Road trips w/ electric vehicles

Factual Questions
221

There’s nothing about your proposed scheme that has anything to do with electrification. If it actually resulted in moving more goods for less money, it would already be happening. It’s not like big shipping companies aren’t ruthless cost-cutters.

Or maybe they’re all making a big mistake, and there’s a business opportunity to undercut them while offering superior working conditions (which would result in lower driver turnover which is further cost savings). I have only a few tenuous connections to the industry so could be wrong, but I would be very surprised.

And all this still doesn’t make any sort of case against swappable batteries in big trucks. Even if under ideal conditions you could make charge time perfectly coincide with the trucks’ extant downtime, there are going to be all sorts of edge cases where being able to quickly add some range would be economically advantageous. The extremely limiting size/shape constraints on passenger vehicle battery packs are much relaxed on large trucks, and there are ways for the capital expense of the extra battery packs to be amortized across the entire industry. I don’t know that swappable batteries for trucks will actually end up being a thing, but there are obvious advantages to them and most of the reasons they look like they’re not going to be a thing for passenger vehicles don’t hold for trucks.

222

My thought about the scheme is that it’s optimizing for speed. Keep the load moving continuously. That is also what is being optimized for when discussing charging speed, battery swapping, or other strategies.

It’s my understanding, that what shipping companies care about is cost per mile, not how quickly a load is moved. Electrics supposedly have a much lower cost per mile than diesels. If that turns out to be true, the industry will switch as fast as trucks can be built, even if they’re limited to 500 miles between charges.

Tesla estimates their truck will cost $0.25 per mile less to operate than a diesel truck.

223

Right, but cost per mile isn’t just operating costs. It’s also amortized capital costs. If the truck is rolling fewer hours out of the day, then the capital expense of the truck is spread out over fewer miles.

224

Supposedly, Tesla was planning to make a “megacharger” that could add 400 miles of range to its truck in about thirty minutes. If that’s true (and I realize that Musk has an established record of overpromising stuff), the truck seems plausible.

BTW, I read that Tesla is delaying production of its truck to devote batteries to passenger car production, so it’s not going to be available soon.

225

Existing V3 Superchargers will put 250 kW into an 80 kWh pack. Putting >1 MW into a >500 kWh pack is easy; just combine several existing charging circuits in parallel. Nothing difficult tech-wise compared to the current shipping product.

Where Musk tends to underdeliver is in the rate of deployment. They’ve been somewhat… optimistic in existing Supercharger deployments. This probably matters less for a Semi since the long haul routes will mostly be on major highways (and initially, buyers can simply limit their EV routes to ones with chargers). And apparently, Tesla is building a Supercharger factory to produce 10k charger stalls per year, so maybe the production bottleneck will be somewhat alleviated.

As you mention, though, Tesla is still battery limited. You can build 6 Model 3/Y cars with the cells from a 300-mile Semi. But the former will be far more profitable. They’ll need to ramp up their 4860 production massively before it makes sense to build the Semi vs. other vehicles.

226

In fact, there were photos of the Tesla Semi prototypes charging at regular Superchargers - IIRC it had a box with 2 or 3 supercharger cables plugged in, connected to the Semi charger port. The stop time to charge probably competes favorably with the amount of time it would take to swap trailers and be sure everything is connected safely.

Tesla has a new design (allegedly coming to the newer versions of their vehicles) called the “tabless battery”. As I understand it - Consider a regular battery as a roll of sandwich anode-electrolyte-cathode, with the anode and cathode having metal tabs sticking out every so often - when the configuration is rolled up, the tabs are bent down flat so the top of the roll is the + and the bottom the - . Charge current has to go through those tabs and then spread out for the adjacent -node. With tabless, there are continuous tabs all along the roll so there is no bottleneck where current has to flow to get to a length of anode/cathode strip, it enter the full length of the battery strip simultaneously - and the battery can be charged much faster without overheating the point where a tab joins the anode or cathode. As i understand, the concept has been proven and it’s simply taking time to put into production, as the resulting batteries are a different form factor and also require changed management electronics.

This is the direction of EV’s also - no battery swaps, much shorter waits to charge. All that’s missing is the infrastructure. I suspect the future also holds large battery buffers so the chargers don’t put massive intermittent drains on the grid.

And… the problem with every EV maker, especially Tesla, is producing enough batteries to meet demand.

227

This is basically how a stage coach works. :+1:

228

You know, that really is a kinda neat idea. There could be a limited number of nodes, so a person might need to drive 100-150 miles to get to an entry node, and another 100-150 at the other end to get to their destination. Would require some complicated math and infrastructure and coordination to minimize then number/length of stops. My limited experience w/ ferries is that the on/off is sorta a clusterfuck. And I don’t really see it appealing to enough Americans who want to go exactly where they want exactly how and when they want.

But it IS a neat idea. I could imagine driving to Chicago - or Milwaukee to hop on a train that would take me to w/in 100-150 miles of my destination in - say Washington or Florida.

229

Jalopnik reports that a group of six electric utility companies (American Electric Power,
Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Entergy Corporation, Southern Company and
Tennessee Valley Authority) are planning a network of charging points around the South and Midwest. I expect over time, chargers will be more widely available.

230

I put forth perhaps a more sensible notion upthread,

which would eliminate the time needed to load cars on the train (you just hitch them together), and you would not “hop on a train”, rather, ride in your own car. No large locomotive would be needed because each car would be powering the train, and most importantly, since the train is self-powered, it could be staged to employ live decoupling so that getting off at a station would not require stopping the whole train, just releasing the tail. If such trains were scheduled for thousand-mile runs, they would probably make periodic stops at major stations to allow the passengers to get lunch, stretch their legs, take a piss, but probably two-to-four hundred miles straight, instead of the runs of 30 miles or less one sees on Amtrak.

