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Comment by hwillis | Hacker News Reader

Assuming he's not being sarcastic, it could be power aimed at semi trucks. That would probably be sub-megawatt for regular charging, and 1-2 for supercharging. It's gonna be a lot more important to have a well-developed charging network for trucks since they are working vehicles: nobody is gonna buy a truck and then sit around and wait for it to become profitable to drive. Maybe we'll see some extra-large charging spaces opening up soon...

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4u0yci/why_i_w...

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Trucks stay stopped a lot of time for loading and unloading. Most could easily have an 1 hour charging without any issues.

Superfast chargers would be great for self-driving trucks making long distance trips. But then, train corridors probably beat those on every way.

For vehicles where somebody is inside, I don't really see the point of 5 minutes charging. People need to rest and eat, and nobody does that in 5 minutes. Plentiful slower chargers would be a much better selling proposition.

I did some analysis and think batteries will be somewhere 1-1.5 MWh for tractor trailers. 3 MW would still take 20-30 minutes to charge that. The middle ground isn't very useful as delays on deliveries lose a lot of money. Even an hour long delay cuts into profits. Unless you can charge at .5-1 MW, its not any more useful than just charging overnight.

Long haul truck fleets will be much more suited for swaps than recharges.

It would probably be easiest to swap the cargo onto a charged tractor. Since there is no driver, you just have an automated station that swaps the tractors and the cargo goes on its way. Swapping a giant long haul battery would be very cumbersome.

I agree though that swapping and slower charging would make more sense than trying to charge at some multimegawatt level to reduce the cargo transit time.

Not really. Unless you are driving team you still only get 10-11 hours of driving a day. (iirc. I know the regulations have changed a LOT since I grew up in a truck in the early 00's)

There is plenty of time to recharge a truck over night at a truck stop. The issue is gonna be infrastructure at the truck stops. I am gonna guess at 150-300 spaces at most truck stops. If the majority of trucks go electric then I am not sure the electric grid's connection to the truck stop is gonna be able to support that.

Anybody know the math on how much electricity would be needed to take an 80,000lb truck 700 miles? (700 miles would be on the very upper end of the scale but you want that kind of range to accommodate for climbing hills with a full load.) And after that the math for charging say 100-200 of them? (I doubt the truck stops will all be charging at once)

I did a bit in the link above

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