Actually I was quite surprised that those are ordinary trucks without superhero style exterior etc. I think that this is a recipe for success of electric vehicles (and they are hurting EV market on long run) - not that they look like from outer space (at hefty price mark) but comparable to prices of non-EV while driving on electricity.
What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for.
I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway).
And Volvo did it right. Targeting purpose, targeting users and business. Congrats. Finally.
The weird exterior many electric cars have is to lower the drag coefficient to increase range. This is especially true for Semis as they have a notoriously bad drag coefficient. The range for the Volvo trucks could be up to 300 km as stated in the article, that is okay for some haul distances but you need serious charging infrastructure if you are going to be charging a Semi every 250 - 300 km. These trucks will probably need 0.8 - 1 MWh batteries.
> The weird exterior many electric cars have is to lower the drag coefficient to increase range.
In Europe vehicle footprint is a big deal and for a box truck, minimizing vehicle footprint (and maximizing capacity) is likely more important than reducing drag. Particularly when you are looking at vehicles which will likely spend most of their time pushing 16+ tons and accelerating and decelerating to speeds around 30 MPH all day long.
> you need serious charging infrastructure if you are going to be charging a Semi every 250 - 300 km.
These trucks aren't designed for long haul/ cross country trips. There won't be charging every 250 km, they will go out, do their job, come home and park on a charger.
About 15 years ago I rebuilt an old golf cart. What I learned was in the late 90's better motor controls lead to a resurgence of electric golf carts especially for fleets. In most use cases electric is better logistically. The electric ones just run and run and they don't require handling gasoline and oil. It's really quick for an employee to plug the golf carts in at night. Pain in the ass to run around with gas cans. Not to mention having to store fuel on site.
Reason conversion to electric happened earlier for golf carts was electric golf carts only have about 4-5kwh worth of batteries. Interestingly historically lead acid batteries are about $100-150 per kwr. Which is close to where automotive grade lion batteries are now.
So no surprise that delivery trucks are converting to electric. They have the exact some scenario going on.
A friend of mine runs a business servicing fork-lifts and similar vehicles. Mostly old propane or diesel powered fork lifts. When people ask him for recommendations about replacing a dead machine, he recommends they go electric due to reliability. It's a bit counter to his self-interests because they do require a fraction of the maintenance.
He also owns several electric golf-carts he's tunes up for speed and light 4WD.
When the Prius came out I looked at the drive train and it seemed obvious that the transmission on those things should and appears to be very reliable. It's a planetary gear set and two electric motors.
Fixed gears and electric motors life spans are between 25,000 and 50,000 hours. Vs less than 10,000 hours for a piston engine.
Everything about cars is designed around that fact that the engine is shot after 200-250,000 miles. Would not surprise me if eventually the expected life of an EV will end up being 2 to 3 times longer.
Footprint is at least partially due to regulations. EU regulations are much stricter with dimensions, whereas in the US the limit is more the weight.
Technical development might have some impact as well. I remember as a kid many trucks needing bigger engines (e.g. sand or concrete transport) had the cab-behind-engine layout, but nowadays those are more or less completely gone. Maybe turbochargers and intercoolers allowed a sufficiently powerful engine in the cab-above-engine layout?
If that’s the case, they’ll make a single 300 km trip or day. I doubt that the business case for that is strong. With autonomous Semis on the horizon, the potential reduction in costs with the scaling of hauling in km / day will drive costs down. 300 km a day won’t be competitive in that space.
For a buyer of semis, the cost of running one is arguably the most important factor. Producers need to focus on $ / km and there range is quite important (as well as charging infrastructure)
> If that’s the case, they’ll make a single 300 km trip or day. I doubt that the business case for that is strong.
You might have heard of UPS? FedEx? Amazon? Maybe you've had a contractor work on your home or business?
All of these businesses operate on less than 180 miles round trips per day typically inside the US. In Europe distances tend to be even shorter.
Semis are by nature long haul. It's rare to see semis pulling 40 foot trailers through urban areas even in the US. Semis are usually limited to long haul or short haul freight from industrial or agricultural areas. The Volvo trucks are designed to operate locally and it's a huge market.
> For a buyer of semis, the cost of running one is arguably the most important factor.
There is definitely a market for semis—particularly in the US—but it's a vastly different market than what this targets.
> All of these businesses operate on less than 180 miles round trips per day typically inside the US. In Europe distances tend to be even shorter.
Yes but you are referring to the small urban trucks used in last mile deliveries. The article mentions heavy duty trucks. Even in the last mile delivery case, a limited 300km range is a problem because that means the same truck cannot be shared by workers in following shifts. Or maybe operate autonomously 24/7.
> Yes but you are referring to the small urban trucks used in last mile deliveries. The article mentions heavy duty trucks.
We don't have to guess. If you go to Volvo's site, you can see exactly what sort of trucks they are talking about. We're talking about:
=> "A two-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 16 tonnes and an excellent working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for urban transport like deliveries."
