 3-phase winding, all you can do is remove the current until it cools down and try again, but that will force the motor to stop and then try to restart, so creating an even larger load. Possibly if you have 6 more more phases and more magnets such that each of the normal 3-phases has multiple windings and magnets, you can cycle through the different ones and still keep applying some torque, but obviously this would still not really solve the fundamental problem.
Essentially the problem is the same for ICE vs EV - if the gradient is so steep and load so heavy that the engine / motor can't provide enough force, then it will be overloaded. Whether that's through pressure / shearing / excess heat in an ICE or through excess current / excess heat in EV, the outcome is failure to continue forward at best.
The only real solution is to massively over engineer the engine for normal situations, but human nature being what it is, there will always push things way beyond the designed limits and safety margins until it fails.
One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.
EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box
As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.
In normal use, only one phase is active an a time, so the duty cycle is 1/3. When the motor slows almost to a stop, the duty cycle on that winding is 100% meaning that the effect of that current on heating the wire is much worse than normal.
The catastrophic failure is when the MOSFET fails in a way that it doesn't protect the winding or battery from a short circuit which could lead to runaway heating in the battery as well as the motor. But even before then, unless the controller is actively limiting current to safe levels, the motor will get destroyed.
The only happy day scenario is if the motor control is actively limiting the current to safe levels well below the expected failure point, and then the EV will just fail to move at all under that load, other than rolling backwards.
As I said, the limit for this will be based on what the manufacturer expects the maximum load will be, but people have a knack for trying to carry more weight than their vehicle was designed for, or taking it places that are unsuitable. That's just humans being humans.
It's possible to design an EV that could withstand significantly steep hills with heavy loads, e.g. by putting many more sets of individually wired windings in parallel, but it'd be expensive and unnecessary for the typical situations that they'd be used in, and so unlikely to be commercially viable.
Or downhill...[0].
I'll get my coat...
The problem isn't overloading the engine when you go up, it's overheating the brakes when you go down. The reasoning here is probably that EV semis will use regeneration for some of the braking thus avoiding the overheating to some extent.
Even if it’s an engine issue, I don’t see how an EV would be more likely to catastrophically overheat. An EV will generate a lot less heat for a given amount of power. There’s also less potential for oil and fuels leaks which exacerbates the issue.
Friction brakes convert momentum into heat. If you ride the brakes going down a mountain you generate more heat than the brakes can dissipate into the air and the brake temperature keeps going up until they're hot enough to start a fire.
A quick search says it heats the engine less than accelerating, so shouldn't cause overheating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...
Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I can engine break with my diesel car and do that pretty often in fact. Or I misunderstand what engine breaking is.
A diesel engine does not have a throttle valve. Engine speed is controlled purely by the amount of fuel being injected. This is why diesel engines can "run away" if an uncontrolled fuel source such as oil leaking from a turbocharger enters the intake, and why older pre-computerization diesels can be smoky under hard acceleration (or any time if poorly tuned). When you release the accelerator the engine stops receiving fuel and thus stops producing power, but aside from friction there's nothing working to slow it down. Air is sucked in more or less unrestricted and some energy is spent compressing it as the pistons rise in the cylinders, but much of that energy comes back out as the pistons come back down so the only energy loss in the system is what's converted to heat. You would get the same effect in a gasoline engine if you shut off the fuel pump but kept the throttle wide open.
Your car also has rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag to contend with. Might work well at slowing a passenger car, not so much with a 50K lb. vehicle, hence the Jake brake.
I like to believe I'd recognize the difference, especially since it's a manual car and I can tell the difference between letting it roll in neutral and shifting down a gear which slows down the car :) Maybe it's not that it doesn't work on diesel cars but the effect is just less than with petrol?
But I think you've hit on the difference, as I vastly simplified what is going on. Not that I expected you to read the link I gave, but it does give some explanation as to what's going on. And what's going is that the pistons are still going up and down because air is continually drawn into the engine. Air is compressed, and even though there is no fuel to make it go bang, that air still needs to uncompress and so returns a lot of the energy back to the crankshaft. Ergo, very little engine braking.
As a personal example, our diesel Sprinter van (automatic tranny, FWIW) had some degree of engine braking, but so little that I wouldn't rely on it for much more than coasting to a stoplight or other low-stakes slowing. If I'd like to stop sometime in the next day or two, I hit the brake pedal.
But such a gradient would be completely unusable for any ICE! EVs can deliver an absolutely insane amount of power at even the slowest speeds. If an EV has the power to sustain highway speeds, it'll also have the power to go up a steep hill at a snail's pace. On the other hand, an ICE will struggle significantly with steep hills - even if they technically have the horsepower to do it.
