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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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.