Electric trains have been around and widely adopted for more than 100 years. What is novel about these?
They had no electric batteries worth speaking of, but it was all overhead wires, and labor was cheap; rolling out gigantic infrastructure projects was cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Electric_Railway
What's really crazy is I've told people this while in the park right outside the museum with one of the electric railroad cars and people still didn't have a clue despite being able to see the old railroad stop and living there a generation.
> The Giga Train is Tesla’s answer to potential concerns that some employees might have had regarding how they would get to work. The new train will eventually transport 4,500 employees to the factory every single day, where they will build the company’s all-electric vehicles.
It is replacing a train that currently runs on diesel:
> Niederbarnimer Eisenbahngesellschaft, or NEB, is the train’s operator, and plans to switch to an e-fleet of trains starting at the end of this year. Managing director Sebastian Achtermann said:
> “We will put 31 battery-electric multiple units and seven hydrogen multiple units into operation, gradually replacing the diesel fleet we currently use.”
But if this is something they want to actually turn into a product instead of purchasing an existing battery based train, I could see Tesla learning from this experiment and then targeting geographies where there are lots of diesel based train lines without electrification.
Battery-electric passenger trains as an off-the-shelf option are a relatively new phenomenon, but not brand new or unique to this line or use case.
I guess it could be useful where it's cost-prohibitive to electrify the traditional way, typically in rural areas.
More recently, these have become somewhat commonly used on partially electrified lines. There are at least three types in use in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_multiple_unit... (the ‘Tesla’ one is the third type listed.)
It's a nice service to provide, and nice that the electric car factory is served by an electric train, but Tesla isn't launching any new product or technology here.
And ubiquitous? Last time I checked more than half of all trains here ran on Diesel engines. No idea if it improved since, but probably not by much.
Batteries have a lot of advantages if you trust they won’t explode too often.
I'm not sure what's more resilient, if a tree falls on to the tracks breaking the electrified wire, it'd also be on the rails, stopping the train anyway, but I imagine not having an electrified wired dangling around across the country is less dangerous than having a battery in a known location with qualified engineers looking after it.
They could just be doing this for PR purposes, but I'd love to see the internal cost analysis that was done to build this vs the cost of building using a known good solution.
This has been done successfully around the world since the 1880s. Looking at a map it seems like the length of the line is only a few miles, so doesn’t seem like it would be that huge of an electrification project, especially considering Germany’s rails are already 55% electrified.
Wasting energy by moving those batteries is contrary to that goal.
We'd have to see some actual numbers before deciding if moving heavy batteries is better or worse than having an electrified wire.
And yes, we'd need to see numbers to be certain, but my intuition tells me that transmission losses won't come close to hauling all that weight.