Unless this is cover for something else. Unless this is just greenwashing. Unless this project pulls money in that would otherwise have gone to more effective projects. Commercial EV charge points are great but the low hanging fruit remains the vast numbers of private vehicles not currently served by charging schemes. Those people are basically everyone who doesn't own a house with a garage where they can install the bespoke charger for their particular EV.
What EVs would they be. At least in Europe all new EVs use CCS and most of the older ones used Type-2. They can all be charged from an ordinary 230 V, 10 A domestic supply; Schuko in Europe or BS1363 in the UK (and Ireland?).
Electric trucks have huge batteries and will need super-fast chargers to "refuel" on the road, you can't just plug them into an ordinary outlet. (Well, I guess you can, you just literally won't get anywhere.)
The remark I was responding to was clearly talking about private cars not commercial vehicles:
> the low hanging fruit remains the vast numbers of private vehicles not currently served by charging schemes. Those people are basically everyone who doesn't own a house with a garage where they can install the bespoke charger for their particular EV.
This is a much-needed move for the commercial EV sector. With Greenlane focusing on medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, long-haul electric trucking could finally become a reality. It's interesting that they plan to add hydrogen fuel cell infrastructure and eventually chargers for passenger EVs, making it a more comprehensive network. Exciting times ahead for the decarbonization of the trucking industry!
I wonder, does it even make sense? Long-haul (electric of course) rail + short to medium haul trucking make more sense - it would be much more efficient.
Do long haul electric truck even make sense? Don't the batteries needed weigh too much?
It’s an engineering challenge, but doable as you get about a ton of extra weight for EVs.
The main mental miscalculation I think people make when they say “why not just trains” is ignoring that rail is a super conservative industry, at least in the US, and in the case of passenger rail (not on existing tracks) that building out new rail infrastructure is super expensive, particularly for HSR where rights of way have to obey Newton’s Laws when it comes to turning radius.
It literally may take more time to do the environmental review for adding, say, catenary lines to existing rail than to just go to electric trucks. Some companies have been really effective at building out charging infrastructure. Additionally, just convincing the rail industry to make changes to enable/allow electrification (especially in non traditional ways) could take a generation.
Additionally, the US has removed a lot of seldom-used rail, so you just need a lot of trucking. Moving cargo from truck to rail to truck just may be a lot more cost and hassle than direct via truck.
Electrifying trucking, even long haul trucking, is just potentially the fastest way to electrify a lot of current logistics given the cultural, infrastructure, regulatory reality we live in today, as opposed to the ideal cultural, infrastructural, regulatory world we’d LIKE at here to be.
Engineering a decarbonization transition with realistic assessments of infrastructure & industry/regulatory inertial as a constraint is very different than “ideally we use trains for logistics as they have a lower coefficient of friction.”
It makes perfect sense. Roads let people take a variety of vehicles and loads anywhere they want. Rail needs specific drivers who can strike, construction and maintenance people same, and a load of land and planning and budget to add any addition destination.
Large trucks also destroy roads at a far faster rate then they trains destroy tracks. Trucks need specific drivers to, they can strike too. The reason its harder is because there are more companies, the same could be done for rail, the system as it exists now in the US as compared to most of the world. The reason trucking is so successful is that the government spends an absolutely huge amount of money on roads from highways to local roads, in what amounts to a absolutely gigantic subsidy. Trains on the other hand are incredibly profitable industry running on decaying infrastructure (that was once funded with government grants).
I don't really see the distinction you're drawing between government subsidized roads and government subsidised tracks. And the difference is that roads are useful for everything, driven by anyone. I can't go on strike and stop myself from driving somewhere.
Trains in most nations are useful for everybody. And they are far more energy efficient, better for air quality and most importantly more space efficient. So when analysis what a government should invest in, it makes sense to invest in trains.
I know that you can go everywhere with your car, but what if I told you not every single person had a car. I know, I know for Americans this is very hard to understand that such a thing is possible. Roads aren't for everybody, roads are for people that can afford cars.
And roads still need to be designed far larger if you also use them for cargo, and because trucks are so heavy the need to be fix these roads very often otherwise they will lose utility for everybody.
And I don't understand the obsession with strikes that Americans seem to have. As if everywhere outside of the US nobody would ever get anywhere because everybody was always striking.
Trains are an optimisation for where there's enough utility to cope with the massive overhead they impose. That's how they're more efficient: they are only built where there's so much demand that it's worth putting a train there. They aren't general-purpose, and they need a lot of top-down control to make happen. They aren't like roads, where you can run a private bus service, ride a bike, or hop in a car and go.
Because its generally Americans who think its unfathomable to connect anything other then Tokio and Osaka by train.
We have villages with a few 100 people connected by train. You can transport bikes, cars, and cargo or people on a train. Just hop on.
And building a train isn't much more top down then building a general road. Many train companies historically have run locally with local control. And in rural places there is often a public owned bus running on the publicly owned road.
Trains are an optimisation for where there's enough utility to cope with the massive overhead they impose. That's how they're more efficient: they are only built where there's so much demand that it's worth putting a train there. They aren't general-purpose, and they need a lot of top-down control to make happen. They aren't like roads, where you can run a bus service, ride a bike, or hop in a car and go.
Long haul could "work" but the effort needed is immense, compared to replacing delivery/short-haul trucking (which is doable with equipment we have today).
I’m still surprised that got swappable batteries isn’t being seen as an option for commercial. It seems like it would solve a lot of issues (Eg slow charging during peak solar, fast refueling swaps), while giving the manufacturers a subscription model which seems to be the kind of thing companies like.
Its a good idea exactly as long as you only think of the good thing about it and ignore the gigantic pile of technical, political, organization and infrastructure problems with it.
Some companies are trying it in the commercial space so far not much has come of it.
The natural market for EVs is a maximum of 20%. The cost/benefit is only positive for certain use cases.
Ford can't sell its Lightning F150 EVs. They just had a fire on one of the holding lots too that burned a bunch of them down. I guess they'll have to take the insurance.
Fun fact about EV fires: they're a chemical reaction, not an ordinary fire. Removing the oxygen source like you would with an ICE fire doesn't work.
A chemical is a compound that has been purposefully refined or purified.
A chemical fire is far more complex and potentially dangerous than a normal fire.
Gasoline is a chemical, however we have a lot of experience dealing with gasoline driven fires and they can be easily doused with water. Large battery driven fires in vehicles are a new thing, and they are not easily doused with water.
And yet countries in Europe have already higher then 20% of new car sales being EV and some of them without subsidies.
Ford can actually sell its F150. And lots of version of F150 and other trucks had issues that stopped production line. Its utterly irrelevant in terms of the EV debate.
When a lithium-ion battery catches fire, it can be very hard to extinguish and can burn very fiercely³. If a battery is going to catch fire, the likely cause is thermal runaway¹. This is when a battery experiences an increase in temperature that eventually leads to cell short-circuiting or disintegration that can spark a fire¹. There are three main abuse factors that can send a battery into thermal runaway — mechanical, thermal or electrical¹. The contents of the battery are under pressure, so if a metal fragment punctures a partition that keeps the components separate or the battery is punctured, the lithium reacts with water in the air vigorously, generating high heat and sometimes producing a fire².
Likely being forced to, a reminder this is the same company that deliberately and consistently cheated on emissions tests in the USA.