There's a huge difference between a car that might go 50 maybe 100 miles a day compared with a truck that does 600 700 in a single shift while weighing 40 tons or a set of locomotives dragging 15k tons of cargo. In these cases being down for 2 hours to recharge isn't a freaking option. I've run team in the OTR industry and unless we're getting loaded or unloaded or the truck was in the shop the left door was closed and the throttle was wide freaking open whenever possible. When you're given 60 hours to go Salinas to Greencastle PA stopping to smell the roses isn't in the schedule along with 2 hour stops to recharge every 500 or less miles. Also just how are you going to keep perishable items cold without internal combustion powered refrigeration units. Even the container reefer units are diesel powered by generator sets. You're risking food safety for a pipe dream. They tried battery powered reefer units in the past that used a battery backup for a wheel driven generator setup. These devices failed so frequently that when ice ran out in some areas fresh produce wasn't even available for sale at times unless homegrown. To keep a load below zero it takes over 20k btus when it's over 90 degrees just how much battery life will thar require for a 24 hour period. I can tell you this it takes about 25 gallons of diesel fuel to make it happen. So right at 2k kwh for a reefer unit battery BTW the entire unit installed weighs less than 1500 pounds on a trailer so that's the limit there.

Keep in mind that when talking about technology, what was true at any point in time in the past may not be true today or tomorrow. One driver of technological advancement is need. What might be a road block today may have only been a speed bump when looking back from the future. Problems will be solved or something new will evolve. But if you don’t try, you’ll be forever stuck in the past.

Who knows? Maybe there really are dilithium crystals that we haven’t discovered yet….

You don't tend to see much of the latter, however, when it comes to perpetual motion machines, or "There's this car that runs on WATER, man! Just WATER!!! But 'The Man' doesn't want you to have access to it, because........."

I've had guys rebut the critics that call them nay-sayers by saying "Of COURSE, if you actually manage to do what you're claiming, I'll go to the highest mountaintop and scream out 'I WAS WRONG!!!' But no one is going to hear me over the cacophony of every science/biology/physics book being thrown in dumpsters, and the roar of the printing presses to replace them!"

My mother told me of her college days in the early 1940s where her science teachers took pains to note that there were scientists right then working to split the supposedly "unsplittable" atom, and that what they were reading in their textbooks might soon be obsolete.........

Saw this article linked: https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/ ... attery-ev/
I'm a late adopter of technologies, but I have no doubt that these things are coming. Sort of like a steam locomotive restoration: they'll be finished when they are finished. I suspect that California is repeating what was done by the federal government in requiring automatic train brakes and automatic couplers over a century ago: forcing the railroads to start a process that they otherwise wouldn't, because our national government is, well, you all know.

Those of you unfamiliar with Rowan Atkinson outside of his well-known "Mr. Bean" character may be surprised to hear he's Britain's answer to Jay Leno in auto collecting/enthusiasm--with actual degrees in electrical engineering, electronics, and control systems that predate his comedy career.

Therefore, take this essay in Saturday's Guardian as informed analysis by a supporter and expert, not celebrity blather.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... n-atkinson

Thermo King has sold a battery temperature control container for two years now.

https://europe.thermoking.com/air-solutions

https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/thermo-king-launches-battery-for-reefer-trucks-65873

Volvo launched a line of heavy electric trucks two years ago. They have a promotional video, and then sales information on their website.

https://youtu.be/Gc9_n2tBxUE

https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/renewable-fuels/electric-trucks.html

Elon Musk told a lie?


OMG!!!!! The person I Just Trusted because . . . . . . . . He inherited far more money than I did? Ummmn... He conned the Saudi Arabian Folks to help buy out Twitter so they would not have to deal with an Arab Spring on their own land?

Seriously:

From the 1899 version of this web site: (Abraham Lincoln Invented the Internet Doncha Know)

There is NO Way one of these Infernal Put Put Put Gasamahollik put put wagons are ever going to replace my hay burning horse for reliable day to day transportation. Steam Locomotives will rule railroads forever!

Seriously - it took a few decades for one transportation propulsion technology to completely drive the older tech back to museums back then.

Expecting the new tech that we are discussing here to spring forth without teething problems and no unintended consequences ----- and therefore is IMPOSSIBLE is beyond my ability to hold respect for such a person.

Please. Have you not at least acquired a new puppy in your household?

Just look at the Ocean Liner USS United States. As much as I think it's beautiful (it's docked just a few minutes from where I lived) - jet airliners made it obsolete within a decade of it's completion.


Brian

Having driven a reefer with a day cab for about six months, and working with a guy who quit C.R. England because of the noise, I can tell you that a lot of drivers will be happy to say goodbye to the racket behind the cab that a diesel-powered reefer unit represents. I think it will be better for food safety also, given how many shuttle drivers turn them off while driving only to turn them back on just before they hand them off. I do agree that it likely will put an end to the team driver concept, but that is good for a number of reasons also. My dad almost burned up the one time he was force dispatched in a team for a well-known national company and the other driver fell asleep and rear ended a car. Good for railroads, though, who hopefully will pick up business.

That's going to be a big problem if you have to run a truck in the fantasy universe of deniers.

Remember, you left the dock at 100% because someone put a charger at the dock. So that's a fuel stop that doesn't happen. Now you have that time back. There's 18-minute charging waiting for you at the Hyundai dealer, so this gets pretty easy - roll into a truck stop, plug in 10 seconds after you stop the truck, go do your usual truck stop things, and unplug 10 seconds before you drive off. Do you really claim you're in and out of a truck stop faster than 18 minutes? I am skeptical. I know trucks stop, because I pass them 3-4 times across Wyoming and Nebraska and *I* stop.



