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Tesla Will Reveal Its Electric Semi Truck in September (techcrunch.com)
From a report: Elon Musk just let us know when we'll get a look at the electric semi truck that he's teased in the past: The Tesla transport vehicle will be revealed in September, the CEO said on Twitter on Thursday, noting that the team has "done an amazing job" and that the vehicle is "seriously next level." Plans at Tesla for an electric semi truck have been in the works for a while now: The vehicle was first mentioned back in July of 2016, when Musk revealed part 2 of his fabled "master plan" for his electric vehicle company. The Tesla Semi, as Musk called it, is designed to help reduce the cost of cargo transportation, and improve safety for drivers, according to the CEO at the time.
It has to have the capacity for a driverless upgrade out of the gate or it's going to be an expensive, outdated piece of awkward shit. That's where we are now: an electric lorry would be awesome, but we're seriously waiting for a driverless lorry in 2020. Promise an upgrade to driverless at significantly less than the full cost of the vehicle and close to the cost difference between it and a driverless model of equal specification when the tech becomes available and you're good to go; require replacing a probably 5,000,000 mile vehicle 500,000 miles into its lifespan to get the driverless tech (bigger than electric tech) and you're getting nothing.
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Exactly how do inner cities behave?
Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.
Given how critical aerodynamics are for ev's, I wonder if they'll be able to streamline the vehicle without it looking like a phallus on wheels.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
poorly, lol
I say to Tesla: Reduce the complexity and(or) the gimmickry and see cash flow into your coffers. Folks, how about creating a near "normal" car with better range and more competitive pricing?
I for one know I'd be a sure customer. I also know that I am not alone. Who needs a car whose handles will pop out? These get "stuck" sometimes...and in a dusty environment, it gets worse!!
From the article:
Tesla's not the only company targeting electric drivetrains for transport vehicles; Nikola revealed its One vehicle last year, too, though that's a hybrid that also uses compressed natural gas in addition to its electric battery.
Hehe.. I'm sure Nikola & Tesla will get along nicely...
Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.
Who said it was a long haul truck? And if you're going to make up bogus numbers for range at least try to make them credible. Be more clever with your snark next time.
Given how critical aerodynamics are for ev's, I wonder if they'll be able to streamline the vehicle without it looking like a phallus on wheels.
Aerodynamics are just as important for gas powered vehicles as they are for EVs. Wind resistance doesn't care what you have under the hood. Besides, EVs have an advantage there because they don't need a radiator up front screwing up the air stream.
They don't pay attention in English classes, apparently.
Ezekiel 23:20
I get that this could be useful, but where if they can make a semi-truck it seems like they could make an electric pickup. Something capable of hauling around a family, the occasional lumber load or appliance, and towing trailers in the 3000-4000 lb range (a LOT lighter than a semi).
At least in my area it seems like at least half the vehicles on the roads are trucks, and most of those people actually use them for doing "truck things". Even the most efficient trucks on the road though are still not getting better than ~30mpg highway.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
that's just downright racist.
A driverless lorry could park a trailer accurately, correctly, and safely at a loading dock.
So can one with a human driver. They do it every day all over the world with excellent results. Nothing wrong with letting the computer do it but let's not pretend humans can't handle the task.
The sensors would tell it exactly how it aligns and moves, versus a human who uses some visual information and some prior information (intuition) to estimate without a real data stream.
You think there are no sensors on trucks to assist the human drivers in docking? You need to go visit a warehouse sometime.
I get that this could be useful, but where if they can make a semi-truck it seems like they could make an electric pickup.
I think the problem there is that the typical buyer of a pickup is... ummm, rather conservative so it's a harder sell. It's a big market but the typical buyer tends to have some rather backwards notions about what makes for a drool-worthy vehicle. Go pick up a copy of Diesel Power magazine if you don't believe me. These are people who all too often think getting 12mpg while belching smog is just fine and think they "need" 800ft-lbs of torque even though they rarely haul anything. I think selling them on an EV pickup is going to be a tougher sell than a family sedan.
Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an EV pickup in a heartbeat. My daily driver is a pickup and I'd happily replace it with an EV if one was good enough. All sorts of advantages to electrification of a truck. Tons of torque, electric power on tap to run power tools, more cargo space, fuel efficiency, etc. What's not to love? Though I have to admit that in many cases a hybrid pickup might make more sense especially as a work truck.
race-ist? who's winning?