AND
=> "A three-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 27 tonnes and a comfortable working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for demanding types of urban transport like waste collection, light construction transports and deliveries."
> Even in the last mile delivery case, a limited 300km range is a problem because that means the same truck cannot be shared by workers in following shifts.
Pretty much all delivery companies have sub 12 hour routes which run during business hours and into the evening. There is very little demand for package delivery at 2am. Likewise, construction is a 9-5 sort of job. Garbage collection (which is specifically mentioned) is almost always a once/ per day route.
I'm sure there is demand for autonomous 24/7 vehicles out there, but there are also plenty of commercial vehicles which are parked over night as well.
> => "A two-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 16 tonnes and an excellent working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for urban transport like deliveries."
This is still significantly heavier than what most courier companies like FedEx and DHL use; within Europe most use Ford Transits and similar, which have a maximum gross weight of 3.5t (this is partly due to licensing; these vehicles can be driven on a normal "car" driving license).
I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here, that Volvo doesn't know what they are talking about? You'd think after decades in this industry Volvo knows who their target market is.
I don't live in Europe, but I'm inclined to take Volvo at face value on this.
You two appear to be talking past each other. When Volvo says deliveries they likely don't mean residential deliveries in the typical P700/P800/P1000/P1200 package cars that people associate with UPS, and the analogous models at FedEx. The two-axle Volvo truck is comparable to a Freightliner M2 106, a straight-truck, not a package car. And the Volvo truck has a maximum GVWR of 16 tonnes, the final configuration would be lower, and you could operate it without a CDL. The poster is correct about licensing requirements. I do not have a CDL, but I can drive the straight trucks and package cars because they are under the 26,000lbs GVWR limit in my state.
> The two-axle Volvo truck is comparable to a Freightliner M2 106, a straight-truck, not a package car. And the Volvo truck has a maximum GVWR of 16 tonnes, the final configuration would be lower, and you could operate it without a CDL. The poster is correct about licensing requirements. I do not have a CDL, but I can drive the straight trucks and package cars because they are under the 26,000lbs GVWR limit in my state.
Note that within the EU, in general "large goods vehicle" licenses cover everything over 3.5 tonnes, so these Volvo trucks are _well_ into that category. Package delivery companies avoid such large vehicles for last-mile deliveries.
But yes, two-axle trucks like what Volvo is proposing do of course see heavy usage for deliveries in commercial/industrial settings. Most smaller supermarkets are supplied by such trucks, for example, especially within cities (where loading bays are rare).
You know I saw his post and I thought... hmm maybe he's right. Then you go and confirm that we aren't talking past each other. You just don't seem to get that there is indeed demand for this kind of truck for local use.
Again, look at Volvo's site. They understand this market, they've been in it for 50+ years.
No, we're not talking about long haul trucking, which is done with tractors. To use an American example, the two-axle truck could be used for intra-city moving, like U-Haul. Speaking with my commercial customers, they also do their own intra-city deliveries of plumbing supplies and HVAC/appliances. Amazon runs two workers in a box truck for irregular packages. Furniture companies use box trucks for intra-city deliveries. Document shredding companies could use these trucks. Landscaping companies use trucks like the Isuzu NQR. Look around you at next time you're in a city and make a note of what trucks you see. That's what Volvo is targeting here
Deliveries as a segment is not exclusively UPS/DHL/etc. package delivery to end consumers. At least where I live there's plenty of small trucks doing deliveries from regional warehouses to various shops.
> If that’s the case, they’ll make a single 300 km trip or day. I doubt that the business case for that is strong.
Europe is much denser when comapared to US. You can do a lot within 300KM in Europe. Volvo openly states that the trucks are "to be used for regional transport and urban construction operations in Europe".
The trucks in question and the possible range is very well suited to this kind of operation.
Also, there's another important factor: Noise. Some European countries are more sensitive to noise than others. The Netherlands and Sweden comes to my mind.
These trucks will be a huge win on that front because a 44 tonne truck is not exactly silent, especially under load.
I live in Norway and I can tell you, 300 km will not suffice. The thing is, when you have other trucks on the market with more range (e.g. Tesla-Semi), and likely, much better charging infrastructure, why would you go with Volvo?
Volvo has a way to go if they want to compete in this market.
Noise wont have any effect as it is not government regulated. A buyer of Semis wont think twice about noice if $ / km is lower.
Semis are used to for DC to store within urban areas. With groceries, the trucks are usually plugged into an electrical outlet while parked to keep the refrigerator running and saving fuel. So it seems the infrastructure is already in place for those applications.
A large part of the distinctive EV design is to increase their value for signalling. There has been at least one study where they compared Prius sales to Honda (Civic?) Hybrid sales by geographical area, and correlated it with politics. In more 'green' areas, the Priuses sold much better, whereas in other areas, both cars had similar sales. The take-away was to make the hybrids and EVs look different, to encourage conspicuous consumption.