Yeah, 6-700 miles is an awfully long day, so I figured you're talking long-haul out west. Of course you'd go straight for that; it's a worst case scenario for an electric truck and you know it. Stilll.... the batteries are here, let's suppose the charging infrastructure is too (which it ain't yet, but it's coming around fast).

You're running team, so let's ask abetterrouteplanner.com to make a trip plan assuming continuous running and no opportunities to charge while you sleep. Let me be graceful and choose a slow-ass charging, small battery Tesla Model 3. Lots of stops because the battery is so frickin small, obviously a semi could be built with a bigger battery and roll on. On a car, battery is a significant fraction of total weight. On a semi, it's not. Anyway, our sad sack base model Tesla 3 says 52:08 hours via Reno (Tesla Superchargers more abundant on I-80). 8:24 spent charging.

So let's try it again with a better car. Tesla Model S 2020 LR+, That's 48:18. 6:21 charging.

How about a faster battery? Long range RWD Hyundai Ioniq6. Now we're on I-40 via ABQ and OKC. Wow! 47h21m total but only 4:18 charging. I bet on that 60 hour run you spend more than 4:18 stopped.

Do a linear scale-up to our imaginary semi, and of course provide the needed megawatt fast chargers enroute. Still not seeing any intractable thermodynamic problems. Battery life wll be an issue but I couldn't say whether battery maintenance would cost more than diesel maintenance. Fuel would be a monster savings, but I don't know how important that is vs. labor.



You can figure that out for yourself. SEER is "BTUs per watt". The best Asian A/C units are 36 SEER, and let's say we avail ourselves of that but we're only getting 20 SEER in your worst-case. So 20,000 BTU is 1kW during the hours with worst solar gain. (solar panels could counteract solar gain, a 7' x 38' solar array is much too large for the job really).

1 kWH of Tesla-style battery would be 10 pounds. So 10 pounds per peak hour you want the battery to last.



2kW is 3hp. Reliable diesels that tiny are impossible to make, so they use bigger diesels and under-load them. Since they have power to waste, they don't even try at efficiency or insulation. A clean-sheet redesign of a reefer with battery in mind, could do much, much better.



Yeah, especially if Elon Musk is involved LOL.



Probably. But he also did this (not a lie).



Actually this is the new normal in space travel, almost all Falcon flights are used rockets. Just like that, the world changes. Expendable rockets are now stupid.

Anyway, that's what Musk does to establishments.

The reason why those units are so freaking large is this reason. Your hauling a deep frozen load say ice cream or frozen pizza across the desert. No 3 HP electric cooling system made is going to keep that from getting to warm at 120 degrees inside a 53 foot long metal box that only carries 2 inches of foam insulation all the way around. A modern CARB certified S750i Thermo King reefer has over 26K BTU's of capacity to keep loads -20 below at over 100 degrees outside. Also Tesla's truck batteries weigh in at 8 TONS for the battery alone. Their trucks are coming in at close to 24K for a sleeper truck. I can right now spec out a truck that meets CARB requirements would be perfect for a team running long haul with a 144 inch CUSTOM sleeper on the freaking thing and still beat that weight by 2 tons. Yeah I am talking about a rolling apartment sleeper for the drivers not a 70 to 80 inch factory model either. But what would I know and power requirements for a truck stops to feed an electric trucking nation would make the power draw of NYC look small. Just to feed the Tesla semis Pepsi Co and Frito Lay bought required them to install 5 MW of power capacity at the locations they recharge at each. Also what would be the price to recharge one of these units. At least with Diesel Fuel you have the option to hedge your costs and keep them down for a bit or at least fix them. With EV's they could say your buying in all the time on the spot market and lord help you then. Or lord help you if they need more power the first thing that will get cut will the charging station power.

Off topic, but Space X head Gwynne Shotwell should be getting credit for Showing up L mart and boeing, Not musk.

In all of this I just got a reminder of the other factor not slated into all of these hypothetical calculations.

The other day, the family I was farm-sitting for for over a week was returning to Arizona from Wisconsin. On their long run, they hit two major traffic jams: A big one somewhere around Oklahoma City, and an hours-long one that trapped them near the New Mexico/Arizona border on I-40. Their original, reasonable ETA was 10 PM Sunday night; they made it at 05:30 AM Monday morning--just in time to let the chickens out of the coop and crash into bed. (I left for home Sunday night as they were sitting in the latter traffic jam.)

Now, just a thought experiment:
If theirs had been an EV, what would have happened had every vehicle jumped off the main road to hit a charging truck stop simultaneously? Sure, efficient use of time, but not when there are limited numbers of chargers and you are booted off at only 75-80% charge to make room for the next vehicle.
(I'm looking at where the second accident happened. There is ONE truck stop, a small one, and two rest areas nearby--no chargers currently at any of them.)

A diesel truck or internal-combustion car can just pull over and sit, maybe with an occasional run for AC or heat. Or head for the gas station.

And now I'm picturing the mini-nuclear reactor power plants that will have to be behind every battery-recharging truck stop/terminal to supply all their needed current. Ironically, the big power plant that would have supplied the aforementioned truck stop and rest areas has recently been decommissioned and demolished...........

Everyone acknowledges that AT THE PRESENT TIME the EV Charging station situation is sub optional.

Geeze, they haven't even succeeded in chosing a standard plug configuration.. Something the Player Piano Industry knew had to happen before commercial success could happen.

So I don't get your point in pointing out the obvious.

ALL I have to do with my horse is let him feed on somebody's lawn.


Brian