Cool trucks, but if one of the concerns is weight, I can’t imagine a BEV truck with any decent range is gonna have appreciably better weight/axle. But perhaps I’m overestimating how much battery they’d need.
Battery electric trucks exist in pretty much any weight class you can think off. This stopped being a theoretical thing about a decade ago. The main issue is cost and even that is starting to look really good. For last mile deliveries in cities it's pretty much game over for ICE vehicles. Electrical vans are selling as fast as they can be produced. They are cheaper to operate, cleaner to drive, more comfortable (no vibrations, quiet), etc. and they get the job done.
Range is fine too. 300-500 miles is plenty for a long distance truck doing 50-60 miles per hour. There are several manufacturers selling battery electrical class 8 trucks now. It will take a while for those to get common of course and for charging infrastructure to ramp up (these things need some serious amounts of juice). They have their required 45 minute break every few hours in any case. Great opportunity to charge the vehicle.
Range anxiety for commercial vehicles is not a thing. You might have personal anxiety but it's an entirely predictable thing that you can plan and budget for from a business point of view. It either is good/affordable enough and adequate or it is not.
In fact, it seems the low range delivery vans are popular because they are more cost effective and more efficient (less unneeded dead battery weight). Why spend the extra money on range you don't need? It seems the sweet spot is around 100 miles range. Some vans do even less than that. But it's more than the average delivery van does in a day apparently. Longer range options are available. Anxiety does not factor into this. It's a simple matter of "do we spend the 10-20k extra and is it worth it?"
It's meant for cities. It don't have to have thousands of km in range.
But as I read for Volta Zero they promises 150-200 km od range with ~9 tonnes payload (but they want also 16-ton variant). For city driving looks okay for me.
Not to mention the idea is to reduce inner city pollution and noise pollution levels. Current trucks are despised in cities for this. It’s worth sacrificing on some other aspects to achieve that.
except for that damn backup "beep beep". Yes, I know the arguments for safety, and few of them are based on studies which show safety improvements
esp vs other options, like backup cameras. Or if the beep only signaled if there was an obstruction behind the truck. That would be a great use for computer vision. Someone standing behind the truck (or even just something which might be a person)? Beep. Otherwise, keep quiet. An alarm which is false 10x more than it is true is not an alarm.
The beep isn't for the driver. I don't want it to beep after I step out behind it, I want it to beep before.
Despite that, there is an alternative which sounds more like a hiss. The main benefit is that you can identify the direction from your hearing. I have to look in all directions to find where the beep is coming from.
It's worth it to you to trade distance for clean/quiet, but it's the companies involved using the trucks that need to be convinced. Telling them that they need to have separate trucks for city use and long haul use will receive push back from sheer momentum of how it's done now. Unless the cities get involved and tax the bejeebus out of them for not switching, they will never switch.
They already often have very large trucks that only go to warehouses, and would be a pain to drive through a city, especially such an old and super-dense one as NYC.
Smaller trucks move smaller quantities around the city from the warehouses.
Maybe sometimes you need to bring something especially large e.g. for a construction; such deliveries may be special-cased and planned carefully, instead of being completely off-limits.
It's not the companies that need to be convinced, it's a matter of the people wanting this enough that politicians act on it or get voted out, and then companies are just forced to follow the regulations that require such trucks.
