A Garbage Truck That Would Make Elon Musk Proud

curtwoodward writes: Ian Wright knows how to build high-performance electric cars: he was a co-founder at Tesla Motors and built the X1, a street-legal all-electric car that can go from zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds. But he only cares about trucks now — in fact, boring old garbage trucks and delivery trucks are his favorite. Why? To disrupt the auto industry with electrification, EV makers should target the biggest gas (and diesel) guzzlers. His new powertrain is very high tech, combining advanced electric motors with an onboard turbine that acts as a generator when batteries run low.

Comments

Some of this is happening at PACCAR

[WillAffleckUW]

They make trucks, they're near Seattle, and there are some UW engineering projects in doing stuff like that there.

They already have a number of hybrid trucks, and I know that fuel cell powerplants scale well in truck form.

Low hanging fruit

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

SCHOOL BUSES. Usually low-speed, frequent starts & stops, usually only out for 2-3 hours at a time. Time to recharge between morning and afternoon routes. Current diesel models get terrible mileage. Perfect for teslafication.

Wondering why it took so long...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The diesel-electric locomotive took over from the steam locomotives at incredible rate of adoption. Many steam locomotives pf Baldwin Loco Works, Philadelphia, made just one run from assembly line to scrap yard. It was that fast, technology changed before the order pipeline was flushed. In just 10 years, between 1950 and 1960. But even very large earth movers, even those that needed lots of electric power on board, stubbornly stayed with diesel instead of diesel-electric.

This conversion of diesel trucks to diesel-electric or gas-turbine-electric trucks is long over due. In the case of steam locomotives, the efficiency went from 6% for steam to 15% diesel-electric. But coal was much cheaper than diesel. Here the efficiency boost is probably from 20% to 30%. Going from expensive fuel to slightly cheaper fuel. It might not beat the speed at which steam was made obsolete. But it could come close.

Missed opportunity

[bugs2squash]

A Mr. Fusion, system would have been a better fit for the Garbage collection sector.

Engines are more than just for movement:

[Hartree]

Fire trucks have to use their engines for extended periods to run the on board pumps during major fires.

Bad enough having to find a hydrant. Imagine having to find an electrical outlet with sufficient current capacity to keep electric pumps going after the batteries are down.

1950.s Milk Floats in the UK

[nukenerd]

The UK at one time (certainly around the 1950s-60s) had the world's highest number of electric vehicles on the road - tens of thousands of them I believe.

They were milk delivery trucks (called "Milk Floats") which typically delivered milk around town in glass bottles to people's doorsteps at around 5-6 am every day. That was before most people had fridges but wanted fresh milk every morning. They ran on batteries and had a top speed of about 8mph.

It was ideal, like it would also be ideal for rubbish (US garbage) collection. Electric drives are good for the constant start-stop driving with long-ish pauses in between. Also the early morning milk floats did not wake people up as a IC-engined truck would have done.

Fridges and car ownership brought an end to most doorstep milk deliveries, but there are still some around.

Elon Musk had nothing to do with this

[ModernGeek]

The only purpose for putting Elon Musk's name in this is to grab the attention of the reader by dropping a popular name, I'm sure that he isn't proud of this truck; the article doesn't even mention his name. I'm sure that the "editor" that put this up didn't even realize they weren't talking about Elon Musk, they just skimmed through, saw "Tesla Co-Founder" and assumed said article was about Musk... I want to even say that the two aren't even on good terms anymore for some reason, something the "editors" should have looked into.. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one, Bloggers are not Journalists.

Re:Distance and Charge Time

[Adriax]

An electric drive train weighs a fraction of what an axle drive train does for those monsters, and an electric motor is MUCH better for a stop&go traffic pattern due to resting torque differences and regenerative braking.
Plus the generator can be tuned for a singular operating RPM since the battery bank will be buffering the energy. That right there simplifies the engine and boosts efficiency.

I'm a fan of the electric + generator hybrid setup. It can take advantage of the existing fuel infrastructure for distance, while giving efficiency gains and allowing designers to use a wider range of engine designs for the generator. I would guess there are a couple engine designs out there that are more efficient/powerful for the mass and/or volume but can't do the variable RPM a 4-12 piston IC does.