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Tesla's Electric Semi Truck Will Reportedly Get 200-300 Miles Per Charge (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, Tesla next month plans to unveil an electric big-rig truck with a working range of 200 to 300 miles, a sign that the company is targeting regional hauling for its entry into the commercial freight market. From the report: Chief Executive Elon Musk has promised to release a prototype of its Tesla Semi truck next month in a bid to expand the company's market beyond luxury cars. The entrepreneur has tantalized the trucking industry with the prospect of a battery-powered heavy-duty vehicle that can compete with conventional diesels, which can travel up to 1,000 miles on a single tank of fuel. Tesla's electric prototype will be capable of traveling the low end of what transportation veterans consider to be "long-haul" trucking, according to Scott Perry, an executive at Miami-based fleet operator Ryder System. Perry said he met with Tesla officials earlier this year to discuss the technology at the automaker's manufacturing facility in Fremont, California.
I can see a big need for intra-city hauling of trailers. 100 mile range (with less than 20 minute charge times) would probably be adequate and it would help build the infrastructure for electric vehicles in cities.
It also proves the technology and helps it evolve into longer range tractors. 1,000 miles is 16+ hours of driving, which I don't think is legal in most states/provinces, but 400 to 500 probably is reasonable to allow the driver time to stretch, have a meal, rest, shower while the tractor is recharging. I suspect the 1,000 mile range is to minimize fuel costs which is less of an issue with an electric tractor which should be able to plug in at multiple truck stops.
The technology won't be perfect from the starting gate, but Tesla will learn and be able to build better tractors down the road.
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I have often wondered why Tesla doesn't set a standard battery pack dimensions specification. Why couldn't you simply change battery packs like changing batteries in a flashlight or remote control. Even if the range for an electric long haul truck was 1000 miles you should be able to swap batteries packs in less time than it takes to fill a diesel fuel tank.
I guess you missed the part where this is aimed at regional hauling, not long haul? For an example: Costco's Pacific Northwest distribution center is just outside of Seattle, WA. One of their busiest stores is in Portland, OR. That is under a 150mi trip. The truck would charge while being loaded/unloaded. This sort of truck would be PERFECT for these types of routes.
I live not too far from highway. I usually cannot hear cars. But large trucks, yeah I hear them. And I guess I am breathing what they are putting out as well. I cannot wait for electric semis to become popular. Sure, in the early days, with a 300-mile limit, it will be a regional solution. But I'll take what I can get. As another poster noted, Seattle is about 150 miles from Portland, OR. An electric truck from Portland could travel to Seattle, charge while being unloaded and then be able to make the trip back. And I suspect most of the trucks on Hwy 26 near me are regional.
Electric semis? Get them on the road ASAP please.
Portland, OH to Seatle, WA is about 170 miles, ONE WAY.
A vehicle that gets 200-300 miles on a charge will only make it one way before needing to charge, and that's only a 3hr trip.
IMO, this thing needs to safely go a full truckers working day. If they limit themselves to 8hr/day of driving, and only do 60mph, that's 480 miles, and it needs some extra headroom to get to/from charging stations and to allow for reduced battery life, which will happen quickly. That means more than double the range (400-600 has a low end that won't complete a days work).
Though I could probably just RTFA, I'm curious what the curb weight of the truck is versus a comparable diesel truck (ie. how much do the batteries weight).
Long term, I think these have a great opportunity for long haul trucking in convoys. They should be able to employ some of that fancy self driving stuff to make a train of trucks, which would greatly reduce overall energy use... not sure how they'll work out who leads though.
Perfect opportunity to develop swapable battery packs.
Have gnu, will travel.
Those "specialised situations" could very well be cities that no longer allow ICE powered trucks to be used within their boundaries. Have depots outside the city for ICE road-train long haul pick-ups and drop-offs, and shuffle the goods onto electric short-haul for travel to/from the final destination within the city borders.