I highly doubt it'll result in a fire, though. Measuring motor current isn't exactly rocket science, so it'll just go into an overload mode. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if EV motors were explicitly designed to survive short-term stall currents. Measure the wheel speed and it's pretty obvious to figure out when you're stalling and should shut down to avoid damage.
Most EVs are direct drive from the motor without a gearbox. There absolutely is a minimum speed depending on how the motor is wound. If you imagine, say 12 magnets around the motor driven by 3 phases, the idea is to have one winding attracting the magnets, and this phase is the one the motor is "trying to get to". In this situation, this winding is active until the motor is in the correct position (actually slightly before) when it is depowered and the next phase is powered. The longer the motor stays in that position, the hotter the winding gets for the same current. At the point where the motor stops being able to rotate at all, that winding is receiving 100% duty cycle.
There are strategies that you could try - the simplest is cutting power and letting it cool down, but then the motor will stop where it is, and starting the motor from stationary requires even more power than keeping an already moving motor going. You might apply a reverse polarity to the previous winding for a bit to repel the magnets and then swap back. If the motor has passed the mid point this will be less effective, but still better than nothing.
If you ignore feedback from the axle and just cycle through the windings at the desired speed, then there definitely is a minimum speed. Because when the load is too great and the motor doesn't move and you cycle to the next phase, then next phase won't exert much magnetic field on your magnets and the next phase after that, you're working against the direction you want to go.
It's true that if you gear an EV motor, the torque should be able to be geared down to any speed. But typically pure EVs are direct drive, because usually they have enough torque for the low speeds and adding a gearbox just adds inefficiencies. But for a heavy load, maybe gearboxes are required. As a disclaimer, I don't know if EV trucks have gearboxes or not, but certainly EV cars tend not to have except for hybrids.
So who provides this Volvo Semi batteries? Geely / CATL or someone else?
Northvolt and Samsung, apparently.
> That is like Toshiba selling only their Appliance brand to another Chinese company or Sharp Display and TV belongs to Foxconn but not other Sharp products?
That sort of thing is actually somewhat common in appliance-world; appliance _brands_ are often sold off or licensed. For instance, Siemens appliances are not made by the same Siemens who make trains and MRI scanners and things; they're made by GSH GmbH, which is owned by Bosch.
HP is another fairly well-known example; the HP (HP Inc) who makes the printers is no longer the same HP (HPE) who makes networking equipment and things.
And then of course in the automotive world there's Stellantis, which owns all the car brands that you vaguely assume no longer exist.
Yes. And they bought Renault Trucks from Renault. And they own Mack in the US.
The way he speeds past diesel trucks driving up hill is indane.
It's very worth watching.
I think he's proven that single driver long haul freight in Western Europe (which seems to be a good chunk of truck trips) is perfectly doable. Just two weeks ago he did a 4.500km trip around Europe which is about the maximum you can do given the law on driving times.
The same is then true for the shorter trips (round trips etc.)
And the European Commission has just decided that electric trucks don't have to pay road toll until at least 2031.
Better for the environment, more comfortable, quieter, cheaper in the long run, ... what's not to like.
And yes: There are still some use-cases where non-EV trucks are "better" by some metrics but that's definitely not the case anymore everywhere.
Pragmatically speaking, At least for the weight of a 'US Style Electric Tractor' my concern is that nobody in my state is following the Truck Speed limits as is. The added weight on top of the speeding means our roads turn to shit way way faster (I live near a major US/CA transit point for freight that also has sharp seasonal changes.)
Where this becomes a semi-concern for the practicality of such drivers (i.e. potential buyers,) the advertised range likely is based on certain assumptions, and going 70MPH+ likely results in a notable range reduction.
All of that said, I do really like that Frito Lay is using E-Transit vans for local distribution now; that 'last leg' is arguably at least as important as long haul, yet has the advantage of being way easier to solve from a logistics/planning standpoint. Amazon seems to have it figured out well with the rivian vans and they aren't changing strategy.
I'm in The Netherlands and I feel that we aren't even close to the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany.
Maybe it's easier to justify the investments for a much larger country/market.
2.4%[1], which is more than I would have guessed, but I think that number includes delivery vehicles. For semis, it's 0.4% (and 2% of new registrations in Q1 2025). So, still a long way to go.
That's for vehicles registered in Germany. Half of the heavy trucks on the Autobahn are registered elsewhere[2], which makes sense given geography -- I guess it's similar in the Netherlands.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrolastkraftwagen#Deutschl... but the source is government data
[2] https://company.toll-collect.de/de/magazin/lkw-verkehr-deuts... roughly; 5 years ago
[1] https://www.rabobank.nl/bedrijven/groei/duurzaamheid/elektri...
He has a german channel which has more and longer content: https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
Speed in relation to semi trucks always seemed the most absolute vanity metric on earth!
