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Walmart Unveils Turbine-Powered WAVE Concept Truck
cartechboy writes "It's no secret that semi trucks use a lot of fuel. Moving that amount of mass along at highway speeds takes a lot of power. But Walmart might have just unveiled the semi truck of the future with its WAVE concept truck. This crazy looking semi features an aerodynamic cab and looks like no other truck on the road. The driver sits in the center of the cab and the steering wheel is flanked by LCD screens instead of conventional gauges. The WAVE concept is powered by a range-extended electric powertrain consisting of a Capstone micro-turbine and an electric motor. To reduce weight the entire truck including the trailer is made of carbon fiber. The 53-foot side panels on the trailer are said to be the first single pieces of carbon fiber that large ever produced. The result? A trailer that weighs around 4,000 pounds less than a conventional one. While Walmart says it has no plans to produce the WAVE concept, one has to wonder if this is a look at what semis of the future will be like."
I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have
so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but
it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?
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Anything that light will have serious issues with cross-winds. If current trailers can blow over just imagine how bad it will be when you reduce the weight by 4000 lbs.
Some time ago, I recall reading on /. how Walmart was researching new energy efficient tires for use with trucks. Looks like they are being used here - a single large tire to replace the current standard dual-tire configuration. But this makes me wonder what the impact of a blow-out would be. Perhaps they have it figured out - or perhaps there are good reasons why this will never become a production machine.
How will the trailer hold up to the average idiot with a forklift? Or to the average idiot that didn't strap the load in and it shifts?
Railroads have to pay to maintain their tracks based on the wear their cargo trains do to them. Trucks, on the other hand, have the costs of maintaining the road spread onto passenger cars in a way that results in the trucks paying far less than their share of the costs. This results in billions of dollars per year effectively subsidizing truck transport.
Trains are still used for long haul of bulk freight. The raw materials for manufacturing generally move from production to consumption over rail (when it's across land), as that's a fairly small network compared to distribution of manufactured goods. In terms of tons of freight moved, rail is still important.
What's curious is the low use of rail from manufacturing to distribution hubs. It is used some, and most of the FedEx/UPs/etc hubs that's I've been to are on rail spurs, but you'd think there'd be more rail used there, or for cross shipping between Amazon distribution centers, or in general "rail to distribution hub" use.
There's plenty of rail right-of-way into and around most big cities, even if the tracks aren't used much: the hard problem was getting the contiguous path to someplace interesting.
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And then add the aero changes, which also reduces fuel consumption. Now..... you do realise a truck uses 50 litres of fuel per 100 kms, yes? And a truck usually can do 500,000 kms a year? Even 1% is 2500 litres. Across a fleet like Walmart? Seriously adds up per year. I suspect however the concept has a bigger number than 1% total fuel savings. Good aero on a truck can save up to 10% and that's 25,000 litres.
And if you think it'll cost 4 million in CF IF it comes about, you really have no concept of return of efficency in production.
Oh, and the service life of a truck and trailer are 10 - 15 years at least. The lifetime saving do indeed overcoem the initial cost.
Someone better tell Airbus that their 59ft panels on the A350XWB are somehow shorter than Wal-Marts 53ft panels...
But for pretty much every other owner/operator out there, this sort of setup makes pretty much no sense. There's too many different types of loads (and specifically designed trailers) for that.
So there'll be a fleet of a few hundred Walmart trucks like this. And the other 99% of the industry will stick with standard trucks.
There's also the durability issue. While modern trucks aren't cheap, they're designed to be readily repairable. As are trailers.
Not many repair shops (let alone road services) have carbon fiber facilities.
These designs are great...until they get damaged. Then they cost an arm, a leg and a testicle to repair, compared to standard trailers.
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Trains on their own can't solve the last-mile problems that trucks do solve. On the other hand, we've had more than a century of experience with overhead power, which can be made safe, efficient, and inexpensive with today's technology. This has been applied to buses numerous times. It absolutely can be applied to trucks and made very safe through switching systems. (Only supplying power to a segment of the line when a vehicle is on it, shutting down immediately when a short or mechanical failure is detected, and so forth.) Obviously there are design challenges: The truck has to be able to change lanes, and attach and detach from the overhead freely. Those challenges are anything but insurmountable and could enable trucks and buses that, once attached to the overhead, never need to stop to refuel. They only travel with their own energy supply (whether it's an ICE or a battery) when they're not on the highway where the lines are available, eliminating the need for depot facilities and maintaining the flexibility that trucks and buses provide.
