The future of long-haul trucking in Europe is electric | Hacker News Reader

The future of long-haul trucking in Europe is electric

transportenvironment.org

36 pointsdoener39 comments

That article is about the European trucking industry:

Close to 80% of road freight activity in Europe is performed on trips below 800 km

I suspect that in the USA, the distances are much longer, though I'd really like to see more of our long-haul freight being hauled by rail rather than truck. A lot of the cost of trucking is externalized -- one study says "Freight trucks cause 99% of wear-and-tear on US roads, but only pay for 35% of the maintenance". Trains are already around 3 to 4 times more fuel efficient than trucks... start electrifying rail lines and emissions could be cut even more.

Charge trucks their share of that road wear and trains would become more competitive even if they take longer.

Trucks won't go away, they'll still be needed for the last mile (or last hundred mile) delivery from the train terminal to the customer.

A lot of freight is already transported by rail in the US 18-30% depending on who you ask. This seems about on par with or bigger than the fraction of fright that travels by rail in Europe.

Part of the difference is that rail in the US is used mostly for fright whereas people use trains to get around more in Europe. Passenger focused rail vs fright focused rail.

30% according to railroads.dot.gov. https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...

It's easy to forget what a big deal rail is in the USA, because the freight lines successfully lobbied Congress to allow them to eliminate the passenger cards they used to be required to add to the end of their freight trains. Back when that was the case passenger rail travel in the USA was cheap and ubiquitous, because it went everywhere the mail did. E.B. White has a wonderful little essay[1] about it. The full text can be found in the excellent Essays of E.B. White[2].

[1] http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=91313

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394616.Essays_of_E_B_Whi...

From a link on this page:

Declining Length-of-Haul

Today, the average length-of-haul is just 62 percent of what it was in 2005, decreasing from 800 miles to 500 (Fleet Owner). And the rate of decline appears to be accelerating. Since 2012, average miles driven between pickup and delivery have declined by 26 percent in reefers, 10 percent in flatbed trucks, and 9 percent in dry vans (Overdrive).

According to https://www.bts.dot.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/docs/FFF_201..., the US is the same (see page 15)

50% of freight (by volume) is under 100 miles. 84% under 500 miles.

It'll take years to transition new truck sales to 84% electric. By that time the batteries will improve: cheaper, lighter / more energy dense and therefore we will make trucks that go even more than 500 miles.

Because of the Jones act we don't rally do shipping between US ports which would be a huge benefit.

We can do it, just not with ships flagged in Panama and manned by child labor from third world countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights)

the Jones Act ... requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flag ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.

I gladly accept that over yet another race to the bottom using cheap labor and unsafe vessels.

There's a world of difference between

> just not with ships flagged in Panama and manned by child labor from third world countries

and

> . requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flag ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents

So a Germany built ship, owned, under the flag of, and crewed by Canadians isn't allowed.

It's blatant protectionism, nothing more.

the distances are much longer, though I'd really like to see more of our long-haul freight being hauled by rail rather than truck.

It's not uncommon for a factory in Oregon to ship something by truck on Friday and have it arrive in South Carolina on Monday. This is done by having a two-person team transport the trailer across the country.

It would literally take weeks to accomplish the same thing by rail. There is not a single national railroad. Also I don't think the rail system could handle a large increase in traffic. For example, in the past some US railroads tore up existing parallel tracks. This saved them a lot of money on property tax, but required using a single track in both directions. That type of setup doesn't work well when freight volume increases.

I work deeply in heavy duty trucking technology in the US, and literally recently talked to many operators of large fleets about electrification. The only real opportunity for electrification is on short haul, less than ~300mi routes. For electrification to work in long haul (multi-day routes), they carriers will need to re-work how they actually plan freight lines to introduce many more hand off points along the route, which is going to drive up costs all around.

It's solvable, but there's a lot of work left to do. The majority of freight in the US is still basically hauled via brute-force human planning.

Isn’t this an NP hard problem?

Seems like a straightforward electric truck mileage/range problem.

For Europe the distances are less daunting - that 300mi (500km) gets you from Paris to Frankfurt, or Milan to Frankfurt.

