Slashdot Mirror
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.
At the same time, they're dependent on scale. It's estimated that a doubling of battery production rates equals a 17% reduction in battery costs. Hence it's in Tesla's interest to sell as many batteries as possible - whether in Model 3s, stationary energy storage, or Semis. It's also notable that Tesla is doing the exact same thing with drive units: Semi uses the exact same drive units as the Model 3 - just 4 of them.
Roadster 2.0, by contrast, is more of a halo car. Pricing hasn't been announced, but it's clearly the sort of vehicle where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Hence Tesla's target of 2020 (ages by Tesla's normally overly-aggressive timelines) seems to be "pushing capital expenses down the road".
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Is "Model 3?" a question?
if you're asking how production is going: spyshots and VIN tracking currently suggests that they're up to about 100 per week. It got a bit weird because the VIN count stalled out for like a month in the lower 500s, but then suddenly leaped to nearly 1100, and then has been counting backward, filling in the gap. But there's been a real flurry of activity in the past week, week and a half. Multiple parking lots filling and emptying on a near-daily basis with Model 3s of differing VINs. So while it's not clear what exactly got uncorked, something clearly did.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
OK, let's get them started:
500 mile range at 250 mph means you have to stop every two hours, that's pathetic compared to gasoline cars.
(OK, I'm outta here, have fun)
Not so much in the US. Very little rail freight in the USA is electric from what I understand.
The Bugatti Chiron can do 250 now, and they claim that after eventual fettling and tuning they will get it to do 300.
It might be the quickest production car, though, which is not the same as fastest.
Bugatti - Spends two years and thousands of man-hours on developing an internal combustion engine and transmission to squeeze a gain of 25MPH faster than the previous model. Eventually becomes a not-so-useful one-seater that runs out of gas in 3 minutes at top speed.
Tesla - Slaps in a bigger battery. Tells customers to hold on tight.
Yeah, I think we know how this race is gonna end...
(FYI, Koenigsegg Agera RS tops out at over 280MPH, so Bugatti already has some catching up to do.)
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.
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).
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
It's fueled by millennials? Do they have a big furnace in the basement or something?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
Screw you dude. I spent at least two minutes thinking about it before I posted, so clearly I have seen things those so-called "professionals" working full time on the problem didn't even consider.
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.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
"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.
Apparently they didn't get of the naggers since you keep bitching about them. =P
Arguably, the real limit for responsible drivers is the speed rating of the tires. With some ad-hoc Google research I find no tires for heavy trucks that are rated more than speed class "M", which is 81 mph or 130 km/h.
This said, if you look on old forum threads like http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=97985, you can find statements like this:
No, it's not a myth. A company I worked for had trucks that would go that fast. We had several tractors with Caterpillar 3406B engines set at 425 horsepower. One was always getting worse fuel mileage then the others. We had the local Cat dealer check out the tractor. They went into the computerized fuel system on the engine and were able to show how fast the driver had been running with it. He had been hitting 118 out on I-10 through Arizona pretty regularly. With a few keystrokes they cut his top end back to 85 MPH and the fuel mileage improved a lot. A lot of the tractors on the road have Detoit Diesel 60 series engines set at 500 horsepower and they will also easily run over a hundered if they are geared right and haven't had the top speed set down. Is it smart to run that fast? No way. It takes a lot more distance to stop as you get rolling faster. Trucks running close together to "draft" are just an accident waiting to happen.
But I guess in 2001, speed limiters were not as widespread as today...
C - the footgun of programming languages
By definition tonne is metric and ton is imperial.
However the US confuses things by calling a tonne, a metric ton.
Well, that is the long and short of it...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I once read about a high altitude mine that had a custom built electric truck haul ore to where it could be processed and shipped out. The truck actually had to discharge at the bottom, not charge, as the energy it consumed going up empty was less than the energy it recovered going down full.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Not a solid line; they leave a gap between each truck, and are designed to deal with vehicles moving in and out between them.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Even in the US heavy rail is electric. The diesel just turns a generator.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Their margin on each S and X is approximately 25%, but don't let that stop you from making things up.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Trucking companies mostly avoid the first three problems by taking advantage of one of the largest socialist programs in the USA: government-provided roads.
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...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.