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The EU is already on this with new regulations. As of 2022 european trucks can be upto 90cm longer if the extra space is used for aero bodywork. The DAF XG+ is the 1st truck that uses a 60cm longer nose to get improved aero. It will be interesting to see what other truck manufacturers will do with these new EU rules.

https://www.daf.com/en/news-and-media/news-articles/global/2...

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The lowest hanging fruit is likely going to be adding a second trailer behind the first and increasing the horsepower while simultaneously reducing speed.

Ontario, Canada made this tradeoff a couple years back on very specific motorways. There are dedicated places for super-long road trains to lash-up, drive, pull over, and disassemble between London, Toronto, and Montreal. These combinations are only allowed to drive a max 90km/h speed which further reduces fuel use and permits easier passing by standards trucks and cars.

Sounds like trying to convert a truck to work like a train. Why not just more trains?

Trains require dedicated rails, and increasing traffic on rails requires modern signalling infrastructure, both which are a lot more expensive to build and take decades. At least if the UK is anything to go by.

Road trains use existing infra, aren’t as constrained in destinations, and don’t take decades to roll out.

Don’t get me wrong. More rail is a good thing. But we also need more road trains too.

It's all of this but mostly the flexibility. Rail is a centralized service with unpredictable schedules. Once a truck is full it can be shipped, but rail poses an additional bottleneck. Plus then you also need a driver on the other end anyway to pick up and deliver the trailer.

Rail should absolutely be used more frequently. It just isn't well integrated with trucking right now.

In India we have Ro-Ro (or whatever it is called now) where trucks are loaded onto trains and transported over long distance, fast and cheap. Then the roads take them last 100 km or so, in the heartlands (or wherever the destination). Best of both worlds.

We do the same thing in the US for more long haul things. Also we ship a lot of intermodal containers this way.

The big issue is speed. Individual trucks moving trailers is insanely fast. Semi's are commonly moving at 110km/h here in the states. The US is highly dependant on JIT shipping so any changes to slow this down would have huge economic impacts (which we saw with covid).

Roads don't just emanate out of nowhere either. They must be built and maintained, or they become useless. I doubt building new highways really takes much less time than building new railways.

We wouldn't need to build new highways for this. We'd just be changing how we use existing ones (replacing existing road traffic with more efficient road traffic).

Which will wear down bridges and streets far faster. There have been experiments with extra long trucks in Germany, but so far they haven't resulted in extended regulations. Longer trucks have severe limits of manouverability in small cities.

As far as I know, German trucks are already limited to 90 km/h

Above 7.5t on the Autobahn 80km/h, outside cities 60km/h. Fines start at 10km/h over, so they're usually going 89 and 69 though...

> Fines start at 10km/h over

This is not correct. A distinction must be made between:[1]

a) Driving up to 15km/h too fast outside of a city/village for more than 5 minutes or in two cases after departure is fined with 140 EUR.

b) Exceeding the speed limit once for a short time by up to 10 km/h outside a town or village is finded with 30 EUR. (11-15km/h: 50 EUR; 16-20km/h: 140 EUR; ...)

There is a tolerance applied to the measurement of 3km/h for under 100km/h and 3% above 100km/h. That should take into account the inaccuracy of the measurement; however, it does not guarantee that you get away with driving 83km/h in the autobahn, because the measurement might be a little inaccurate to your disadvantage.

[1] Source: https://www.bussgeldrechner.org/lkw.html (in German)

An absolutely horrible idea for safety outside of the autobahn. There are many distributive roads where over taking safely is impossible with two trailers in front of you.

The autobahn??? The highway between London and Montreal is 4-8 lanes, what's the issue?

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