Only a complete moron would waste their money on a piece of shit tesla.
So being in trucking for a 20 years. I can tell you Musk is obviously having a pipe dream if he thinks a all electric truck can work. For one a semi truck can gross around 80,000 lbs and any reduction in that for batteries or other technology won't be attractive to a trucking company. I can only imagine the time it will take to charge a battery large enough for a heavy truck. Especially one that will navigate cities for up to 10 hours if that's even a possibility. If you have to reduce cargo capacity to accommodate weight of batteries, and range of truck. You will probably add to the congestion because it will require more trucks because of this reduced capacity. Its obvious Musk is absolutely clueless on how trucking works.
There's an enlightening video of a trucker driving near Calais, in France, showing how illegal aliens there attack the truck traffic.
The situation there presents some very interesting challenges for anyone writing software to automate truck driving.
There are scenes where the illegal aliens are walking in traffic, in front of the trucks.
The driver talks about how these illegal aliens try to break into the trucks, or throw rocks and other debris at them.
At one point the driver gets angry, and rightfully so, because the illegal aliens have damaged or displaced one or more of the mirrors on the truck, limiting the trucker's visibility of the surroundings.
It would be difficult enough to write software that can handle normal driving conditions.
But having to handle the sort of threats and dangers posted by these third-world illegal aliens who attack the truck traffic near Calais brings up a whole new set of challenges.
What should a self-driving truck do if it's swarmed by illegal aliens?
What should a self-driving truck do if the illegal aliens were to enter it?
What should a self-driving truck do if the illegal aliens manage to damage it?
They're called trains. We don't run them without a driver out of an overabundance of caution, but the conductor mostly just sits there ready to yank on the brake if something catastrophic happens.
A driverless truck/lorry won't happen (at least not for several decades if not centuries) because the existing infrastructure won't support it. A good percentage of the places where trucks have to unload their goods aren't actually built for trucks to park and unload. I regularly see tractor trailer drivers make 5, 7, even 9 point turns to position their trailer correctly. Newer businesses in remote areas (lots of cheap land) can be built for easier truck unloading. But existing businesses in cities and areas with high land prices are usually limited in the amount of space they can devote to truck turning/parking. (Loading generally isn't a problem because the distribution warehouses are designed around the trucks, unlike retail stores.)
Heck, one of the businesses near where I live gets a produce delivery truck every other day who parks in the middle of the street with hazard lights blinking while they unload. That turns the two-lane road (one lane in each direction) into a one lane road where traffic in both directions has to take turns going around the truck. Hardly ideal but it's the only way for a truck to unload cargo at this location. I've wondered how an autonomous car would even deal with a situation like that, much less a driverless truck.
I don't think a driverless truck will ever happen until the "truck" is redesigned with all-wheel steering and no cabin (engine and drivetrain completely underneath the truck bed). Basically they'd be mobile shipping containers which can pivot and rotate in place or move sideways if need be.
I believe the long-term plan to protect driver safety is to allow them to sit at home instead of perform the dangerous job of driving a truck.
I imagine you have a caravan of Trucks with two drivers, one in front, one in back, taking 12 hour shifts of being awake.
You could effectively have 5 long haul trucks running 24 hours instead of 2 running 12 hours for the same staff.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
What should a self-driving truck do if it's swarmed by illegal aliens?
"You have three seconds to comply."
Replace "illegal aliens" with "blacks", "Muslims", or your scapegoat of choice. Ethnicity and correlation with reality may be region-dependent; correlations with reality may be due to regional demographics rather than actual racial behaviors. Americans take no responsibility for predictive value of scapegoating in either the event-implies-profile or profile-implies-event direction; ethnic profiling provided for entertainment only.
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Statistically speaking? The ones who do the worst at English.
http://www.wrightspeed.com/tec...
Tesla co-founder. Perhaps they are working together? I don't know why Tesla would try to recreate what their co-founder is already doing -- why not work with them? Old grudges? Planning on merging and the deal fell flat?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Now first page news. Bubble?
Tractor / Trailers can swap the trailer at charging stations with a new automated tractor to take over transport while the other tractor recharges...