They probably did the math and found that the infrastructure require for battery swap wasn't economical. Better Place tried and failed with battery swapping. Took about $1 million per swap location. I think Tesla did try a battery swap service for Model S in California between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Butt not a lot of people used it. You drive to your destination swap out the battery on the way and when you come back the same way you swap out again with your original battery pack.
Some basic facts that everyone gets wrong almost every time there is a discussion of electric vehicles.
1) Maximum battery charge rate is not a constant. Empty batteries charge faster than full ones.
2) Maximum battery charge rate in miles/hour of charge is much greater in bigger batteries than it is in small ones.
3) At superchargers, the batteries are the limiting factor for charge rate, not the chargers.
That means at a super charger, it takes about an hour to go from almost any charge to 100% charge.
Truck drivers can only drive 10 out of every 14 hours and then need at least 10 hours off.
Driving 300 miles is going to take at least 4 hours.
So the driver drives for 4 hours, chargers for 1, drivers for 4 more hours, charges for 1 more hour, then drives 2 more hours before he has to stop anyway.
It would actually be more time efficient to stop more often for less time.
Drivers that want to cheat on their logs will be at a disadvantage with electric trucks.
Team drivers may not want to use them.
You're all super focused on the range. Tesla has not said anything about the range. Some guy gave his theory. Now you're all jumping on that and either crapping on them or supporting them.
There are other uses beside long-haul. I'd expect Tesla would go first for local routes with smaller tractors and lighter trailers: supermarket and chain restaurant deliveries and the like. A fixed route would be the easiest first market for an electric tractor - assuming it's actually cheaper to operate long-term.
Tesla could still have a nice business even if it's only suitable for 5% of semi trucks sold - but I'd be surprised if they would actually be cheaper long-term (i.e., across multiple battery pack replacements, given how long commercial trucks tend to stay in service).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They did. Tesla Model S battery can be replaced in 1 minute 35 seconds. They demonstrated it on stage back in 2013. And there was a pilot battery swap station built between LA and SF I believe. But there was no call for it. No one ever used it.
LynwoodRooster the Luddite.
It doesn't take a few hours to charge a car. A Tesla supercharger will give a car an 80% charge in 30-40 minutes.
You're whining about range. No doubt you were whining about electric car range too a few years ago when it was about 100 miles. Now it's anything up to 350 miles.
This is the 1st generation of Semi. It's not where the technology will stop. At the moment, the use cases will be limited. But its just a start.
You'd do well to remember the dumbass comment from Cmdr Taco when the iPod launched: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
That's the kind of dumbass you look when you keep declaring every new thing is shit.
Although I'm global IT for an international aerospace firm my office is above a shipping and receiving warehouse (long story.) We ship large crates (could be used for homeless housing, god knows I've had apartments about that size) full of airliner cabin parts all over the world. The trucks that pick them up, mostly FedEx, are short cab with 30' trailers, all local. If these guys can rack up more than 200 miles a day in Seattle/Everett area traffic I would be amazed. The Tesla range is perfect for this use. There are a lot of these out there. Even the can haulers (containers) from BC going to Seattle/Tacoma are in this range one-way.
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Charging will be dirt cheap but a new battery will likely cost 50-80k USD before subsidy and won't last long if the vehicle is used commercially, much less than a car.
$80k is about 40 trips worth of diesel fuel in Europe. If the truck can make 80 trips before the battery wears out (and that's a lousy estimate). If it costs $1k to charge the battery then parity is achieved. If it can make more than 80 trips and costs less than $1k to charge the battery, then it is a net saving.
I think a modern LiFePo battery can take more than 80 charges. I have no idea how much it would actually cost to charge a battery for one of these things, but the fact that they are going into production (and not just at Tesla, but at MAN, Mercedes, DAF, etc.) means it is already an economic win for their customers or they wouldn't be doing it. Trucking companies are not swayed by soft arguments, they are a business and they know exactly how much maintenance, fuel, carbon tax, and capital depreciation are costing them.
As soon as you talk hydrogen you lose all credibility.