That's still a half-way solution. Ultra-light rail using mass produced, modular infrastructure would be ideal and could probably use the same rights of way that highways occupy. The same category of vehicle described above could also be used, and put into its own isolated (and probably elevated) 'lane' where it drives on autopilot and entirely with overhead power until it reaches an exit and gets back on the road. (An extra set of wheels attached to existing axles, made to mount a rail, would be needed.) We already know that modern rail systems require far less maintenance than asphalt roads and we also know that trucks are a massive safety hazard on the highway. This road-to-rail approach would solve those problems along with electrifying the long highway stretches of truck shipping and passenger busing.
Good luck funding that, though.
I'm no friend of trucks, but I wanted to clarify that 80,000 is the typical maximum weight allowed for a semi-truck. That would more likely be a shorter-haul truck moving gravel or other materials instead of less dense cargo like Walmart products. For the long-haul, materials are transported by train.
While these road taxes are an interesting dimension, the main reasons Walmart's products are shipped via truck is because they don't want their own restocking schedules limited by train schedules. If efficiency were to dictate their logistics, the large Walmart regional warehouses would be located on a rail line and trucks would distribute the short haul from the regional warehouse to each store. Oh, well.
To reiterate, rail line maintenance expenses are not pushing Walmart cargo onto trucks. If those fees were so high, low-margin materials like gravel and sand would be in trucks and not hauled via train across multiple states.
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Do you know why I know this news is fake? You spoke of Canadian troop transport ships and amphibious vehicles in the plural form.
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Because in the end a truck still needs to get the freight to and from the train. There aren't enough rail terminals to be feasible for this to work. You have the problem of rail yard congestion as trucks line up and wait for hours to pick up their trailer or freight.
It sounds nice in theory but in the end its much simpler and economical to move smaller non bulk loads via truck.
Walmart trucks will only carry walmart trailers. Do you think empty cans and bottles fly to the recycling centers by themselves?
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If by "lab" you mean an acquired company that develops ONE SINGLE SOLITARY PRODUCT for use across various Walmart applications -- yeah, that's a lab. I interviewed there because they contacted me and the idea of working in an R&D capacity sounded intriguing (even if it was for Walmart), and the person I spoke to made it out like it was an R&D type of place with many internal projects and a "real startup culture". I was pretty pissed off to find out that no -- they just have one product there, will only have product in the foresee able future and as if that wasn't bad enough, that they were planning on relocating to Sunnyvale, because being out in Mountain View was too culturally diverse (my spin on that). What a waste of time, I really let the hiring manager have it when he circled back with the "good news" that they wanted to move forward.
It depends on the load being hauled but you would be surprised how heavy freight can get, even Walmart freight. A load of breakfast cereal or mattresses might be light but books, liquids and other bulky items like potting soil are not. So ensuring their trucks can gross out as close to 80k as they can get gives them flexibility.
80,000 is the federal weight limit for interstate highways. Most jurisdictions stick to that number for their limit but there are many that allow more with, and sometimes without, permits. In certain parts you can apply for overweight permits to carry more than the 80k. For example in NY you can apply for an overweight permit for dump trucks with 7 axles (semi trailer type) to carry 117,000 pounds/53070kg. Tankers can also go upward of 100,000 or perhaps more using more axles but not in NYC. I know a retired truck driver who hauled intermodal containers to/from the NY and NJ ports and he frequently ran into containers that weighed more than the container was rated for. One container had him hitting the scales at 90,000 pounds, 10,000 over the legal limit.
And I can assure you that while 80,000 pounds sounds like a lot it really isn't compared to vocational and heavy haul. Back in the day there was a concrete company in NY called Certified Concrete. They had custom built Mack F900's who's giant tandem rear axles alone carried 80,000 pounds. then throw on the 23,000 pound front axle and you had 103,000 lbs gross vehicle weight on just THREE axles. If you lived in NYC around the 70's you would remember these polkadotted monsters. Heavy haul can go nuts but typically lowboy's rated 50+ tons are not uncommon for moving large machinery.
