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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

Lots of semi trucking is not "long-haul". In many European countries, you don't have need for long-haul routes for port to city or city to port transit.

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.

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The majority of trucking in the UK is based on the tramping model. A driver gets in his truck at 6am on a Monday and drives it around the country until Friday evening. Sleeping in service stations, lay-bys and industrial estates depending on where they can find availability (often with difficulty).

The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.

If we built charging stations as rest stops then it would work.

Which is exactly what is happening. It makes sense for cars as well, as they need to top up more frequently highway carge stations become a regular service rather than an overpriced emergency one.

Good luck with that. The reality is their aren't enough toilets for truck drivers nevermind building a whole suite of rest stops up and down the country.

In Europe this is already happening. There are dedicated companies for this (Milence) and the traditional operators have truck charging parks as well.

This audit put the number of overnight parking spots at "on-site locations" within 5km of the strategic road network (so not even the whole country) at 16,761. With the remainder of the report concluding that the usage was at or above capacity in much of the country.

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.

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