It's horrible for the environment, is unavailable anywhere, it's extremely dangerous to use, difficult to contain, and it's more expensive than other fuels.
Hydrogen is simply not a viable energy storage medium. It's only being pushed by oil companies who are afraid of people moving away from fossil fuels and refueling at home without them.
Natural gas is more efficient, easier to work with, better for the environment, cheaper, and more readily available than hydrogen. Being that pretty much all commercial hydrogen comes from natural gas anyway you're far better off to just use the natural gas directly.
Toyota Puts Fuel-Cell Semi Truck to Test at Los Angeles Port April 19, 2017 https://www.bloomberg.com/news... The newest heavy-duty truck set to operate at the Port of Los Angeles emits an unusual byproduct that California could certainly use more of: water. Toyota Motor Corp.’s hydrogen fuel-cell truck, which will emit nothing but vapor, will begin a feasibility study at the port this summer. The Japanese automaker unveiled the concept Wednesday and will start testing it in short-distance fleets that run back and forth between the city’s docks and nearby warehouses operated by retailing giants. Swapping internal-combustion engines for fuel-cell stacks will support Governor Jerry Brown’s efforts to cut emissions from freight movement in California. The ports of Long Beach, Los Angeles and Oakland handle 40 percent of U.S. container traffic, with commercial shipments generating half of California’s toxic diesel-soot emissions and 45 percent of the nitrogen oxide that plagues L.A. with the nation’s worst smog.
There are a number of routes where an electric truck would never need to charge - ones where they drive an empty truck up a hill to a mine or agricultural area, pick up a heavy load, and then have it push you back down the hill. I can foresee drivers needing to watch that the battery is empty enough to make it down the hill.
I trust that they have built the regenerative system heavily. Driving a truck down a hill is where truck drivers earn their money, and drivers will love them if they make that job easy.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
As stated elsewhere, these are not for the long haul market but the shorter ranges. Also someone in another article, can't find the post anymore, posted something sensible. This is not a US focused truck,its one for the EU. Where drivers are legally obliged to stop and rest every 4 hours or lose their license. So in the EU this could work perfectly as a long haul truck because they have to take a break roughly the size of a charge anyway.
Also here in the Netherlands, and I believe other parts of Europe too, a lot of cities banned (old) diesel vehicles from the city centers.
These aren't long-haul trucks. They're inter-city trucks, often used to go between ports and their destinations, inside the city.
Sure they may be limited in that you can't take them between cities, but inter-city trucks have their purposes .And there are plenty of delivery trucks out there that run between stores and distribution warehouses where the store can't accept a trailer load. (They are sometimes called lorries).
Of course, none of those uses may call for the stereotypical "trucker" type, but yes, they're driving trucks and need all the requisite licensing and all that. And these trucks DO sit around a fair bir, so if you can even retrofit the loading bays and such with electric chargers, that's the best way to make sure of the loading and unloading times.
Yeah yeah yeah, "trucks" are big rigs that run on the interstates, they aren't "light trucks" (aka SUVs), or the cube vans and the like doing local deliveries. Though port cities also have a need for the big style trucks that really don't do much other than travel through the city delivering between the port and the customer warehouses (because they need to deliver the 20 and 40 foot containers).
And yes, some truck drivers do like inter-city driving. Because it also means they're sleeping in their own beds at night, see their families all the time, not worry about logbook checks or weigh stations, etc. And again, those port lineups, if you can put them in charging stations, well, more opportunities to charge up.
It's also why the article mentions the trucks will not come with sleeper cabs.
Tesla actually did have a battery swap station. It turned out to be uneconomical and unpopular.
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Rapid charges are generally good enough, and it's possible to make them even faster with higher charge powers and charger-provided coolant. And with Supercharger v3, there will be a battery buffer in the charger, so the charging station's max power is no longer limited by the grid.
For people talking about the "time wasted stopping to charge", several important points.