There have been many very aerodynamic conventionally contoured gasoline powered cars, including one of my favorites, the Mazda MX-6 Mystere.
> A large part of the distinctive EV design is to increase their value for signalling.
I've heard this too, but while Chevy and Nissan went the exotic route, every Tesla so far has been fairly normal looking. There were nice-things on them like the gull-wing doors and the handles on the Model S, but those were contained in a traditional design.
The CyberTruck will obviously break that mold, but I suspect that much of the look of the CyberTruck is to keep costs down and efficiency up. It is extremely difficult to make a traditional pickup truck efficient.
Tesla is conventionally configured, with a number of EV design cues, such as the door handles on the Model S, the lack of a real grill on any car, etc. Tesla also has the advantage that its logo is known to signify 'EV'.
The original Tesla Model S had a grill. Also, their name and logo weren't known when the Model S was launched, it is now, but it wasn't when they launched. Tesla wanted their vehicles to be "Normal" looking. If there was any signaling going on, putting a token grill on a car which doesn't need one was signaling this is a normal car. It was only after Tesla had built up a strong enough brand and reputation that they removed the needless grill on the trunk.
The door handles are not an EV design cue at all. They are only on 2 Teslas and no other EVs. They are meant to look and feel luxurious and futuristic and would not be out-of-place on any higher end car. Like the gull-wing doors, I suspect they were done that way because Musk thought they would look cool.
Or at least that's how the stereotypes go. Fancy styling didn't work for them for the same reason that Hyundai is having a hard time convincing people Genesis is actually a luxury brand. Buying something as a signal doesn't work very well when the signal is conflicting.
> I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway).
I would choose whichever makes sense for my business. Without pricing and reliability numbers, it's impossible to know which that might be.
The closest vehicle in Tesla's garage to this is the Tesla Cybertruck which looks bizarre, but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor. If Tesla launched a butt ugly Cybervan which was similarly functional and cost effective, you can bet it would be popular with the class of buyer who are shopping for e-Vans.
Right now I'm eyeballing the Cybertruck personally, in spite of it's appearance. Spending $20k to get a more traditional looking truck just doesn't make sense to me. The only concern I have is whether those high truck bed walls will screw things up.
> The closest vehicle in Tesla's garage to this is the Tesla Cybertruck which looks bizarre, but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor.
No, Cybertruck is competing with stuff like Ford F150. Volvo FH is a commercial truck. The nearest thing is the Tesla Semi.
The Tesla Semi doesn't have any announced pricing or an availability date so it's impossible to get an idea of how competitive price-wise it might be. This is the big problem with comparing future products.
Tesla has also hinted at a passenger van eventually... but again no date, no details.
Production starts sometime in 2021 with scale production probably in 2022.
Production of Semi was supposed to start this year. According to Musk it was delayed because Tesla is still starved for batteries (a single semi consumes the same amount of cells as 10-20 Model 3 cars)
Cell bottleneck will be solved with the new battery production system recently demonstrated at battery day.
Thanks, for some reason I thought it was still a concept project and didn't chase details down. I forget entirely that they'd done a full unveil which inevitably (for Tesla) includes price announcements and pre-orders.
> Commercial fleets require maintenance and spare parts.
Yep. But this is mitigated a bit by the fact that EVs tend to require massively less maintenance and spare parts.
From what I've seen, Tesla does not do service really well and that's something they will have to get down if they are going to get into commercial vehicles. Even if Tesla trucks require vastly less ongoing service, they need to have that service be good. I've heard of Tesla owners having to wait several weeks for parts, for a commercial vehicle that's a no-go.
Running gear wear on trucks is where the costs are, and an engine rebuild every 200K-750 K km depending on how they are used (local routes vs long haul).
EVs should have a substantial advantage over trucks in the brake wear department, battery overhaul costs will match or possibly be lower than the engine overhaul costs.
Put it all together and for short haul trips EVs should have an advantage and for the longer haul they are as yet impractical. Keep in mind that a 1000 liter fuel reserve is a substantial amount of energy for relatively little weight disadvantage on a vehicle that already weighs 8 tons, the equivalent in batteries weighs many times more. Some of this weight disadvantage will be compensated by regenerative braking, with a diesel vehicle that energy is converted to waste heat every time the vehicle comes to a stop.
So, overall, I think short haul EV trucks will have the edge soon, long haul it likely will be diesel for quite a while to come.
they working on that heavily right now, opening hundreds of new service centers, build a presence in europe, china, east cost+ central. They doing everything right in terms of that, and they moving fast. Tesla semi will be a major hit , but the form factor is not limited to that, volvo will get their share. To be a real #1 manufacture tesla need at least 5-6 different size models, including 2 vans , small cheap car, bigger suv for family mid size truck, a bus.
>but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor.