231

There’s a local supermarket that has charging stations at some of its parking spaces. Is this something they are providing as a service? Or do people pay for a charge when they park there? (I realize nobody can say what the policy is at this particular supermarket. I’m asking what the general policy is.)

232

It varies. I know that a number of Tesla Supercharger stations are placed with a neutral-cost basis. Tesla pays for the charger and maintenance, but receives the fees. The supermarket/mall/whatever allows Tesla to be there and pays for the lease. They get the benefit of more Tesla customers showing up, and Tesla doesn’t have to pay for the land.

233

IME, this was a free service a few years ago, and is more likely a paid service for public parking these days. Your case might depend on how long ago those were installed.

There are Blink-network chargers at a few supermarkets in my town, and those are all charged to your Blink account, or you can enter a credit card number if you aren’t on the network.

234

It varies. By us there is one that is completely free. You just plug in. One is blink (or another network) that you pay, but a pretty low charge. Others might have higher rates.
But, it should be noted, these are level 2 stations and won’t be much help on a road trip unless you park overnight.

235

I’ve encountered all of the following charging situations:

  • Completely free, just plug in.
  • Free, but you need a free account with the charging network.
  • Free for some people, but not others.
  • Free at some times, but not others.
  • Pay for charging in a lot where parking is free.
  • Pay for parking, but then charging is free.
  • Pay for charging, and that includes the parking cost.
  • Pay for charging, and that includes the parking cost, but the attendant doesn’t know, so makes you pay again.
  • Pay for parking and for charging separately.
236

DSeidGuest

Feb '21

There are other paths.

No Tesla fanboy I, but the Semi includes a model with 500 miles range.

There is a very negative review of the Tesla Semi out (quoting a Pepsi driver who regularly drives one):

237

From the article:

  • During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city [imagine what happens when 100% of ICE vehicles have switched over to BEV in California by 2035 ].

I couldn’t find anything about this power outage, but just at face value this is a non-sequitor. Whether planned or accidental the power outage when installing the station doesn’t translate into ongoing issues with grid reliability.

I’m pretty suspicious of this “Interview by an anonymous friend”.

238

Agreed. I’m quoted above as not being terribly sanguine about heavy duty EVs but the outage, if it happened, doesn’t seem a big deal.

239

Random anti-Tesla Substack with information from an anonymous “employee” might not be totally correct? Say it isn’t so!

It’s not worth picking apart the whole thing since it’s so bad, but here are the first few things that stood out:

this implies a much smaller battery pack than expected, as Musk said battery efficiency for the Semi is 1.7 kWh per mile

No it doesn’t. It might mean that 1.7 kWh/mi is optimistic, which it likely is. And at any rate, 400 miles on the heaviest load in the real world is pretty solid.

The constant use of the battery pack is unprecedented and is causing reliability problems for Tesla and other EV truck makers

What does this even mean? It’s an EV truck. It’s designed to run off the battery. EV cars run off the battery constantly and are fine. The truck carries more load but has a much bigger battery. It’s probably easier conditions than a car, given the capacity.

The batteries completely burned out

Batteries don’t “burn out,” even in a colloquial sense. They can be abused, and obviously depleted, but they don’t burn out, whatever that’s even supposed to mean.

The PepsiCo employee said that the Tesla Semi is using “pouch” battery cells made in Nevada

This seems extremely unlikely. Tesla is secretive, so it’s impossible to be certain, but they use cylindrical cells basically everywhere (the only exception I know is for their 12v batteries), and there’s no evidence that Nevada is capable of pouch cell production.

All Tesla Semis and other electric trucks are subsidized by California state and the Megacharger station alone cost around $6 million

They’re undoubtedly getting subsidies; there’s no secret here. A megacharger station might well cost $6M, but that would be for multiple stalls. Doesn’t seem like a big deal. Tesla has the lowest costs in the industry for fast DC chargers, and the megachargers are basically several car chargers ganged together. A few chargers at the endpoints won’t cost $6M.

Tesla is using car parts on the Semi

The only aspect of this that’s remotely true is for the motors (which they’ve already said are shared with the auto lines). They’re rated for a million+ miles and the gearbox, etc. is still custom for the truck. The interior screens, computers, etc. are also shared.

But major drivetrain components being shared? It makes zero sense. Like they literally wouldn’t even fit. Has the author even looked at the size difference between a semi and a small SUV?

There is no consideration for battery longevity, which is another reason why the batteries keep dying and Tesla Semis need to be towed away [the Megachargers used for the Semi release 750 kW and only require 50 minutes for a 400-mile charge; that’s a ton of energy that will wear the batteries out quickly

Just totally wrong, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work. When you scale up the size of a pack, you also increase the power it can safely be charged at. If you double the number of cells (say), you double the power, the total charge time stays constant, and so does the battery longevity. The Semi can charge at roughly the same rate as a car, in terms of fraction of battery life added per minute. So there’s no additional wear.

Tesla’s car batteries have excellent longevity, generally >90% capacity after 150k miles, and this has likely gotten better over time. There’s no reason to think they’d go backwards here.

Well, that’s enough. It’s largely just laughable nonsense. The Semi program has undoubtedly run into some problems here and there, and is a few years late, but they’ll be all over the road not too long from now.

240

How would you define “not too long?”