Kind of like Tesla and electric cars originally planning on doing battery swaps for long distance...
The one with HB1 visas. They are winning.
I think it more likely that you're just technologically ignorant, in addition to being so pedantic and obsessive-compulsive that you can't stop yourself from going to all the trouble to post a comment on the basis of one word that very obviously was substituted by someone's spellcheck on their phone. Step away from the Internet and go take your meds.
In India. In China. In Taiwan. In S Korea. And in model year 2017 in Canada.
Tesla is great at getting free advertising for a quality product.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You should see what I do to the gas cap
Americans take no responsibility for predictive value of scapegoating in either the event-implies-profile or profile-implies-event direction
You misspelled "humans". Or did you seriously think that you were describing a trait that is either universal among or exclusive to humans from one particular area?
> Not at all. What you are not taking into account is that electric vehicles
> requires significantly less maintenance and electricity is cheap.
Electricity is cheap *TODAY*. Diesel fuel used to be a lot cheaper than gasoline. Then diesel cars became common, and the resulting demand pushed up diesel fuel prices. A big switchover from diesel fiel to electricity for trucks will push up electricity prices, and possibly lower diesel fuel prices. It's the demand side of supply and demand.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The master race?
http://www.wrightspeed.com/tec...
Tesla co-founder. Perhaps they are working together? ...
frequent-stop drive cycles
[Emphasis mine] - this is not a replacement for the hundred million trucks we see hauling goods world-wide.
Electric (and LNG, etc.) is already a proven applications for urban, stop & go style, short-haul trucking. (Not that Phase2: More Customers, is a bad thing...)
"Semi truck"
Why make only half a truck when you could make the whole truck? Why Elon, why??
Ah! You have proof?
All I've seen is ignorant speculation.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Recent Forbes article.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ignorant speculation
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Probably attributable to lead poisoning from gas additives.
Your use of language makes you sound like a retarded dimbass moron.
I think a pickup would actually be a great use case for a Volt-like hybrid: electric with a diesel engine backup for when you need the range.
Agreed. I've been saying something similar for years. I've thought something similar for long haul trucks as well. A diesel electric hybrid semi just seems to make all the sense in the world. Make it a diesel electric powertrain similar to a locomotive for the bigger trucks. Diesels work great on the highway at steady state speeds. The electric motors could be used for acceleration and the truck could go electric only around town.
Since pickups should normally be work vehicles, they might need more range than what an all-electric could currently do (though they do have a lot more space for batteries).
The hybrid would also allow them to power their tools for longer than would be possible with just an EV. Quite frankly an EV-hybrid pickup just seems to make a huge amount of sense if they could be bothered to do it right. It's probably the most practical electrified vehicle they could make for the mass market. Makes WAY more sense than a sedan or hatchback.
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price?
Like I said, I don't think you'd have to double the price to get something pretty reasonable on the road.
800ft-lbs sounds like pocket change for an electric pickup. I dont tinhk they care one bit for torque becus if they where nuts about that electric is the way to go.
It's not that they don't care but rather that they understand how much torque electric motors generate. To them they hear electric and they (incorrectly) think Prius and those "commie liberal eco-nuts" instead of more accurately thinking diesel-locomotive. My point is that their choice of pickup rarely has much correlation with their actual needs and they insist that pickups keep Flintsone's era technology even when it actually harms performance.
It is all about coal rolling
No argument that there definitely is a fair bit of this going on. People that do this are just of big of assholes as those who ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles because they like the noise.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them.
The point was that they don't need the radiator UP FRONT at the nose of the vehicle where it completely screws up aerodynamics. Some can still use one but EVs can place it in different spots where it won't reduce fuel economy nearly so badly.
It's implied by the descriptive term "semi truck".
Semi trucks are used for a lot more than just long haul transport. If it can make it 500 miles (not unreasonable) that's plenty far enough to cover regional transport needs which cover a huge percentage of the market. Local routes are an enormous market.
Yes, of course wind resistance happens regardless of the power plant, but that's not really what I'm talking about. If you look at most semis, they don't have the aerodynamic styling that cars do. Look at the classic "cab-over" design. It's a flat wall barreling into the wind at highway speeds. Why? You might think that given how important fuel costs are to that industry, particularly for owner-operators, trucks would be more aerodynamic but they're not.