Tesla has a history of claiming their products will be cheaper than they turn out to be. Pretty big claim to say it's cheaper when, as of now, they haven't produced or sold a single truck. I guess it works though, because every time a competitor puts an EV truck out there, someone inevitably claims that the Cybertruck is cheaper.
They announced the Model 3 at $35,000 in 2016. The price for the standard range model on their website has fluctuated between $37,000 and $40,000 since then, and it's currently $38,000 including significantly improved specs compared to the 2016 announcement.
If the Cybertruck also ends up 15% more expensive than the original advertised price, it'll still cost dramatically less than any competitor.
> Pretty big claim to say it's cheaper when, as of now, they haven't produced or sold a single truck.
They've taken pre-orders and accepted cash, it's a contract. Tesla will sell those trucks for the announced prices.
Even using $38k as the base price of the Model 3[1], it is still a good value compared to competing electric vehicles which tend to have much lower ranges, slower charging networks, and worse performance. The Model Y competitors are also generally more expensive and have lower ranges.
They are still a bit pricy compared to non-EVs, but compared to other EVs, Teslas are not priced at a premium. If you value performance, the gap is even more significant.
> I guess it works though, because every time a competitor puts an EV truck out there, someone inevitably claims that the Cybertruck is cheaper.
It works because as I mention above, Tesla has a track record of delivering decent value. It is extremely fair to say Tesla vehicles are often behind schedule, but their pricing (again compared to other EVs) is usually extremely competitive.
[1] It was possible for quite a while to get a Model 3 for $35k, it was just a little tricky without a pre-order.
It is—as I suggest above—the closest thing Tesla has to a shipping product which competes here.
Tesla will have at least some commercial trucks. Whether they will compete directly with this or not remains to be seen. I suspect if they do, they will be price competitive for reasons in my post above.
I was probably a bit unfair to the CyberTruck. The big thing for me personally is I'm not flamboyant by nature. Once the Cybertruck becomes more commonplace I'll get over it. It certainly didn't stop me from pre-ordering.
Europe also have much stricter total length requirements for trucks, which is why the more square trucks are preferred to maximize space-per-meter of length.
The quirky design served a purpose. It helped target early adopters in a market.
I had 2 Nissan LEAF from 2013-2018 and was keenly aware that I was enjoying a piece of the future. Part of the experience was simply revolutionary: quietness, no gas station, amazing torque.
At the same time, being an early adopter had a steep cost: limited range, limited charging options outside of home. (As it turned out, that cost turned out to be less steep than perceived, and simple planning made it pretty much a non-issue.)
This is obviously a generalization and there are exceptions but there seems to be a large overlap between those willing to have a radically different product that comes with severe drawbacks, and those who enjoy the quirkyness of it. And yes: the status (even if it's a subconscious thing for most people).
It's worth noting that the 2019 Nissan LEAF was redesigned to look like regular cars, just as its battery doubled in capacity (tripled if you compare from the first models). It signaled that it was no longer cutting edge and ready for mainstream. Anecdotally, tax agencies agreed as most tax incentives were either dropped or severely reduced around that time.
Notably, Tesla didn't really go this route until the CyberTruck. The Model S and X are both quite normal looking. The Model 3 and Y as well. If they didn't have the smooth grill-free face, you'd never know they were electric.
> What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for.
Tesla used to do that - Model S or Model 3 follow that idea. And that was big part of their success - cars, that look like cars (remember all fugly EVs in 2010s?), with few quirks here and there, but nothing out of ordinary. But as a company, they depart from this idea with things like cybertruck, and are focusing more on hype over last few years.
Volvo didn’t do it first though. The approach at Tesla has always been to make a competitive electric vehicle market. They did that. Musk has even said he doesn’t care if Tesla fails as long as it gets automakers to build electric vehicles. Teslas success shows automakers it is possible. Tesla has already succeeded in its original mission.
No but as I said, Musk's mission with Tesla was to make BEVs widely available. Tesla may never be able to make a cheap BEV but they have grown the market and driven economies of scale that allow others to make competitive BEVs.
I am not sure if I get your main point, but since your talking about Tesla and exterior looks, I think that it shouldn't be forgotten or overlooked, that Tesla truck is planned to have an amazing drag coefficient:
"The Tesla Semi’s drag coefficient of 0.36 is lower than today’s trucks at 0.65 to 0.7, and even lower than the Bugatti Chiron at 0.38, one of the world’s fastest sports cars" [1].
Objects with good drag coefficients are usually good looking, or are not hard to make good looking (while not so true for the other way around).
It's odd to compare the drag of a truck with huge frontal cross-section and zero downforce with that of a supercar that has a tiny cross section but large drag coefficient to create downforce. An F1 car would have an even higher coefficient of 1.0...
Compare it to a normal car instead, and it's the equivalent of an old Chevy Tahoe and far worse than normal saloon cars which are typically at 0.29ish.
