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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Significantly: externalities from co2 emissions. Which is not just money, but lives.

With trucking CO2 is the least of your problems. The fumes are carcinogenic. Brake and tire dust doesn't help either. Electric trucks would be a huge improvement on all fronts.

Not the tire dust. Electric trucks are heavier, so they'll chew through more tires per freight-kilometer.

Electric cars are heavier but 2 tons of batteries barely matters on a 50 ton tractor trailer combination. It'll just carry ~3-10% less load.

In other words: to carry the same amount of freight you need to do 3%-10% more trips, which means 3%-10% more tire wear, which means 3%-10% more tire dust.

I haven't done the math but i feel like a 10% increase in tire wear is probably offset by a 90% reduction in brake dust and not burning 10 000+ liters of diesel per year.

That is one where you need to do the math. the source of the power for these trucks is an unknown proportion of fossil fuels and there is transmission loss for electric power.

Also, assuming a 10% increase of tire wear rate seems unreasonable: I’d assume it’s proportional to the weight of the vehicle.

People have done the math for electric cars, and the elimination of micro-particulates from the exhaust and the massive reduction from brake dust significantly outweighs the increase from tires.

Also, tire micro-particulates are mostly deposited on the road rather than in the air where they are far more dangerous.

It'd be nice to see similar analysis for large trucks. I suspect the answer is the same, but it'd be nice to confirm.

How much actual braking does a semi truck do? It's usually cruising down the highway, and they tend to use gears and jake brakes down long grades.

~80% of semi freight loads are volume limited rather than weight limited.

Batteries keep getting more energy-dense, so likely one of these days electric trucks won't weight any more.

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