While true, trucks also allow point delivery to a specific business, instead of to a railyard. Basically, the bigger trade routes (e.g. between New York and and Chicago) should be serviced by rail, with trucks picking up the products from the local railyard to deliver it to the final destination. Most of the engineering work to make this happen has already been done - truck-sized containers are loaded onto cargo ships for overseas transport.
The overhead of loading/unloading each container (not the contents) does cause some counter-intuitive results. e.g. Driving the container entirely by truck from Las Vegas to Los Angeles may be more cost-effective than loading everything on a train car, then unloading. But at longer distances, the lower cost of rail will override the extra cost of loading/unloading (as long as the trucks aren't being subsidized by automobile fuel taxes).
As for why we don't just switch to rail immediately, unfortunately the creation of the Interstate Highway System and its uneven fuel taxes led to the creation of a multi-hundred billion dollar trucking industry. You cannot simply correct the fuel taxes. Doing so would put millions of truckers out of work and render several trillion dollars of their infrastructure obsolete overnight. Any change needs to be done slowly and gradually, to give the truckers time to recoup their investment in equipment, and time to retrain for a different job.
It's actually worse than that, and only begins to look at the problem.
Railroads own their own right of way, which means property, which means they pay property tax! They are also required by mandate to upgrade to any new safety standards the government dictates.
Neither apply to roads. The government owns the land the roads are built on, and exempts itself from tax. If a road safety standard is updated, existing roads are grandfathered in until they next time they are rebuilt.
Add in the fact that state and local government subsidize roads out of general tax revenue coffers, and use tax-free government bonds to finance them and railroads are at a significant financial disadvantage in the US. That's why they can only compete on large volume, bulk commodities. Want millions of tons of coal for a power plant? Well, even though they have to eat all those costs it's more efficient. Want to stock a Walmart? The cost of the spur to it would never be made back.
Your bad at math aren't you?
Math kettle, meet the spelling pot. There is also a grammatical ladle missing somewhere....
I have a railroad track running across my land. I own the land on both sides of the track. The railroad doesn't own the property, and I pay the property tax on the land. And my situation is normal, not some weird glitch.
"it is inefficient to go from fuel though a turbine, to electricity, to horsepower"....tell that to the trains that have been doing Diesel-electric and turbine-electric for decades. It's incredibly efficient.
Unfortunately, MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. That means the bigger you make MPG, the smaller the effect it has on overall consumption. If a car/truck is driven 15,000 miles per year, and you come up with a technology which improves their economy by (say) 20%:
5 MPG tractor trailer = 3000 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 600 gallons saved
12 MPG luxury SUV = 1250 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 250 gallons saved
18 MPG SUV = 833 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 167 gallons saved
25 MPG sedan = 600 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 120 gallons saved
35 MPG econobox = 429 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 86 gallons saved
50 MPG hybrid = 300 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 60 gallons saved
100 MPG supercar = 150 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 30 gallons saved
All those 100 MPG research vehicles are pretty worthless in terms of reducing the country's overall oil consumption. Likewise, the push for hybrid cars is tackling the problem at the wrong end. It's improving fuel economy where it matters least - cars that don't burn a lot of fuel in a year. If you want to reduce oil consumption, you need to be changing the vehicles which burn the most oil. That's the trucks and SUVs - that's where we should be concentrating our fuel economy improvement research dollars.
Buying a Prius may help assuage your personal guilt over the environment, but we would've been much better off if Toyota et al had spent those R&D dollars on improving truck and SUV fuel efficiency first. The bigger the MPG, the smaller the impact it has on fuel savings - switching from a 12.5 MPG vehicle to a 25 MPG vehicle saves as much fuel as switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to an infinite MPG vehicle. (GPM is the "correct" metric because people usually have a certain distance they wish to drive, meaning the miles should be in the denominator. If people filled up their tank once a week and drove as many miles as they could on the one tank every week, then MPG would be the "correct" metric.)