The reason is practicality. The sacrifice in space, or extra space, required to make the cab aerodynamic does not make sense given the current nature of that industry. The tractor has to have enough space to accommodate the enormous engine, and have a cab that's comfortable enough for the driver to spend long hours while driving, and sleep in when not for long-haul. States have strict vehicle length limitations, and adding length to the tractor to allow for the engine, the driver, and aerodynamics means reducing the space allowed for the freight.
With an EV truck, the mix of needs changes though. The power plant is likely smaller and could probably be placed behind the driver instead of in front or below. This would allow for a more aerodynamic shape which is critical for an EV because charging stations along highways are not ubiquitous like fuel stations are. The EV truck really has to get every mile it can on a charge otherwise use-case just isn't there.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I may have gotten some of the math wrong so feel free to double check me. If I leave all things as they are and just replace the Semi engine with an electric one and only consider the weight of the battery pack and how that impacts performance, it looks like an all electric semi isn't a very good idea. I get that one could change the way a driver takes breaks, etc, but I'm taking it as it is now.
.5 = Max theoretical efficiency of a diesel engine .5)
...
The max legal drive time for a driver is 11 hours.
The Max distance traveled over that 11 hours is 660 mi
150 MJ/gal = actual energy in diesel (google)
75 MJ/gal = energy used over that actual mile (150 x
7 = mpg for a typical fully loaded semi (google)
11 MJ/mi = energy used over a typical mile (75/7)
3.6 MJ/kwh = joules to kwh conversion (google)
So...
3 kwh/mi = kwh required to move the truck one typical mile (11/3.6)
2000 kwh battery pack is needed (3kwh * 660 mi)
85 kwh Model S battery weighs 1200 lbs (google)
15 lbs/kwh = weight of batters (1200/85)
30,000 = weight of 2000kwh battery pack
Since
The max legal weight of a semi, trailer, cab, cargo, is 80,000lbs. (google)
The batteries will constitute 37% of the total load (30k/80k)
A typical Semi, with an empty trailer attached, is roughly 22,000 lbs, call it 20000 with no engine (google)
That's a 25% of the the max weight.
That doesn't leave much to actually Haul in the Long Haul.
But if we limit the battery pack to 200kwh, charge it though breaking and a smaller diesel engine always running at a constant load at a peak efficiency, I think you'd see a great improvement in overall efficiency.
Yeah, well the key there is that they do haul things.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that a majority of pickups are not used to tow anything and even those that do only do so occasionally. Trucks are often as not status symbols rather than practical tools. You don't need a $40-60K pimped out ride to haul a trailer. People use them as daily drivers even when doing so is wildly uneconomical.
Ever tried hauling a 6-ton horse trailer with a sedan?
Most people that own pickups will never haul a 6 ton horse trailer either. No sure what your point is.
Trucks from 30 years ago somehow managed to tow all the stuff we do now and they did so with substantially less horsepower and torque. Pickup buyers are mostly feeding their egos rather than rationally examining their needs. I own a pickup that can tow 5000lbs and it's been plenty for everything I've ever needed. I use the heck of out of the pickup bed. It has about 260hp which is more than plenty for most people's needs. True some need something beefier but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Morons like you will always feel threaten by those with more intelligence like me.
gimme something like an older Ford Ranger, or the newer Transit Connect van, sitting on an older Model S style chassis. More than enough range for a full day of around down deliveries or parts-chasing or hauling light job site gear. Or go with a Model X chassis and have an electric Tacoma sized rig that can crawl with full torque at low RPM and is silent on trails.
...and a $90,000, 0-60 3 sec Tesla is not a status symbol?
Exactly where did I talk about Tesla specifically in regards to pickups in this thread? I'm talking about the fact that people buy pickups who clearly do not need pickups and would be better served by a different type of vehicle. Yes Tesla's are status symbols but they are purchased by people who would mostly otherwise buy a Mercedes or BMW. Equally absurd in its own way EXCEPT for the fact that there are no other vehicles on the market quite like the Tesla. Every other pure EV out there is some ugly econobox that performs like crap.
Tell me, what size refridgerator can you fit in the frunk?
Hard to say since Tesla has only teased their version of a pickup and won't have one on the market for several years.