The trucks are all designed to be driven for the legally mandated maximum of 4.5 hours at highway speeds and to be recharged sufficiently in a 45 minute break to be able to do that again for another 4.5 hours. In particularly adverse conditions a little less driving time before recharging is possible but for an average load the currently available tech works just fine and it is mostly the charging infrastructure that limits adoption.
For raising capital. Waymo is beating Tesla on robotaxis, BYD on cars and Volvo on trucks.
Just more of Musk kicking cans down the road.
2. Electric semi trucks are not ideal for long distance trips, they're more for predictable day routes, so it wouldn't surprise me to not encounter many of them on what was presumably a highway drive.
Disagree. All you have to do is look for lack of a front grill or flush door handles to tell if a car is an EV.
Yes, the Chinese are good at making EVs.
- Volvo Cars, a chinese company owned by Geely. Formerly a part of Volvo Group/AB Volvo aka "The Volvo" people usually reference.
- Volvo Group/AB Volvo, which is still the original Volvo from 1927.
Volvo Trucks is part of Volvo Group not Volvo Cars
The two companies share name and logo
So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?
> So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?
Yes, that's the nature of corporate headquarters. If the company doesn't want to be thought of as a Chinese company, it could relocate its corporate headquarters elsewhere.
This says nothing of the ownership structure and so on. A company could be just as Chinese due to ownership and/or control independently of where its corporate HQ is located. I don't think that this framing is especially useful, because there is no such thing as a stereotypical company or person. Individuals make up companies. Companies are just people, acting in concert.
To say a company is Chinese makes me wonder why that is important to the person saying it, and makes me wonder why that is the way they choose to phrase it, and makes me wish they would tell me more about actual individual people that exist and what their views and goals are. Corporations aren't people. People are corporations.
(A typical diesel semi does 3500km between fillups, long enough for a few days of driving and about as long as the longest hauls in north america.)
And there is a big push for much larger trucks (net safety, less manpower/maintenance etc). Trucks that haul two 40-foot teus are comming. We need far better battery capacities to electrify such loads.
A large proportion of truck traffic in the EU is regional trunking - regular runs between distribution centres, typically as part of a hub-and-spoke model. To give an example, If I receive a parcel via Royal Mail, it's likely to have travelled via the Midlands Super Hub to my local mail centre, a distance of about 120 miles. At either end of that journey, the truck is likely to spend at least 30 minutes being unloaded and loaded.
There are many thousands of routes like that, with a constant flow of trucks covering relatively short distances on a predictable schedule. The operators running those routes have fleets of many thousands of vehicles and would have no difficulty whatsoever in managing a mixed fleet, using diesel or electric based on what's most suitable for the role; with diesel costing over $7 a gallon, there's a very obvious financial advantage to electric trucks.
Currently, the rollout of electric trucks is overwhelmingly bottlenecked by grid capacity rather than vehicle range - installing rapid chargers on every loading bay in a medium-sized distribution centre might require 20 megawatts of peak capacity, which isn't the kind of thing you can wire up overnight. Many operators are ready and eager to switch a large proportion of their fleet to electric trucks, they're just waiting for the grid to catch up.
Europe's truck haulage is too high. IMHO
Don't know how fast these things can charge though, but suspect they'll have more than your typical 350kw passenger car chargers.
This is the same argument people used to have about electric cars: if I can't drive nonstop for 18 hours at 95mph up a mountain hauling a speedboat and recharge up to 100% in 30 seconds then they're worthless etc etc. In reality these are not realistic or typical usage patterns.
Modern luxury EVs have a range of close to 500km, and they are able to charge at over 1000km of range per hour. Split that 6-hour leg into two 3-hour legs with a 15-minute charging session & pee break, and you can easily do that.
Besides, why optimize for the absolute best experience on your once-a-year trip? What about the _other_ 300+ days of the year? How much time are you going to save by plugging your car into a charger when you get home once or twice a week, instead of going to a petrol station to fill it up?
If it would be true, that'd be great.
For me saving time on the gas station is negligible. I drive around anyway, but yes, I agree with you - charging at home is very cool. Just plug it in when you get home and you can drive in the morning.
The only way I see this, have 2 cars. One for longer trips (diesel), one for shorter, every day usage (electric). But this needs 2 parking spaces, insurance, taxes etc. I can't affor this either.
Even budget EVs have such charge rate and do 300km on a highway.
Most charging stops I do I can't even leave my car to grab lunch because I'd have to be running back to unplug the charger.
> The charging station was not working, even though it says that it works. Thanks to that, we had to use slower chargers and wait for our rental EV to charge for quite a while.
> Non of the 4 chargers worked.