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
2. Paying the driver is under 20% of the cost of shipping by truck, and amortizing the truck's capital cost a bit over 20%. But fuel is around 40% for the total cost (the rest is things like maintenance, insurance, etc). So if you can halve fuel costs in half and slash maintenance, you're cutting a quarter off of your shipping costs, which can more than pay for the additional drivers and trucks to compensate for the ~half an hour charging every ~3 hours.
3. This shouldn't need to be said... because it was in the article... but the guy was talking about regional haul shipping, not long haul. Believe it or not, not every shipment travels thousands of miles.
Now lets bring up the side benefits.
1. An EV drivetrain will be ridiculously powerful. I have little doubt that Tesla will be making these as the most powerful semis in the world, as it's much easier to do with an EV drivetrain. Hills will be laughed off. To be more specific, Tesla has stated that they plan to use the M3's drivetrain (which propels a 1600kg car from 0-60 in 5,1-5,6 seconds) in Tesla... except that they plan to have one motor for each wheel. That's going to be a crazy amount of power. And speaking of hills, they'll recoup the energy on the downslope.
2. Semis waste a huge amount of energy idling, to power accessory loads for the driver and/or the cargo. Because the engines are so large, idling guzzles huge amounts of fuel. A variety of solutions have been come up with over the years, such as auxilliary microgenerators and window-mounted "tethers" at truck stops (TSE) which provide climate control and 120V power for drivers. EVs, however, have what owners often refer to as "camping mode". Since you never have to idle an engine, they use only the power that is needed to provide climate control and accessory loads while you're parked. Sleeping in an EV is a quiet, perfectly climate-controlled experience, and depending on the weather usually only takes 1-2% of the battery per hour if you're not plugged in (nothing if you are).
3. An EV semi would not be affected by noise, pollution, and idling regulations, which limit or prohibit semi access to some areas, and which have become more common with time.
4. While the earlier price analysis was for the US, it's a much more extreme difference in other places in the world. Where I am, for example, diesel is about $7/gal, and they're looking to hike taxes on it soon - it'll probably end up around $8/gal. I don't know what percentage of a fleet operator's costs here are fuel, but it's going to be a lot more than in the US.
5. We're so far just comparing base vehicles. But Tesla is working on value-added features as well, such as EAP and platooning. The latter is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than EAP (locking onto a vehicle and holding position relative to it). Even if you don't take the driver out of the loop, you're saving a ton of energy for the trailing vehicles. Meaning not only reducing costs, but also that you can periodically swap who's the lead vehicle and extend the whole platoon's range.
Versus passenger EVs, semis have a number of other big things going for them.
1. Unlike the passenger vehicle market, the shipping industry is all about the numbers, all about the bottom line - and c
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
Except that's not true. The greatest cost for a semi operator is not the driver. It's diesel. Costs double what the driver costs on average.
And given that M3 is priced extremely aggressively versus other vehicles in its class on a feature-for-feature, performance-for-performance basis (even ignoring tax credits and energy / maintenance savings), and that Tesla is working with established fleet operators on Semi, I have little doubt that Semi will priced very aggressively as well. Shipping companies are all about the bottom line. They'll amortize any cost if it saves them more in the long run.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
How are the chemtrails today?
To be more specific, Tesla has stated that they plan to use the M3's drivetrain
Model 3, not M3. When it comes to vehicles, M3 is already well established. If anyone tells you they're driving an M3, and they're not wearing fatigues and goggles, you can safely assume that they mean a BMW.
For those curious what an "unload time in tens of minutes" means for supercharging: given a sufficient charge rate (aka Supercharger V3, which is battery buffered so that the grid connection doesn't limit it), 20 minutes fills the first 50% of the pack, 20 more fills up to 80% (some can hit 80% in as little as 30m total), 20 more to 90%, and 40 more to 100%. So for a 200mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 100 miles
40 minute unload: 160 miles
60 minute unload: 180 miles
For a 300mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 150 miles
40 minute unload: 240 miles
60 minute unload: 270 miles
That's assuming that Tesla hasn't improved their battery tech for Semi.
