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Tesla Unveils 500-Mile Range Semi Truck, 620-Mile Range Roadster 2.0
Rei writes: During a live reveal on Thursday, Tesla unveiled its new electric Class 8 Heavy Duty vehicle. As most people familiar with Tesla products would expect, the day cab truck features staggeringly fast acceleration for a vehicle of its size. It can accelerate 0-60 in 5 seconds without a trailer and 20 seconds with a 40-ton gross weight while being able to pull its maximum payload up a 5-degree grade at 65mph (versus a typical maximum of 45mph). The 500-mile range is for the vehicle at full load and highway speeds (80% of U.S. freight routes are 250 miles or less). Tesla also boasts a million mile no-breakdown guarantee; even losing two of its four motors it can out-accelerate a typical diesel truck. The total cost per mile is pegged at 83% of operating a diesel, but when convoying is utilized -- where multiple trucks mirror the action of a lead truck -- the costs drop to 57%, a price cheaper than rail. Tesla went a step further and stole the show from their own event by having the first prototype of the new Tesla Roadster drive out of the back of the truck. With the base model alone boasting a 620 mile range on a 200kWh battery pack with 10kN torque, providing a 1.9 second 0-60, 4.2 second 0-100, and 8.9 second quarter mile, the 2+2-seating convertible will easily be the fastest-accelerating production car in the world. Top speed is not disclosed, but said to be "at least 250mph." The vehicle's release date, however, is not scheduled until 2020.
Energy consumption is stated at "under 2kWh/mile", which is reasonable. So a 500 mile range would be a 1MWh battery pack. The larger the battery pack, the more you approach individual cell energy densities, so they're probably getting around 200Wh/kg. Hence the battery pack (the heaviest portion of the tractor) probably weighs around 5 tonnes. Given that a typical semi tractor weighs about 8 tonnes, the two should be comparable.
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I didn't have room in the summary to cover charging (tried to fit in as many specs as I could!), but I probably should have made room: 30 minutes to 80% when empty. And you can install those chargers (quite compact, and don't need underground tanks) at depots; they trickle charge to fill a battery buffer, when then surge charges a vehicle when it connects, so it doesn't even mean stops "on the road". Tesla is however planning to expand their current supercharger network to include these new "megachargers", starting on the busiest trucking routes. And since 500 miles range is like 7 hours driving, you're going to want a break either way. In the EU they make you take 45 minutes of breaks every 4 1/2 hours driving.
I think it'll be really neat once they make a sleeper cab. No more awkward hacked-on solutions to avoid idling; the climate control is electric to begin with, and the cab has all the power you could dream of.
Also, contrary to most peoples' expectations, modern EVs tend to deal with cold extremely well. They lose range, of course (not as much as most people expect** when you use a well thermally-managed powertrain like Tesla does, but still some), but you never have any issues with "difficulty starting" or the like. You get in and it just goes - even if the vehicle has been idling for days not plugged in and the pack is completely cold (the only "symptom" with that is you can't use regen until it heats up, and peak acceleration is reduced). Packs are generally rated for storage at -50 to -30 and usage at -30 to -20, depending on the chemistry, and utilize heaters (or in Tesla's case, deliberately-created waste heat in the motor re-routed by heat exchangers) to protect against out-of-spec conditions when necessary.
** - The instantaneous power consumption upon starting is much higher as the vehicle uses power to heat up; however, once it's reached its temperature and heating is only needed for maintaining temperature, power consumption is greatly reduced. And it should be all the easier for Semi, with its very high power demands creating a lot of waste heat (even electric drivetrains have some waste heat, which a good system like Tesla's recaptures; Semi should kick off about 10kW of waste heat when cruising at highway speeds), and its high volume to surface area ratio means that it should be extremely easy to outpace heat loss.
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Electric wins *more* in hilly terrain because it can climb grades faster, and regens on the downslopes.
Salt isn't going to attack electric vehicle tractors any more than ICE tractors. And the vehicle uses a smooth belly pan anyway, it's not like the underside is a bunch of exposed wiring.
Batteries that are discharged over the course of 7 hours are not "stressed". And Tesla batteries have superb longevity (check the charts/graphs tab).
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Pricing I've seen is $200k base price for the Roadster, with a $50k reservation fee. The founder edition is $250k.
Not cheap but not expensive for a car with that kind of performance.
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Yeah, because there's absolutely no rusted out shitbucket internal-combustion vehicles throughout the midwest and northeast US due to road salt. Not a single one. Salt only attacks electric vehicles!
On a hill, the electric truck will win every single time - no rapid downshifting to keep engine RPMs up, no tough hillstart climbs that require a lot of skill or extra mechanical devices like crawler gears or hill-start assist magic that prevent you from sliding your trailer into the family of 4 behind you, torque for days to pull the steep grade faster than 10 mph and regenerative braking to get the power back on the other side of the hill - in a diesel you just burn more diesel getting up the hill, and then wear your brake pads and drums even more going back down the other side.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to these launches, but some of what they did here makes a lot of sense.
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It could be. Or it could just be that they had a chasis surplus but were missing parts to fit them out.
There's no single problem that's hit them; it's been a number of different problems. They had a supplier which fell behind on supply. They had a couple mechanical and electrical problems in vehicles which they had to go back and repair. Automated battery manufacture took them a long time to get right because the tooling they'd been given didn't work properly. There were some paint shop delays, although they don't appear to have been serious. They've had overheating problems when they try to ramp up the speed on the automated welding (they use ultra high strength steel (in addition to high strength and mild steel) for part of the frame, and UHS steel can be very finicky about welding). Etc. Just all around growing pains. But either way, it's good to see that production rate finally starting to angle up.
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"Someone on youtube commented that the batteries add about 20,000 or 40,000 lbs extra weight compared to a diesel truck. That will reduce the total capacity of payload these trucks can carry, won't it?"
That's why they removed the large Diesel motor, the transmission, cooling, fuel and water tanks .....
Also I read a few days ago, that some mining companies use giant electric trucks to move 60 tons of materiel down the mountain (generating electricity) and empty back up the mountain, so they generate more energy than they use.
They have to go to the power outlet only once after each shift, not to load, but to _unload_ their surplus electricity.
Not a solid line; they leave a gap between each truck, and are designed to deal with vehicles moving in and out between them.
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Even in the US heavy rail is electric. The diesel just turns a generator.
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Their margin on each S and X is approximately 25%, but don't let that stop you from making things up.
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and then wear your brake pads and drums even more going back down the other side.
Brake pads should get very little wear going down a hill. Apparently you need to take some driving lessons. You are supposed to shift into a lower gear to keep your speed down when descending a hill.
In the case of a car, the the butterfly valve that controls the amount of air entering the engine stays closed until you open it by pressing on the accelerator pedal. This forces the cylinders to work against a high vacuum pressure. By down shifting you increase this vacuum pressure.
Diesel engines work by throttling the amount of fuel rather than air. So they have what is commonly referred to as a Jake Brake. It opens the exhaust valve in a cylinder just after the top of the compression stroke. Which doesn't allow all of that pressure push the cylinder back down. This in turn forces the energy from the turning wheels to compress the next cylinder rather than the energy from the fuel detonation.
https://electrek.co/2017/09/17...
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