Most new cars charge at speeds of least 1200km per hour, many far quicker.
Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.
If charging the battery of an electric heavy goods vehicle or bus requires supervision or involvement of the driver, then this time needs to be recorded as 'other work.' On the contrary, if the driver can freely dispose of her/his time while the battery is charging, then the time taken for the battery to charge has no effect on the breaks or the daily rest of the driver. Any movement of the vehicle from the charging location would be deemed to be an interruption or an end to a break or rest period.
https://corte.be/images/documents/CORTE_ENF_007_2024_Elec_ba...
A better solution would be a truck stop with a charging connector per parking spot, and a way for the charger to dynamically connect to the trucks one-by-one. The driver can plug it in when they arrive, and the truck stop will handle the rest.
Alternatively, build a bunch of low-speed chargers instead of a single high-speed charger. When it comes to overnight charging, everyone is going to be there for at least 9 hours anyways. No need to hurry up and finish that charging session in 30 minutes.
The problem is that sleeping is not the only activity during the rest period. A "standard" rest period by EU law is 11 hours. Going for a run, getting dinner, doing some life stuff, then moving the truck a few meters, is not going to kill the driver's focus, but currently it's either limiting (because you're now on reduced rest, or you need to rest 11 hours from moving the truck) or illegal.
> Alternatively, build a bunch of low-speed chargers instead of a single high-speed charger. When it comes to overnight charging, everyone is going to be there for at least 9 hours anyways. No need to hurry up and finish that charging session in 30 minutes.
That has its own issues, because it means you need to electrify essentially every truck parking spot where truckers might overnight.
https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu
>>Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.
Well good thing recharging is not the same as refueling. Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons. Recharging doesn't have such limitation.
Why can't pumping be made safe enough to not require supervison?
I only recently got a personal electric car not because they only recently got good enough or only recently made sense, but rather because my last petrol car finally needed replacing. I suspect trucks are similar - they're not going to replace them right away when they have an existing one that is working fine and still has many years of use ahead of it. Keep using the existing ones until they need to replace them, then go EV. Otherwise you're losing that amortization of the capex
Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, torque, reliability etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
These have exactly those
You might be thinking of long distance haules, but what's long distance also depends on the environment
In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe
500km doesn't even get me to the capital of my European country. Maybe you're thinking specifically about Eastern Europe or something, where there is a bunch of smaller countries closer together?
Driving from Warsaw to Lisbon, 6 countries, and crossing 4 of the largest, is 3.300km.
What is needed are 8 or 10-hour endurance trucks, even if at a lesser load, as that will cover a driver's day and allow recharge during rest periods.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186
Edit: I see you've replied there.
Besides, it's not like this kind of electrification is unheard of. Most of the world has electrified rail with a density higher than the US highway system, and India has been electrifying its railways at a pace of over 4000 miles per year. Electrifying the main cross-country freight corridors by the end of the decade should be quite doable.
And forgetting the practical components, the highways would look really bad with wires overhead...
You did, just above:
>>>>> It isnt about travel distances. Most "long haul" trucks ...
With 5,000 of these trucks sold, and presumably others from other manufacturers, maybe just accept your personal experience isn't universal.
I can't imagine it's possible for people to keep up their attention and stay alert for multiple consecutive 14hr days
Paris to Rotterdamn is under 500km, and Paris to Le Havre is much shorter (although these also have train routes).
Similarly, they could serve basically any route in the UK or Ireland.
The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6454ab292f622...
Milence's first site in the UK, opened in March this year, provides 8 charging bays with 4 chargers shared between them. So to provide a similar number of overnight parking spots a further 2000 need to be built. Or to put it another way, these charging stations would need to be approximately as frequent as McDonald's restaurants in the UK. Not accounting for the areas of the country located further away from the strategic road network and the other 35% of the vehicles they surveyed parked in lay-bys and industrial estates.
I'm getting really nervous as we cross into the megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel isn't exactly a walk in the park during a disaster, but it takes a few minutes or hours to burn off. The battery can dump all of its energy in seconds. Managing a diesel fire is a much more understood artform.
What would a million watt hours look like if released in <10 seconds? How many casualties would we have if this were to occur in a tunnel or other confined roadway environment?
I think this is an example of a "good" outcome: https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fi...
A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours
A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.
Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.
It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.
I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.
The whole problem with batteries is the oxidizer is already included. When the cathode decomposes, it turns into an O2 factory. There really isn't a limit to how fast this can go if there is a structural compromise of the battery. Diesel fuel requires external oxygen constantly. This makes it much easier to extinguish.
The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.
There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.
The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.
Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.
EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.
Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.
https://www.thetruckersreport.com/news/tanker-explodes-on-pa...
Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.
Put the battery underneath the trailers and you've basically solved the problem.