These appear to be old trucks. In the brochure there is a link to a YT video which then links to a playlist. This playlist contains the following video "Volvo Trucks - Say hello to the future - Volvo FL Electric & Volvo FE Electric" [1] which was posted on May 14 2018.
I wonder what kind of charging speed these will have. I'm guessing a refuse truck doesn't need to charge very fast as it sleeps in a depot, but a delivery truck might do a few shifts a day so that requires fast charging.
The usage model they're targeting is trucks that return to a depot overnight. Local delivery and drayage routes have ample time to charge.
Honestly one of the bigger issues is upgrading the electrical service at the depots to support the chargers. I worked on a prototype EV truck, and they had to software-limit the charger when first installed, because running flat-out it could draw more power than the entire rest of the prototype facility. They had to get the utility out to drop a new transformer before they could unleash the charger's full power.
The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
> The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
1 Liter per second ~= 38.6 megawatts, for diesel.
I’ve never bothered paying attention to the flow rate in a fuel station, but it’s really fortunate that electric cars are fundamentally more efficient than combustion engines.
> Image result for gas station pump flow rate
Light passenger vehicle pump up to about 50 litres (13 US gallons) per minute (the United States limits this to 10 US gallons (38 litres) per minute); pumps serving trucks and other large vehicles have a higher flow rate, up to 130 litres (34 US gallons) per minute in the UK. and 40 US gallons (150 litres) in the US.
So roughly 80 megawatts coming out of that diesel nozzle. Most impressive!
Assuming 1/3 efficiency (because ICE) a gasoline pump (34ga/min) has a power output of a little over 8000hp or 6mw which comes out to around 4000amps assuming normal 480v 3ph.
It's the new version of the old 'the fastest data rate is a truck full of harddrives'. Now we can say 'for transferring energy, you can't beat a petrol pump pouring fuel'
If you operate a fleet of trucks, battery swapping becomes a lot more viable because you don't have to worry about swapping your good, new battery for a worn-out old battery.
If you have a fleet of trucks, having battery swapping batteries also means you need to have more batteries then trucks. Meaning extra capital cost.
Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads.
This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk.
Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage. Weight is one point against battery packs, but easy refill/swap and maintenance are two points in their favour. When you start to deal with volume commercial vehicles the cost of maintenance and repair adds up and is considered a part of doing business. If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move are an item my depot mechanics cannot touch or repair I am going to show you the door.
If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
> Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage.
Funny then that many large companies disagree with you have have order literally 100s of electric trucks from Tesla.
> If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move
For a truck, you are gone have body-on-frame anyway so the battery would probably not be structural. And it wouldn't be 'critical' to make the truck move, it would be a weight optimization.
> If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option.
Lots of companies transport thing between their own facilities and lots of companies have long term costumers. Adding the charging equipment is relativity cheap and could be built to you.
> If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Go check out how complex these battery swapping robots actually are. Having those at your facility is very costly and need a lot of space. The are prone to break down because they mechanical machines are moving around heavy batteries.
Also, so far nobody has even demonstrated this type of battery swap device for a large truck. Current system drop the battery from under the vehicle, this however is not possible in a body-on-frame construction, and a different method would have to be found. Non of the electric truck vendors have announced or even talked about such a system.
There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.
I wonder if battery swapping is a red herring which always will be talked about but never realized?
Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it.
Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need.
Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed.
Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
“ZES (Zero Emission Services) supplies interchangeable energy containers for new and existing inland vessels. These containers – called ZESPacks – are charged using renewable power.”
Wow! Thank you for showing me that, really piqued my interest as a commercial maritime nerd on the side!
I've seen other more permanent container solutions retrofitted on ships, though mostly passenger ferries with set schedules. Also only as auxiliary power allowing to eg. maneuver when docking without having to start another genset or capture excess energy from required gensets running in inefficient ranges.
I honestly don't see the issue for industrial type machinery. It's not like some Tesla that has to have a sleek body and beautiful styling. Trucks are already big boxes that carry giant boxes behind them.
Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts.
Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
Who don’t we do this? Driver makes it to the way station. Has a chat with the next driver while refilling and that driver takes it for the next four/six hours.
That /is/ how "we" do it with trains. The difference is that long-distance truckers generally live in their cabs for weeks on end, so they can't easily hand it off to another driver.
Ok. So then the lorry and the driver stay behind and the lorry/payload get switched. But apparently there is no such need for speed for road transport and otherwise they would use a plane?
Long distance trucking will be the last to go electric for a variety of reasons, weight being one of the biggest. We're mostly talking local delivery here.
Yes it is. That is why Tesla dropped it, if you actually think threw it, it makes no sense for most cases.
JB Struble just gave a great analysis of this at a Standford talk where he explained why the dropped it.
It actually makes the vehicle more complex and importantly heavier.
It also prevents further improvement, Tesla just showed of their new Cell-to-Structure concept, where the cells themselves have load on them. This fundamentally is incompatible with fast swap. Such a architecture is really great because it negates the 'penalty' of carrying around a battery compared to an ICE vehicle. In fact you might end up lighter, because you don't have the heavy engine and the battery is not so much heavier then the structural steel you would have used otherwise.
