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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.
Please do not feed the troll.
Not so much in the US. Very little rail freight in the USA is electric from what I understand.
Whenever there has been too much bad news for a while, they announce some pie-in-the-sky plan or they 'launch' a product that probably won't ever exist, just to get some positive buzz and to deflect attention from their major problems.
Give me a fucking break. I've lost count of the number of "concept" vehicles that have been paraded around by every other auto manufacturer for the last half-century that never made it to an assembly line, and often served as nothing more than marketing hype.
This concept is hardly new or unique to Tesla.
Also note that regenerative braking is huge boon for big rigs. A lot of energy is stored in the moving mass and wasted every time you have to slow it down.
Does it need to be pretty? Or better - does it need to be pretty for everyone? Because, in all honesty, it's not only a matter of taste (like the Model S and X were) and it's also completely OK by contrast (all semis are horrible IMHO), and I doubt drivers really care. After all, the part everyone sees the most on a semi is their trailer's back and sides...
It's a matter of appealing to the buyer of trucks. Truckers are very passionate about what a truck should look like. However, I'm guessing fleet sales are the initial target and economics will overcome "it doesn't look like a truck" in the end. Even for owner operators the ability to save on operating costs, if big enough to cover buying a new rig, the economics would win over being a Mack/Peterbuilt/Freightliner person. 17% savings on the per mile operating costs is significant, in addition if you get older trucks off the road not only would the savings be greater since operating costs go up as tucks age but you'd cut down on the pollutants they emit.
Since an electric truck doesn't have to have the same cooling system an ICE requires they can be more aerodynamic, if you could combine that with trailers designed for improved aerodynamics the savings could be increased. For a set of driverless trucks yo could draft to cut down on drag with the first and last ruck designed for improving overall aerodynamics of the truck train.
I'd like to see Tesla enter this in the semi truck racing circuit. It would be like the turbine car at Ind, without the breakdown.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Where it gets important is when you have a trailer with 60,000 pounds of cargo in the back, and you need to go from 0-60 up a hill. That takes a Diesel tractor minutes to do, where this thing could keep traffic flowing reasonably.
That's the point.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I remember back when the Tesla Roadster had just been released, and certain parts of the Slashdot crowd were boldly predicting that Tesla would be bankrupt in months. And then Musk borrowed a bunch of money from the US government, and they boldly predicted Tesla would be bankrupt before it paid back a penny. Then Tesla paid it all back and released the S model, and the same crew (with additions) predicted Tesla would be bankrupt in months, and Elon Musk would be begging on street corners with a cup. Then the SUV, and Space X safely landed a bunch of first stage boosters, and the Model 3. Then Tesla open-sourced quite a lot of its patents, and the shrieks of rage could be heard for miles. How DARE they!
And at every stage, growing ever larger as the alt right decided Slashdot would be a worthwhile acquisition, the same group confidently predicted the ruin of Space X, Tesla, and anything else Elon Musk did. And every time they've been proved wrong. It appears they now have been moved to redefine "success" as "anything Elon Musk does not do".
So now Tesla proposes to produce and sell a full-on long-range tractor, and once again, a significant percentage of the comments here are all about how it will fail, and it's ugly and people will die and the world will end when electric trucks take over...and they will, though not for a few years yet.
So I'll just head off to the office now, expecting to get modded down because it's 8:30 EST, and that usually means people without jobs (cough...alt right...cough) will be hanging around. And I'll smile because I know I'll be seeing a fair number of electric trucks on the road before I retire.
Life is good.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Whenever there has been too much bad news for a while, they announce some pie-in-the-sky plan or they 'launch' a product that probably won't ever exist, just to get some positive buzz and to deflect attention from their major problems.
Give me a fucking break. I've lost count of the number of "concept" vehicles that have been paraded around by every other auto manufacturer for the last half-century that never made it to an assembly line, and often served as nothing more than marketing hype.
This concept is hardly new or unique to Tesla.
Please name one car they (tesla) haven't delivered?
It is by for more efficient to reduce drag and turbulence then it is to try to harness some power back from turbulence you caused.
I imagine electric trucks, when fully optimized for aerodynamics, will resemble art-deco steam locomotives in appearance.
Trucking companies mostly avoid the first three problems by taking advantage of one of the largest socialist programs in the USA: government-provided roads.
You're neglecting the fact that the truck is empty going up, and full coming down. There's potential energy in the mass of ore it brings down. If the road down has a steady grade, the truck needs no power at all to get down. If it captures that potential energy via regenerative braking and *if* the ore is significantly heavier than an empty truck it could indeed have surplus power. There's no violation of conservation of energy here. They're extracting potential energy from a high point by bringing mass to a low point.
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".
I wonder if they're also planning to support the obvious (to me, at least) option of putting an additional battery in the trailer. Trucks often run loaded less than 100% capacity so trading off some cargo volume/mass for additional range could make a lot of sense. In fact I'm kind of surprised the battery capacity in the tractor isn't more modular. Battery swapping doesn't make so much sense for consumer vehicles, but it seems perfect for commercial fleets with maintenance depots. I'd think a smallish internal battery, good for short trips, plus a bay where additional capacity can be installed with a forklift would make a lot of sense -- and the ability to add additional towed battery capacity, perhaps up to non-stop coast-to-coast range (for full self-driving, which on freeways is probably achievable with only cameras and radar).
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