For OTR trucks, you have to factor in the battery degradation. A OTR truck easily gets to 1 million miles on an engine. Often times significantly more, and then its only a rebuild, not a replacement. While electricity is much cheaper than diesel, battery replacement cost amortization is a real thing to include in the accounting. I haven't done an OTR, but I did do amortization for a Ford Lightning. While a "battery fill up" is $2-3. The replacement battery is $30k iirc. That's $3000/yr in costs assuming 10 year lifetime. At that rate, its $62/wk in battery amortization. So, you're really spending $62+3/wk in "energy". That's still less than a tank ($90-100 at current prices), but the savings is significantly less than originally anticipated.
A LiFePo4 battery gets > 750,000 miles. That's what people are going to be putting into high mileage trucks.
Nobody is going to put a $30K battery into a Ford Lightning. After 10 years that battery is probably $3K. If it isn't and you're unhappy with the ~80% battery capacity it has after 10 years of usage, you sell it on to somebody who is happy with ~80%. You don't spend more than the truck is worth replacing the battery.
Sweden and Germany have phantograph-powered semi-electric trucks [1] that would make this less of a factor. The trucks do the bulk of their driving off grid power with batteries for exits/lastmile components of the drive.
I feel setting this up and maintaining is far more expensive than extra batteries. Maybe it does enable some new possibilities tho so might be worth it.
Of course you have to take that into account. But it doesn't really change the math a lot.
BTW. I was talking about semis, not pickup trucks which is not really a common vehicle class in Europe where I live. People that use vehicles for work tend to use vans and trailers instead.
In any case, diesel engines get a lot of servicing (and unplanned down time) before they reach their 1 million miles. And the engine has many parts that need regular attention & replacing. An electrical motor is basically going to be fine with little to no attention until its end of life. Batteries do degrade depending on the chemistry. But decent LFP batteries are available now with many thousands of cycles before they start degrading. Other than that, the whole drive train just features a lot less moving parts that can break or wear out. Things like brakes, suspension, hydraulics, etc. of course work the same way and still need servicing.
And again, if you are burning > 100K$ fuel per year, replacing the battery once every few years is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. And this wouldn't come as a surprise either if you run a fleet of these things. You'd plan and budget for that to happen.
And it's not like the old batteries are a complete write off. They have a lot of residual value. Even if they are completely dead, which they typically aren't, they would still contain a lot of valuable minerals (like a couple of hundred kilos of lithium), lots of copper, etc.
With battery cost now dipping below 100$/kwh and actually trending towards 50$/kwh, we're talking about component cost of 25-50K$ for a half mwh battery for the manufacturer. The real price would be higher of course (labor, various suppliers taking a cut, electronics and other stuff) but over time that should get closer to the cost price than is the case today. And that cost price will come down further.
There's an Australian company that converts trucks and says "the Janus fleet electrification solution will provide for up to a 60% reduction in maintenance and operating costs over the vehicle's lifetime." https://www.januselectric.com.au/
They are in operation on a number of large trucks.
this is more of a problem with trucking in general than with electric vehicles. shipping goods long distances by road is just inherently wasteful of both material and labor.
Rail is not scaled to do transport of consumer goods, and is not scalable to a higher level in North America. What are those who don't live on the coasts supposed to do, do you think?
Neither of these would be illuminating. Switzerland's like the size of Rhode Island. And the United States prior to 1980 had much the same rail as today... not much was added at any point in the latter half of the 20th century.
Rail at best connects major cities, and a few minor ones. It is largely at capacity for the industries it serves, and moving retail freight to big box stores simply isn't possible. There are no knobs to turn or levers to pull to change that.
US freight railroads used to carry a larger variety of goods and serve a larger variety of customers than they do today. They were never in the business of delivering finished goods directly to retail stores, but they did transport a large amount of single-carload and less-than-carload deliveries between factories and warehouses. This is why if you visit older industrial areas you will see train tracks everywhere, including in the middle of the street and sometimes directly into buildings.
When the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, trucking companies undercut railroads on low-volume high-profit routes, leaving the railroads to focus on low-value bulk goods like coal. The total volume of freight actually went up, but both revenue per unit and gross revenue fell. The railroads struggled to justify the cost of maintenance on now less busy lines, so they abandoned many of them and neglected the maintenance on others. That made it impossible to win back the lost business from the trucking industry even as the cost of trucking skyrocketed. Everyone is now worse off except for the owners of the trucking companies.