You can charge trucks during breaks, or during loading and unloading.
It wasn't just a concept - Tesla actually commercialized battery swapping because by doing so you got some California subsidy. Tesla drivers who applied could do a battery swap in 7 minutes at their one swap station. It was discontinued when the subsidy requirement ended.
I think standards about battery swapping will evolve which will make infrastructure around that to develop easier, quicker and be more interchangeable.
Largely depends on the neighborhood and existing infrastructure. My suburb is reasonably compact and Amazon and UPS have large facilities at the edge of town, right off the freeway. FedEx still has to process everything through a facility in the city center. It's a 30 mile RT for them just to begin delivering packages here.
I'm sure this will change soon but until it does, there's still a lot of wasted transit time.
The Volvo page has a lot of text. But does it have information?
On the Volvo page, I do not see a single piece of information before I scroll. Instead I see fluff like "We know that many transport operators work hard to reduce the environmental footprint..."
On the Tesla page, I see four pieces of information right away. Acceleration, energy consumption, drag coefficient and that it has four independent motors.
On the other hand, I don’t think any of the numbers Tesla gives is of direct interest to those who buy such large trucks (with the exception of the D energy consumption, which implies “cheaper to operate”, but what fraction of a truck’s cost is spent on fuel?)
Volvo’s ‘fluff’ at least hints at “this truck may be allowed to enter city centers” and “disability payments to drivers may go down”.
Roughly 1/3 of the operating costs of trucking is the fuel, another 1/3 is wages, and then the remaining 1/3 covers everything else (facilities, maintenance, repairs, purchase cost of vehicles, insurance, etc. etc.).
Musk's mission to accelerate the adoption of sustainable transport seems to be working flawlessly.
I can't help to think that the existing manufacturers would not have had any incentive of offering electric trucks anytime soon, until Tesla announced their plans for the Tesla semi.
I am not in the transport business, but personally I am very happy to see electric trucks arrive in Europe. I live in a city and I can't stand the noise and stench of trucks with diesel engines. Not waking up from a noise of a diesel engine will seriously improve urban live.
Tesla is a huge benefactor of government credits and programs - not the reason for those programs. Competitors are not jumping in because the market is ready to pay unsubsidized prices for EVs, they're jumping in because the market will pay subsidized prices.
We're only just going to see what the EV landscape looks like in the next few years without the hefty hand of the government tilting the scales.
Electric vehicles are not new. Electric cars are as old as cars. The first car to reach 100km/h was electric for example.
In the last 20 years batteries and electronics have improved a lot, so electric vehicles are interesting once again.
And I don't think Tesla can explain the Mitsubishi i-Miev or the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, or the Renault Fluence just to give a few examples. Sure these cars were not designed to take over the world, but eventually electric vehicles were going to become more and more common in my humble opinion.
To add to your comment, plenty of EU members have set a target to replace a part of their existing truck/car infrastructure with electric vehicles. For example, Germany wants to have a third of its trucks electric by 2030.
EU truck manufacturers like Volvo, Renault, MAN, and Daimler are all a year away from responding to market's demands. US manufacturers are behind a few years for a chance to respond to that initial demand.
>> Musk's mission to accelerate the adoption of sustainable transport seems to be working flawlessly.
> I think it would have happened anyway.
You could say that about literally anything. Space travel would have happened anyway. The internet would have happened anyway.
The conditions of history are a prerequisite for any major breakthrough. The advancement in rocket technology made space travel possible, but that doesn't make Neil Armstrong's achievements meaningless. He was not passively riding along some wave of inevitability, he was a pioneer that actively pushed humanity further into the future.
I didn't say it they would have never happened, I'm just observing that due to the competition (Tesla in this case, vaporware or not), the plans for EV trucks certainly seems to be accelerating.
True, but it's not just enough to prove the market and put in the effort to drive down the cost of batteries. Tesla gets paid credits from automakers who will not build EVs, but someone had to build and sell cars to be eligible for these credits, which is putting financial pain on legacy automakers [1]. This is important, otherwise these automakers would just cruise making combustion vehicles that further contribute to climate change.
A former Tesla board member said about ZEV credits: "Tesla is eating the competitors' lunch and having them pay for it, that's a pretty cool trick" [2]
The trucks will have a gross combination weight of up to 44 tonnes, and, depending on the battery configuration, the range could be up to 300 kilometers, Volvo said.
About 180 miles. Useful for some things I suppose.
Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles.
My point being: Its easy to announce that EV trucks are on the way next year, its much harder to make them economically feasible and manufacture them in large quantities.
They don't necessarily need to be economically feasible if they are enforced by regulations.
If major city centres start enforcing tighter congestion/pollution bans, such that last mile delivery of goods to city centres can only be achieved with zero emission vehicles, then suddenly logistics businesses are forced to integrate EV or hydrogen into their fleets.
