A few years. At least one more year before production really ramps up. Say, another two before owners really start to fill out their fleets.
And, I should add, it’s going to be unevenly distributed for a while. I live in California and expect to see them going up and down I-5 not long from now. But we have mandates and subsidies and other things. It might be a while before you see them in West Virginia or wherever.
Nothing because that’s not what’s planned.
Yes, but an attendant will need to plug it in for you 
In theory, maybe. In practice, not so much.
When I started driving long distance around the UK, trucks had no beds for drivers. After a few months, I had a book with a selection of good places to overnight. The best ones were highly selective and if you messed up, they would always be full when you phoned.
The ones that operated more on the North American Motel principle had all kinds of problems. All I wanted at the end of a day’s work was a shower and a good meal, followed by a couple of pints while socialising and then a comfortable bed. A good breakfast in the morning and off to work again.
Sadly, there are some drivers who abuse the facilities. If I mention “gas station rest rooms” you will get the idea, accompanied by a propensity to steal anything not nailed down. Having your own bed and your own equipment on board, was a big improvement, apart from the socialising.
As for recharging - how about having a contactless recharging strip on a lane alongside the highway? Operators could be charged on the same system as auto-tolls.
Didn’t see this mentioned regarding personal road trips in electric vehicles, but the Ram pickup folks are including a backup gas generator in their EV trucks.
This kinda makes sense for a truck - as it’s likely to be moving further with heavier loads and using up the battery more quickly. Since it’s already a “cargo” vehicle, I assume the weight and space of the generator/fuel will be less of an issue than in a car. I’ll admit I’m a little confused whether this is a generator equipped EV or some kind of hybrid.
The Rev is a generator equipped EV. Sounds like a low stress inline six generator along with 300 miles of plug-in range. Makes sense for a truck I guess.
Does the generator function as “a series hybrid”?
The engine is not connected to the drivetrain in any way, if that’s what you mean.
Thanks. That’s what I was trying to figure out. I looked over the RAM website and discovered I could join and be one of the first and even become a “RAM Insider”, and that it had super high tech, and lots of horsepower, and really nifty display screens and I could even get discounts on RAM clothing so I could advertise for them…
But absolutely nothing about how it actually works or whether there’s a physical connection between the ICE and wheels. Modern advertising is confusing to me. The advertisers seem to be like rush-week at college – “Pay and you can join this popular group so you’ll be cool”, but without telling me any usable information.
Sell the sizzle, not the steak. Even if it’s $100K of steak. They do that crap because it works. Pisses me right off too, but you and I are apparently not the usual customer profile.
My Tesla is 5 years old, and the battery is still pretty much good as new. (charges to at least 95% of original amount, depending on temperature). I stopped at a charging station north of Toronto, and there were 12 or more stalls, and all of them were full, we had to wait (so 12 cars charging at once - a lot more than one semi) and the grid was still working.
I don’t think we need car trains (although that would be nice) but that’s what FSD is good for - much better on interstate highways than in city…
On my latest trip in a Tesla, I’ve noticed they’ve replaced many of the “back-in” charging stalls with “pull-through” stalls. And there was actually an attendant at one of the stations! I was shocked. He was friendly and said he was there to help people charge.
A lot of the places I’ve seen, there are, say, 8 stalls and the last one the pedestal is sideways and at the front of the stall so someone with a trailer could pull in nose first and the charger would be beside their rear tire (where the charge port is on a Tesla). Handy, because with a 2-bike hitch rack I had to get the bikes within 6 inches of the charger pedestal with the bikes loaded so that the cable would reach. The trailer stall was much easier.
One criticism I did see of the Tesla semi was about the power demand. For home overnight charging, I have a 240V/50A circuit (so 40A peak draw). 40A charges about 57k/hour, or about 35mi/hr. To charge from 9 to full (500k, or 300mi) would take about 9 hours, but you don’t let the battery get that low or charge that high. 10% to 20% for low, 80% to 90% for high is the recommendation for healthy battery life. Assuming the semi is about 10 times the Model 3 in terms of capacity (on a good day a Model 3 does 0.17kWh/mile) then an overnight charger for a semi would need 240v/400A or about 100kW, which is not bad for an industrial location, especially after hours if everything else is quiet. The problem comes, as one commetator describes, when you have to recharge a dozen or more trucks. Unless your business site is already a heavy electricity consumer, putting in a circuit to handle additionally over 1MW of power may be expensive, particularly if a new feed and onsite transformer is required.
I anticipate your typical industrial park would install a “charge site” and have a massive power feed installed to one location to accomodate charging for a number of businesses. Some slow overnight spots, a few high speed high power chargers.
Where I see a real opportunity for businesses is the smaller delivery vans and such - the charge demand is about the same as a car, the slower overnight charging is logical because the business does most of its deliveries during the day.
Another option is giant local battery packs, to limit the load and smooth out demand, since many utilities charge for electricity also by the peak usage. The same kWh demand spread over twice the time would be cheaper.
(following the news about new Tesla charging sites, so often the final issue is “the equipment is all intalled and ready to go, but the service from the electric compnay is the hold-up”)
I occasionally pull a trailer with my Tesla, and those nose-in chargers are wonderful. If there are none, I have to either park across several charging spots, or unhitch it.
The Supercharger in Beaumont, CA is all nose-in.
The Amazon warehouse nearest to me has dozens of chargers to keep their fleet of Rivian vans running.
How many places will have to charge dozens of trucks from empty every night? I’m sure it happens, but I don’t know how common it is. I’m not thinking of truck stops, but regional warehouse type setups. How many miles are the trucks driving that go from the regional Walmart warehouse to stores around the metro area? I really don’t know, but I expect not always 500 miles every day.