I didn't see it mentioned in the article but is swapping out the battery entirely an option being investigated, i.e. you roll into the truck stop and some process takes the depleted battery and inserts a charged one.

It was discussed on the past for cars but I'd assume it's easier to design for trucks due to their specialised use?

I actually asked that exact question as well recently :)

The problem is that the truck batteries are absolutely massive (4k+ pounds), so while I'm sure it's technically possible, practically speaking, moving around and storing batteries that big and heavy is just not realistic today.

Most likely not.. it would be difficult to warehouse, move, charge and redeploy the batteries in typical truck stops. On top of that, with so many different fleets in operation in the US, there's no guarantee there will be the broad compatibility and on-the-road service that you would want when integrating an unknown piece of equipment on your vehicle.

It will likely be more difficult for trucks. The amount of space consumed by the battery is prohibitive, and they're not laid out "below the floor" like they are in a passenger vehicle. They're typically in a large stack behind the drivers cabin, imaging the type of equipment needed to do the swap, I can't see this happening regularly.

The trailer could have a battery pad on the front. Service it with a forklift.

Yeah, sadly I think you're right. Ultimately this is somewhere standardization would really help. If rather than a fuelling pump there was some kind of (strong!) robotic assembly/arm that just retrieves the battery from behind the cabin, inserts it into a magazine type system at the truck stop and inserts the available charged battery from the same magazine with zero human involvement then I can't see the process exceeding 10 minutes or so.

But this is somewhere where commercial competition will resist standardization, and I think that's going to cause difficulties in electric vehicle tech more broadly.

I don't think it is an option being investigated, because drivers have mandatory rest breaks. Communities like that trucks require the downtime, because they remember when drivers where coked up doing back to back runs pissing into a bottle and a danger to everyone.

This is a good point but they seem like slightly separate concerns in a sense. My limited understanding is that truck drivers tend to rest where they hit their legal limit which will often be a lay-by rather than a proper truck stop. Perhaps we could include charging points in most lay-bys to get an overlap in charging vs. rest breaks but it seems to me a shorter charging process via swapping in a truck stop would still be advantageous since the rest break and charging stop won't necessarily overlap in most cases.

According to https://www.bts.dot.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/docs/FFF_201... 84% of freight by volume is under 500 miles.

Do you dispute that?

Tesla Semi will be 500 miles so current technology can address 84% of the market and by the time 84% of semis sold are electric, batteries will be cheaper and more energy dense, so trucks will go even further.

> According to [link] 84% of freight by volume is under 500 miles.

And by mass? A furniture store in (e.g.) Chicago will order a bunch of sofas; the resulting shipping container full of furniture won't weigh a lot, and will mostly be air. This is part of an existing logistical setup between the store, distributor, and manufacturer (which may be on the other side of the Pacific).

Meanwhile, a 'random', ad hoc transaction causes some earth moving equipment to be either sold or rented, and so needs to be moved to the new owner / job site with-in a couple of days. Arranging for a train shipment (assuming it can even fit on a train) may take longer than just posting the job on a trucking board and having someone show up the next day:

* https://www.youtube.com/user/smd5231/videos

Is shipping a Ferrari easier or harder on a train than a truck?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-inPRBhonfY

Perhaps we'll get to a more electric truck future, or perhaps an hybrid / range extender interim, but there are a number of cases where things don't work out, especially if you're moving at max load, with extra axles, on short notice.

Shipping on rail is already quite cheap in many cases, and yet there's a sizeable industry for long-distance freight, at about US$ 200B per year:

* https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/lo...

That's about a quarter of the $800B trucking industry total:

* https://www.trucking.org/news-insights

If people though trains were cheaper, easier, and/or faster I would guess they'd be using them already—and probably are whenever they can.

It might be easier to wire up the roads rather than muck about with batteries:

https://trans.info/en/more-scania-trucks-with-pantographs-co...

>" will likely reach cost parity with diesel as early as 2025 if the right policy incentives are in place"

Weasel terms instead of honestly telling that we will increase the cost of owning and operating regular trucks until they will become uncompetitive. Nothing's wrong with it if the end benefits outweigh the economic harm. Just please do not insult people's intelligence.

