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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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

Isn’t this an NP hard problem?

Seems like a straightforward electric truck mileage/range problem.

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