My point is, it might not be necessary to fill 15 trucks from 10% every night, but rather top up 15 trucks that may each have anywhere from 20-60% charge.
There is likely a huge range of use cases. Local and regional delivery trucks probably can charge whilst being loaded or unloaded - if they are moving between proper transportation bays. This works for local distribution workloads, but not for a whole raft of random pickup and delivery tasks.
Then you get the interstate routes. Where I live, the next major city (Melbourne) is 450 miles - 725 km. Many trucks do this run overnight. This overnight regime is important. In 2018 about 1200 trucks did this run each day. The run Sydney to Melbourne is about the same distance but sees close to 2000 trucks a day. This underlines the disconnect for long distance trucks and electric power. Unless a truck can carry enough battery to do the distance in one go - which trucks currently cannot - it isn’t viable. Even with battery swap capability half way along the routes - just getting power to the swapping stations to recharge the batteries is a major undertaking. Recharging 2000 trucks all arriving mid-journey overnight isn’t viable. The time lost recharging, and the battery degradation incurred with a high speed full discharge recharge cycle makes it impossible with current technology. Even if you could get enough power to the charging stations, which would require major interconnector upgrades, not just a substation upgrade. A Tesla truck has a 850kWh battery. 2000 trucks needing a recharge is 1.7 GWh. You might spread the arrivals over say four hours for overnight traffic. So maybe you could get away with a power distributor providing 500 MW.
The problem with battery degradation with deep cycling is probably the big issue with any working vehicle. It is what makes taxi drivers worry about the viability of EVs. For those with an EV doing just the usual daily rounds, EVs work well. If you want to make your battery live forever, recharge it every day to about 70%. Indications are that it will then outlive you. But if you slam it from 100 to near zero and back, expect about 4-500 cycles. Even 20-80% sees measurable degradation, especially if it is always fast charged. This pairing - fast and deep is where the problems lie.
The Tesla Semi is close. Sydney to Melbourne is ~900 km, while the Semi is 800 km. You’d probably want a tad extra for safety, but I’d think 200 km total for a mid-route charge would be fine (100 to cover the gap, and 100 for margin). The Semi does about 1.1 kWh/km and can easily charge at 750 kW. So under 20 minutes. I don’t know what Australia’s laws are, but in the US you must take a 30 minute break after 8 hours of driving. So a route like that, which probably takes 10ish hours, would need a break like that anyway.
I’m not sure what the power situation is along the route, but 2000 trucks adding 220 kWh each mid-route is 440 MWh. If they can spread the charging over, say, 8 hours, that only averages to 55 MW. It’s not chump change, but it’s small compared to the needs of even a mid-size city.
The endpoints will need more, since they’ll be charging the trucks the rest of the way. But those are both large cities that can handle it.
The mileage capability of the Tesla semi is a bit of a wobbly number. Tesla list a gross combined vehicle mass of 82000 pounds, aka 36.6 tonnes. They steadfastly refuse to provide the mass of the prime mover. But some simple sanity checks show that it is significantly heavier than a conventional prime mover. So the useful load is likely somewhat compromised. Here in Oz the most common long distance semi rig is a B-Double, which has a gross combined vehicle mass of 50 tonnes. On the real outback runs we run road trains, and they get silly big. But these big intercity runs are heavily utilised by B-Doubles. The economies of trucking make high mass big rigs the only way to go.
The question about the Tesla Semi’s range that they don’t answer is at what speed the range was calculated.
A Tesla Semi holds about 3GJ of energy.
Rolling resistance is one question. Tesla can’t do much about that. Truck tires can get a C_{rr} of maybe down to 0.005. Resistance is about 1500N. A 36 tonne vehicle travelling 800km on those wheels uses about 1.5GJ of energy. Which is about half the battery capacity. There isn’t much energy left in the budget for air resistance.
In the past it was generally accepted that air drag accounts for 70-80% of the energy for a semi travelling at 100km/h. Things have got better with improved aero, with 25% reductions possible. Drag goes as the square of velocity. No doubt Tesla have expended serious effort getting the drag coefficient down, but they can’t perform miracles. The frontal area of a semi is pretty much a given number, as it is constrained by the loading limits. About 11 m^2 A really good C_D for a semi rig, with lots of care taken, is about 0.5. 100km/h is about 27.8 m/s. Drag is about 2600N. So nearly but not quite double the rolling resistance.
At 22 m/s = 80km/h, the drag might drop to 1500N. So lineball with the rolling resistance, and just squeaking in under the energy budget, assuming no other losses.
Just back of the envelope calculations. So not accounting for other losses. But it supports the idea that running at rated gross combined load, at 80km/h, on the flat, with everything going right, a Tesla Semi might just manage 800km.
A B-Double with its extra mass, length, and expected speeds would need well over double the energy.
We bought our first BEV this summer, and during my research I found some interesting correlations. A compact fossil car burns some 4-5 L/100 km WLTP, a compact BEV uses some 1.5 kWh/100 km WLTP. That’s a factor of 3. A family-size fossil car burns some 6-7 l/100 km WLTP, a family-size BEV uses some 2 kWh/100 km WLTP. That’s a factor of 3.
So, there are two obvious conclusions:
And while BEVs shine for short- and medium distance person transport and is quite OK for longer-distance person transport (up to some 5-800 km), battery-electric for long distance truck transport is probably almost as far into the future as battery-electric airplanes. The energy density of a tank of gasoline or diesel is about ten times the energy density of a modern Li-ion battery.