P.S. There is a good chance that sometime in the future batteries tech might improve to the point that makes them competitive for truckers as well but this remains to be seen

As others have already mentioned, this really applies to places like Europe where truck routes are quite short. In the US I'm bullish on hydrogen-powered trucks (fuel cell). It's a technology that doesn't make much sense for passenger vehicles, but does make sense for heavy duty commercial vehicles that can have planned stops and fleet-managed stations.

In the US I'm bullish on hydrogen-powered trucks (fuel cell).

Natural gas (CNG and LNG) trucks haven't exactly set the transportation world on fire, even though they make much more sense than hydrogen. Natural gas is still routinely flared, it's too much trouble to try to collect it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routine_flaring

So, instead, you propose to take that very same natural gas as a starting feedstock and turn it into hydrogen? Then build a new infrastructure to distribute that hydrogen across the country? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

Non starter.

Natural gas is already distributed all around the country. Literally hundreds of thousands of miles of existing pipeline cris-crossing the country. How many hydrogen pipelines can you point to? If not pipelines, how do you propose to deliver hydrogen to where it is needed?

I suppose there is some argument to be made to use excess PV solar and wind turbine energy to create hydrogen, but so far that hasn't happened at scale.

The near future of short-haul trucking is electric. The boring but useful Ford Transit goes electric next spring, along with the F-150 pickup. Many companies who have a fenced yard full of company trucks parked all night are likely to go for that. A Level 2 charger at every space, and the fleet sits there and charges at night.

I believe you're thinking of the wrong class of vehicles. Trucking refers to the big 18 wheelers and such, not the little four wheeler trucks and vans. The Tesla Semi is an example, which may end up being great for short haul trucking.

https://www.tesla.com/semi

Trucking refers to the big 18 wheelers and such, not the little four wheeler trucks and vans.

This reminds me of some truck weigh station on some Interstate back east. (It's been years so I don't remember exact details).

   WEIGH STATION AHEAD
   ALL TRUCKS MUST STOP
   NO PICKUP TRUCKS

The Freighliner eCascadia (a semi-truck) and em2 (a straight truck) have been talked up since 2018, but apparently will not ship until 2022.

Freightliner is a no-nonsense truck builder in a no-nonsense business. They probably will ship useful trucks. Although probably not with the silly purple LED lighting effects on the nose they stuck on the prototype.

Unless something goes badly wrong, electric trucks are going to be all over the place next year.

It seems like there ought to be an "... in Europe" at the end of the headline, at least given the evidence they presented. Truck haul lengths are getting shorter in the US as well, but

> Close to 80% of road freight activity in Europe is performed on trips below 800 km

doesn't really apply in the US yet, where the average haul length is still 848km as of 2019[1]. Battery-electric trucks still might end up being the winner here, but there are still lots of hauls in the US where the battery-weight/range tradeoff is likely to be a significant obstacle with current technology.

[1] https://transportfutures.net/navigator-blog/length-of-haul/

Ok, we've added that to the title. Thanks!

All of the new large battery factories that I've seen make the news are being built as joint ventures between a battery company and an automaker for the exclusive use of the automaker - and the capacity is probably never going to be sufficient for the automaker to sell batteries to 3rd parties.

Do you really gain "economies of scale with passenger cars" if you have to build your own battery factory for your long-haul trucks? Which would never be of the same capacity as the automaker factory?

Several European car manufacturers are also truck manufacturers, although there are several that aren't.

Ah, makes sense then

Some numbers for the US for comparison:

https://www.capstonelogistics.com/blog/trend-watch-2019-leng...

Quote from this link :

Declining Length-of-Haul

I don't see this being a big player in the US any time soon. I'm having a hard time imagining the infrastructure required to service recharging all the batteries at truck stops every night, even if the range problem gets solved.

Perhaps if the catenaires are only in the rightmost lanes the experience of "elephants fucking" (e.g. a truck moving at 92 kph is overtaking one moving at 91 kph) could be mitigated.

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