As for Switzerland, they invented a special kind of shipping container and that can be loaded/unloaded from a train or truck with no need for a crane. This allows them to make carload and intermodal deliveries without building any new infrastructure.
baseball is a very complex game. That's what makes it so great to spectate. The footwork, the defensive organization, the dynamics between pitchers and hitters. Its expansive. There's so much to learn about, there's so many opportunities for unique play.
its less about even taper and more about moving weight/center of mass around. Youth bats have been doing that for quite a while. Camwood bats is a great example of moving weight around. In their case, its a training bat.
while I don't know the details of your situation. However, my experience says there's always an alternative. Sometimes it means networking yourself. Sometimes it means changing industries while still leveraging your skills. Sometimes it means getting some education/certifications (even at night). Good luck on your future.
why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid? I don't understand this. Range is entirely dictated by your EV capacity and you're going to "rent" back the capacity (and battery cycles) for night time hours? I don't understand how this would work at scale.
> why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid?
Because you'd get paid for it, and you like free money.
And it should be pretty trivial to set an option to ensure you always have the necessary range for your daily commute by a little bit before you leave your home.
if services like Uber have shown anything, its that you can sell your vehicle's intrinsic value, depreciating it's value in the process. But will you be net positive after depreciated value?
Obviously almost nobody would do it if it weren't net positive.
And why wouldn't it be? The whole point here is for power companies to avoid buying as many batteries themselves, and their own batteries depreciate too.
This isn't hard -- the power company adjusts the price it pays minute per minute, and you set the threshold at which it is profitable for you, taking battery cycles into account. And it becomes a classic supply and demand curve -- it's Econ 101.
Uber drivers earn roughly $0.70/mile[1]. Gas at $3/gal and MPGs at 25mpg mean it costs $0.12/mi in fuel. a $30k vehicle driven to 150k miles costs roughly $0.20/mi in depreciation. Without additional maintenance costs, its roughly $0.32/mi to drive a car. Approximating tires, oil changes, brakes, and other maintenance of roughly $0.15/mi, you're looking at total cost to drive at $0.45-0.50/mi.
Do you think most Uber drivers drive for the $0.7-$0.12 = $0.58/mile or the actual cost of $0.70-$0.50=$0.20/mile? Sustainable Supply/Demand doesn't work until all costs are measured.
A Rivian battery is roughly $17k. Estimating 1500 charge cycles [2], that's roughly $11/charge. If you "give back" half a cycle, there's only $1.50 worth of electricity sold back, but its $5.50 worth of battery. Are you expecting to get paid $1.50+profit or $7+profit?
Because a battery will become a lot cheaper and replacing it sooner will still have huge benefits for you financially.
I have a 100kWh battery and can drive with this 3 weeks around without charging at all.
Why would i not want to leverage this?
And results from storage systems show that you can charge and discarge car batteries a lot more often without real degeneration when you do this a lot more stable than when driving.
Also it reduces the overall straine to the power grid. If you fill your cars battery with local solar, you are transporting less energy across the whole grid. If you discharge it locally, again less overall energy which needs to be transfered across the whole grid.
How this would work at scale? easy: in my city for example there is one local power company and they offer a charging solution for my EV. They have a few powerplants locally here too. They have everything they need.
Also overall solar energy prediction for the next day is very good. You can easily save a lot of money by leveraging this up front.
I think it's a combination of that and curtain air bags which are often packaged on the pillars. And of course the rollover requirements are predominantly due to SUVs and trucks being so high off the ground (needlessly most of the time) they are more susceptible to rollover.
Minimal visibility requirements around A pillars (and in front of the car/over the hood) sound like the logical next step.
>>high off the ground (needlessly most of the time) they are more susceptible to rollover.
Also the far greater mass of the vehicle requires far stronger A-, B- and C-pillars to not crush in a rollover
Forcing all vehicles onto a 30-50% weight loss diet would help every factor tremendously, including reduced braking distances and more nimble turning to reduce collisions in the first place, reduced impact when there are collisions, reduced road wear, reduced fuel/energy consumption, etc.. Everything gets better with lighter weight, but engineers/designers seem happy to blow right past any weight budget at the slightest excuse (if there even is a weight budget in the design brief). The sheer mass of vehicles these days, even so-called "sportscars" never ceases to amaze me, and when it gets to SUVs and trucks, it's just insane. The technology certainly exists to cut weights by close to half, to levels of 35 years ago, and improve safety and performance while doing so.
It's a result of roll over requirements in tandem with a complete lack of requirement around A-pillar visibility, yeah. It's not like a hard limit of materials science that A-pillars have to have poor visibility to be rollover safe.
I find whole concept of 4-way stop extremely weird. Either you have yield sign or you have equal crossing. STOP signs are only used in cases where there is a reason, like poor visibility or greatly different speeds.
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