As for "range figures" - not only could things like solar trailers significantly improve range (as you note, that's a lot of surface area), but there's a more fundamental aspect - speed is a major impactor of range, and semis drive slower than cars. Furthermore, if they have the aforementioned platooning, then all trailing vehicles will use significantly less power than the lead vehicle. Lastly, EVs are much less affected by hilly terrain (where the start and end altitudes are the same) and traffic than diesel semis (minor congestion actually improves EV ranges - steadily flowing congestion can improve it significantly).
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
Not sure about regs in the US, but in the EU drivers of LGVs (Large Goods Vehicles - >3.5 tonne) are required to have a 45 minute break every 4.5 hours. So that would give a 45 minute break every 270 miles. Whether a lorry can be recharged within 45 minutes is another matter.
I was on holiday in Ireland and I hard plenty of radio adverts from the RSA (Road Safety Authority) reminding commercial drivers about obeying tacho rules.
You got me curious about the amount of power that could be produced by a semi trailer... since as you note, they're almost always outside. The large end of trailer sizes is 2,6m by 17,37m by 4,27m. We'll assume that the top and one long side have an average sun angle of 45 degrees and there's no solar on the front or rear of the trailer (although there could be). The top has an area of 45,16m^2 and the sides an area of 74,17m^2, for a combined area of 119,33m^2. On a sunny day, the angle-adjusted insolation is around 707W/m, so the trailer would be receiving 84,4kW and, at 22% panel efficiency, generating 18,6kW. While that's not enough for a fully "solar powered semi", it's definitely meaningful bonus power (that's enough to entirely power an electric SUV at highway speeds).
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
Maybe in your corner of it, homie.
The BMW M3 over its three-decade history has produced something like 100-150k total vehicles (it was around 100k as of 2010, so estimating 150k as an upper bound is being generous). The Tesla Model 3 will be produced at 500k per year as of next year.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
"One company's 4000 Kelvin is not like the others..."
You can use a CD as a diffraction grating to look at the spectrum from the "bulb". Over the years, we've ended up with "Daylight" CFLs from a number of different manufacturers in our living room. Looking at their spectra with a CD, it's easy to see that they use different phosphors to achieve similar visual effects. My guess is that you'll find different spectra from different manufacturer's 4K LEDs
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Hang out anywhere that people discuss Teslas. The shorthand for the vehicles is the MS, MX and the M3 (there is no shorthand for the Roadster). Given that the Tesla Model 3 is going to be produced in numbers order of magnitude than the BMW M3 ever was, I'd recommend getting used to it sooner rather than later.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
speed is a major impactor of range, and semis drive slower than cars. Furthermore, if they have the aforementioned platooning, then all trailing vehicles will use significantly less power than the lead vehicle.
Maybe in your corner of the universe. Here, they drive as fast or faster than the cars, and above the speed limit. I personally cannot wait for autonomous trucks to arrive (probably concurrently with EVs) and have them run at 50 mph in the right lane. Sanity would finally return to our roads and something like 20% of all fatal accidents would magically disappear. Yes, something like less than 8% of the vehicles on US roads cause more than 20% of all fatalities, yet we're worried about those cars going 2mph over the speed limit. Oh wait, that's "revenue enhancement".
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The BMW M3 over its three-decade history has produced something like 100-150k total vehicles (it was around 100k as of 2010, so estimating 150k as an upper bound is being generous). The Tesla Model 3 will be produced at 500k per year as of next year.
Naturally the M3 has lower production numbers than the model 3: it's a premium automobile out of the budget of most and with performance and handling features most would have a difficult time appreciating.
They still haven't gotten rid of train engineers, and trains run on fucking tracks. I really don't see driverless semi's being allowed to operate any time soon.
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
Believe it or not, in the US it is eleven hours. We have big problems with sleepy truckers on our highways. 300 miles would be in the vicinity of 4+ hours, and having a setup where they physically *have* to stop for a while every 4 hours would be a huge win for us.