I honestly don't think this is that unlikely in many European cities in the next decade.
I would even say it’s highly likely. For public transport tenders in the richer parts of Europe, emissions are weighted so heavily that many, if not all, winning bids nowadays are for fully electric buses.
Older Diesel cars also are banned from quite a few city centers, but I don’t know whether that extends to large trucks.
> About 180 miles. Useful for some things I suppose.
My wife drove rural postal delivery for years. The longest routes would be 150 miles, most of the routes were less than 50 miles. This was rural, low density delivery areas. In cities and suburban areas, routes are even smaller, more like 10-20 miles round trip.
A contractor might have a job site 20 miles from home and make 3 trips to various suppliers during the day.
Seems like that's the sort of service these trucks are targeting and they will have plenty of range for that. Longer haul routes would require a different type of vehicle, but most companies that do both long and short haul have dedicated long haul vehicles regardless.
> Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles.
Big trucks are expensive to maintain. While the initial expense might be higher, ongoing maintenance is much lower and reliability higher. Not having to deal with vehicle downtime is a big issue when that vehicle brings your profits in.
That range is perfect for doing deliveries all day long in a city like Denver. A few short runs on the interstate followed by city streets to deliveries is how most in city trucks get about, and 180 miles of electric sounds perfect. And while I can't imagine the cost being competitive, when you factor in smog reduction it could be.
Here in Europe they're experimenting with using EVs to deliver goods to restaurants and shops at night, since they're so quiet they can operate at night without disturbing anyone. This massively cuts down on the hours needed to get everything out since there's no traffic to worry about, which cuts costs too.
It also alleviates traffic during the day by removing those trucks.
It would be easy for governments to subsidize parts of this for the good of society.
Disagree, possibly. The EV trucks I've worked on were intended for exactly that usage, and specified accordingly.
I can't promise that's how Volvo is rating theirs, but A) their customers aren't stupid, and B) the aerodynamics of a truck can mean it gets better mileage around town anyway. Not so much with diesel because of idling and shifting and things, but an EV with regenerative braking is an entirely different animal.
Yeah, that's because the various national railway systems are poorly suited for international traffic. There are various EU efforts to improve the situation, but the governments try to protect their national monopolies etc. The end result being that in most cases it's easier to ship international freight by truck.
I'd imagine you could swap out your current Volvo trucks with these for supermarket DC to store deliveries in Metro areas. The DCs already have electric power on every dock to hook up the trailer's refrigerator while parked. And DCs I know of here in Australia are being covered in solar panels because of their large foot print. The suppliers who deliver to the supermarket DC from their own DCs could do the same. Long distance are usually done with road trains (3+ trailers), using much more powerful trucks, and then the trailers are split up outside of the city area and completed by towing single trailers. So again you could use the electric vehicle to complete the last leg.
As someone else mentioned, if they are quieter than the diesel equivalent, you may be able to start delivering to supermarkets in areas where they have curfews on deliveries after a certain time because of the noise.
I'm not trying to be negative, because I think electric vehicles are a good idea. However, what happens when a fleet of such trucks return to their depot and all need charging overnight? Wouldn't the depot need a lot of expensive infrastructure to avoid overloading the system? (I presume the same applies to the domestic/consumer electrical supply, once there's an EV in every driveway...)
“Expensive” is a very relative term — running high capacity power is something we’re very good at and scales well (it’s not 2x as expensive to increase power availability by 2x). Even with dozens of trucks charging at 100+ amps, it’s no more power hungry than your average industrial site - and it has the benefit of off-peak utilization so there’s much more slack before it would require new generation from the power company.
100 amps at what voltage? At 220v that's only 22kW which is nothing. This year my city has installed 350kW EV chargers in the old town without digging up the street (other than under where they install it), so the infrastructure must have already been there. I assume in an industrial area it would not at all be an issue.
Yeah I meant 100kW, but you’re right that even much higher power versions don’t require much retrofitting. A company I worked for had to install power to support 5MW of equipment where there was previously only a few houses nearby and the cost to do so was under $1M which was something like 2% of the total project cost. Incremental upgrades are extremely reasonable from a “capex / useful life” perspective.
Gas stations, refineries, pipelines, loading ports, bulk tankers and of course oil wells & rigs represent trillions of dollars of infrastructure & investment that have to be built and maintained. So I think we're just shifting the investment from one kind of infrastructure to another (one that's hopefully more efficient and less environmentally damaging).
How much does it time does it take your drivers to fuel up every day either at a commercial station or at an in-house fueling station? Likewise, monthly oil checks/ changes, and other services that would be reduced/ eliminated.
Yes, it will cost some money for companies to bring infrastructure online, but they will be eliminating a lot of ongoing expenses as well. There are a lot of expenses associated with driving ICE vehicles which people just ignore when they bring up the expenses associated with EVs.
