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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.
I have my Class A CDL and would love to get a chance to drive one of those. I'll bet the visibility is phenomenal when you're sitting centered in the cab. Furthermore, I'll bet the ride is much smoother due to the lower center of gravity when compared to conventional tractors. This thing would be a driver's dream because you don't have to worry so much about emission system failures and other breakdowns well-known to diesel. The only thing that the driver would still need to be concerned with would be the air brake system. Air brake systems these days are very reliable with the automatic slack adjusters and redundant air supplies. Hell, you could put a solar panel somewhere and make some serious mileage in the desert southwest. You might be able to run the entire truck off of the solar panel and just use the batteries for the night time. As it is right now, re-fueling takes about 15-30 minutes of time off of a driver's clock. By the time the tanks are filled, mirrors and windshields cleaned, and other miscellaneous activities, an appreciable amount of time gets burned. Truck drivers constantly race against their 14 hour drive window.
Not according to this.
At top speed, a Bugatti Veyron would drain its 26 gallon fuel tank in 12 minutes, having covered only 51 miles.
That is in fact why this truck exists. See, the U.S. is weird in that it measures fuel efficiency in MPG. That's actually the inverse of fuel efficiency (which would be GPM, or how many gallons does it take to drive 100 miles). Because MPG is the inverse, it leads to a numerical inversion which tricks a lot of people into thinking what's small is big. (The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem.) Say you needed to drive 100 miles. How many gallons of gas do you need?
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the amount of fuel saved is only half that of the previous doubling? In other words, the majority of the fuel savings comes at smaller MPG. The +25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons. While the +12.5 MPG jump from a SUV to a sedan saves you 4 gallons. Even though the 12.5 MPG delta seems smaller than the 25 MPG delta, it saves twice as much fuel. How? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. Bigger is smaller, smaller is bigger.
So econoboxes like the Prius are actually the worst possible place to put a hybrid or electric motor. The car is already very fuel efficient. You're adding a lot of complexity and cost for very little fuel savings. The best place to put these technologies is in the gas guzzlers - SUVs and tractor trailers. Raising that 6.125 MPG tractor trailer's MPG to 6.67 MPG (a 9% increase in MPG) yields just as much fuel savings per mile as doubling a Prius' MPG to 100 MPG (a 100% increase in MPG).
This whole obsession with high MPG vehicles like the Prius is misguided at best, a terrible waste of money and resources at worst. Musk has done the math and knows this, and knows that the best way to really cut the country's fuel consumption is by improving the efficiency of gas guzzling vehicles like tractor trailers. Which is why he made this electric truck.
HP = constant * Torque * RPM. That's right, the HP and torque curves for an engine are one and the same, just both axes are scaled differently. (The value of the constant depends on what units you're using.)
Also, an electric motor deals much better with the huge range of power output that a truck needs. From low power at cruise speed, to high power during acceleration. Electric motors are so much better at this than transmissions that pretty much every modern train locomotive is electric. Even if the train still uses fossil fuels, it's energy isn't sent directly to the wheels via a mechanical linkage. It's converted into electricity, which then powers an electric motor which drives the wheels. AKA the diesel-electric locomotive.