In practice, you probably wouldn't put PV on the sides unless you have PV panels that are considerably more durable than the ones we have today. Still, just the panels on top could do quite a bit. Also, trailers often end up parked outside of warehouses (there tend to be a lot more trailers than tractors, for all sorts of logistical reasons), which means that with a little planning depots could arrange to generate a large percentage of the power they use to charge the tractors.
It seems to me that what they should do is put a significant amount of battery capacity in the trailers. Then there would be no need to connect cables to parked trailers to take advantage of the PV energy they're generating. Also, it would make battery "swaps" trivial, and in many cases almost eliminate tractor charge time: semi pulls into the depot or delivery location, drops the trailer to be unloaded, picks up another -- which has a full battery, perhaps largely self-charged depending on how long it was sitting there and what the weather has been like -- and heads out.
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I think the ideal application is something like the regular routes here in the Los Angeles area. There are a huge number of truckers who go back and forth between the port complex and major logistics centers in the Inland Empire. The round-trip is well under the 200-300 mile range of these trucks, and it involves a lot of travel through highly congested areas where electric vehicles have an inherent efficiency advantage. Perhaps more important, the ports have a long-standing problem with diesel exhaust pollution, and they're talking about phasing out diesel trucks for electrics to help deal with it. This is going to make that practical rather than pie-in-the-sky.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
If there were massive crashes every day, why would they be news?
In all honesty, though, European roads are designed better on average. They have roundabouts but few rotaries, while Americans have rotaries that cause maximal contention points and more crashes. They have long merge lanes and stronger lane-control rules, whereas American highways are designed with the briefest window to get on the highway or else you're getting right back off, and so you're contending with people trying to exit while you're trying to enter. They've also got better driver's education--we learn to operate a car, and my driver's test was three right turns in a parking lot; I failed it; and the proctor passed me in frustration on my fourth try by falsifying some of the numbers.
What we call "advanced driving programs" here--those $350 weekend deals where you ride around a skid pad and learn to deal with slick conditions, sudden hazards, and keeping the vehicle under control while loading the suspension hard--are just part of normal driving requirements in Europe. You don't learn to keep your ass straight when there's weather, you don't get licensed. You have to be able to drive safely and competently in traffic under a wide span of conditions or else you can't get licensed.
EU statistics for 2014 show that heavy trucks were responsible for 15% of deaths caused by road collisions. In the U.S, of 6 million crashes each year, 0.5 million (8.3%) involve trucks, and are responsible for 9% of deaths caused by road collisions. Unfortunately, nobody's doing the statistics of collisions per VMT, and what you really want to know is fatal and non-fatal collisions per vehicle miles traveled. For this particular problem, we want to know the statistics for highway collisions per highway miles traveled.
The U.S. doesn't allow trucks to ride the left lane in most locales. They ride in the center lane at speed, away from the busy right-lane contention points---you know, the string of constant intersections. Apparently most crashes occur there. Because of the high speed of travel in the left lane, trucks would either need a lot of stopping distance (which nobody is giving them) or a lower speed (causing dangerous lane changes around them, creating additional contention points and more collisions), so banning them from the left lane is sensible.
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VCR trade-ins weren't popular, but VCR rentals were exceedingly popular. Suppose when you bought your car you had the option of either getting a brand-new factory battery or you could instead subscribe to a battery swapping service that has sufficient capacity for your needs and get a discount on the car equal to the cost of the battery pack. You wouldn't own the batteries, so you wouldn't have any qualms about getting a "lemon" battery -- if that did occur you would just return to the station and get a different one. With a sufficiently developed network range anxiety would disappear, a battery swap could easily happen as fast or faster than a tank fill. Battery swap stations would have the ability to use cheap off-peak power and also be able to rent their packs to the utilities as a grid-stabilization system. The only problem with a system is getting it started - it would take an immense investment to build or retrofit stations, obtain battery packs and convince manufacturers to implement the system into cars. Tesla piloted a system to do this and got little response, but perhaps it was too early and it would see a higher acceptance rate today or in the future.
Enigma