It needs infrastructure, see my other comment in this thread, but the cost thereof can be considered part of the cost of fuel, in a way. You're currently spending money on diesel fuel, which is already paying for the expensive infrastructure to transport and store and dispense an energy-dense liquid. Just shift who you're paying for your energy, and now the electric utility uses that money to upgrade their infrastructure to let their customers buy more of their product.
Companies are generally happy to expand their operations to allow their customers to buy more of their product.
You may not be intentionally trying to be negative, but you're parroting the same FUD lines used against EVs for decades, and against horseless carriages a century ago. (And which, incidentally, became entrenched in Oregon and New Jersey in the form of laws prohibiting motorists from operating the dispensing infrastructure.)
> (I presume the same applies to the domestic/consumer electrical supply, once there's an EV in every driveway...)
I don't know about commercial vehicles but the British National Grid is adamant that there will not be any great difficulty in supplying electricity to charge electric cars.
dumb question, is it easy to redesign EV to use hydrogen?
Isn't the whole premise of hydrogen being
1. world adopts renewable energy
2. to compensate for lulls, build way more capacity
3. excess capacity bought cheaply to create hydrogen
...
5. profit!
It wouldn't make sense for the current EV makers to switch to hydrogen. Tesla, for instance, has spent billions of dollars to optimize their battery packs with their lithium-based chemistry and specific cathodes/anodes. To then switch over to fuel cell + hydrogen is a completely different architecture, and Musk is notoriously anti-Hydrogen.
There is a case to be made that excess renewables can be used to attempt to generate "green hydrogen" which is then a "storage" of renewables that can also be used for vehicles. I think in practice, it's a much smaller scale than battery electric vehicles.
Yes, some quick searching will show you that quite a few major brands are in the process of either building battery factories, or about to be building battery factories.
Reference for easier searching: Northvolt (new manufacturer) is working on a major factory with VW, CATL is building new factories, daimler is about to have a new factory come online, etc etc.
Yeahbut. The number of trucks on the road is minuscule compared to passenger cars, they just put on a lot more miles. A kilogram of lithium used in a truck battery will accomplish more than a kilogram of lithium used in a car battery. (Which also suggests the industry may be less cost-sensitive and able to tolerate price increases if they ever happen, although the trajectory is solidly downward.)
Furthermore, secondary use of EV packs (when they're down to maybe 60% of nameplate capacity, they're replaced and the old ones are sold into stationary applications) means that there'll be _decreasing_ demand for purpose-built stationary batteries. Five years ago, if you wanted to put together a massive lithium backup system, you had to buy new batteries. Today, you can head over to batteryhookup and get BMW, BYD, Mercedes, and other ex-EV batteries for pennies on the dollar, in modules with the connectors on 'em and everything.
The industry is actively pursuing this, by the way. Five years from now, it'll either be much easier and more official, or wrapped up in-house and out of third-party reach. But either way, the path from EV to stationary use is developing, and the packs which already did some service on the road, will fill much of the need for stationary batteries, displacing that market's appetite for virgin batteries.
As the secondary market floods with ex-EV packs, at some point it becomes economical to "mine" the really-dead ones for their lithium, and the loop closes. Recycling plants aren't the same as virgin-lithium plants, but we'll see those developing in due time.
Yeah, people are harping about how much minerals we need to dig up for all those batteries. Yes, that's true, and we should certainly seek to mine those minerals with minimum environmental damage, and seek out new battery chemistries not needing critical materials (e.g. Tesla has announced their next gen batteries will be cobalt-free).
But as you say, batteries can be recycled into new batteries. At some point we'll approach some saturation point, where most of the need for those minerals can be satisfied by recycling old batteries. As opposed to fossil fuels which just go up the tailpipe, and thus need new resources to be extracted constantly.
Car makers for the most part don't build their own cell factories. They do invest in battery pack factories.
However, there are major supply contracts being signed all the time. The major battery producers, Panasonic, CATL, LG, SK, Samsung SDI and even BYD. GM and LG have a major partnership and are building a factory in Ohio. SK is trying to build a factory in the US as well.
At the same time you have many new players coming onto the market. Tesla themselves are the most relevant. There are also major European projects, such as Northvolt (former Tesla guys from Giga Nevada) but also others like GigaVaasa. Northvolt will also build a large factory in Sweden, and a somewhat smaller one in Germany. CATL is building battery factories in Czech Republic and expanding existing factories.
There represent long term off-take agreements between car manufactures and cell providers.
Pretty much all of these have large contracts and are building factories all over the place.
All that said, nobody is as aggressive as Tesla with their targets. In fact, a good argument can be made that everybody else is copying the Tesla Gigafactory as a model. Even calling them Gigafactories and targeting the same sort of output levels.
In terms of car makers Tesla (and BYD) are the ones vertically integrating the battery.
What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for.
I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway).
And Volvo did it right. Targeting purpose, targeting users and business. Congrats. Finally.