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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.

And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.

Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.

Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.

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Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.

The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.

Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.

Imagine the cost of installing massive diesel depots at half the wide spots on every highway. And yet, there they are. And we already have car chargers every few dozen miles on the highways. A larger number of smaller chargers adding up to likely a larger wattage than what the trucks need.

  > Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.

Do those spots have lighting? If so, a significant portion of the work has already been done. Even if the electrical wiring must be supplemented or replaced, just having already the subinfrastructure to snake high voltage wiring up there is the major hurdle.

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