You get used to a different point of view pretty fast. As anyone who's ever driven in the UK or Australia can tell you. Or a motorcycle for that matter.
It took me almost a week to be able to signal routinely without first turning the wipers on though.
Strange thing, drivers don't work so well when it's cold either. That's why truck cabs are generally heated when it's cold out.
I'm from a place where, before glow plugs, if you turned off your truck during the winter it wasn't starting again until June, so the drivers would just leave their trucks idling all night while they slept. If you were smart you'd shove some cardboard in front of the radiator on your car (or truck) to block the airflow so that you'd actually get warm air out of the heater, and avoid that driver/LCD screen freezing problem.
In the vast majority of cases (in fact I would suggest > 90% of all rail miles) the railroad owns a 50 foot wide strip of land. This is due to the history of how railroads procured land when the routes were selected. You would own the property on both sides, and the railroad pays property tax on that 50 foot wide strip in the middle.
There are some cases where the railroad does not own the land, but has an easement for the use of the land. Railroads hated that arrangement for a number of reasons, but could in fact be the arrangement where you own property. In that case it's like any other easement (for a pipeline, electric line, or even a driveway to a landlocked property) they have a right of use for the purpose of running a railroad, but do not own any property and would not pay property tax as a result.
Railroads have to pay to maintain their tracks based on the wear their cargo trains do to them. Trucks, on the other hand, have the costs of maintaining the road spread onto passenger cars
Nevertheless, shipping something long distance via rail is way cheaper than by truck. In spite of the subsidy advantages truckers get, they still don't compete on price.
The truckers compete on convenience, and time, and door to door service. By the time you handle all the inter-modal swaps, and delays trucks get it done faster. Rail means you go 1)From the shipping dock onto a truck, 2)across town, 3) off the truck, 4)onto the train, 5)wait for a train to be built, 6)wait for train to run, 7)off the train onto the trucks, 8) finally to the delivery dock.
Mr Fuckup can visit in any one of those places, and your 6 box cars of cabbage rots on some siding in Omaha.
And train building can literally take DAYS before your container moves. And it might take days at several points in the journey for unusual destinations.
Still, we are beating the hell out of all our roads with mile long trains of trucks. After every city there is the 20 mile truck sort where each driver wanting to go 1/4 of a mile per hour faster than the next, will consume all available lanes passing.
You will get modded to hell suggesting we get trucks off the road and onto the railroad, because you are attacking someone's life style.
But its a sad truth that we rely more on long haul trucks than any other place on earth.
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If they were truely automated, I don't think such behavior would be written in. Target would be happy to tailgate Wal-Mart. Save $100 in fuel at Wal-Mart's expense.
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The limit varies a bit per state but the most common value is not a total weight measure. The size, shape and distribution of the wheels can vary the load that can be carried.
A typical weight restriction is a pounds per square inch weight which is typically administered by the states as a weight of 3200 lbs per axle with the assumption that each axle carries dual tires on each side. This weight is usually figured by weighing the total truck weight, and using mathematical equations (and the trailer geometry) to calculate the per axle weight.
I spent a summer weighing trucks and I can tell you that maximum 3200lbs per axle can vary anywhere from 62000lbs gross weight to over 84000lbs depending on the trailer and tractor combination used. Though the most common configuration for a 50-67' trailer is right around 80,000lbs its not the legal limit in any state I know of. Triple trailer combo's can carry almost 125,000 lbs split between 3 trailers. In fact there are specialty truck trailer combinations with about 16 axles that can carry almost half a million pounds without exceeding the legal limit. See the link below for images of a few examples.
http://www.guymturner.com/heav...
The rails lines are broken up all over the nation. As such, if you want to go coast to coast, you will pay multiple companies to access the rail. It becomes EXPENSIVE. Then through in the fact that the train companies are ran poorly. Very poorly.
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Nope, not at Wal-Mart's expense. Tailgating is fuel efficient for both trucks. Normally there is a pressure drop behind a truck that sort of sucks the truck backwards. That pressure drop after the first truck is partly compensated by the "bow wave" of the next truck. Thus the "sucking effect" is lessened.
The only, but big, problem is safety and that can be partly mitigated by adaptive cruise control.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.