That’s probably the best path forward. Chickens and egg problems are better handled by starting with smaller birds that have smaller eggs.
When I was a kid in the 1970s or 1980s, Amtrak advertised the Autotrain quite a bit and I remember seeing an article that explained why it didn’t go further north than Washington, DC. Apparently the tunnels north of there don’t have enough headroom for the tall traincars needed to car passenger cars.
I always wanted to take the Autotrain, mostly so we could go to Disney World.
One of their links explains why the 25% alone is simplistic. When matters. And which state.
It doesn’t change the fact that however many tons of 4680s you need for a ~MWh is freight you can’t carry. Streamlining, lightweighting, platooning, automation, “new usage pattern models” all work just fine for ICEs too, with the exception of batteries-as-structural-components. Which supposedly ol’ Musky has people working on. So I hope he’ll prove me wrong.
It points out that access to even a suitable low-voltage circuit, while less prevalent in rented residences, isn’t a given for cars parked at owned residences.
And? You can say the same thing about any component. A pound of diesel is a pound you can’t carry as freight. Without realistic numbers, it’s a meaningless critique.
I remember seeing analyses in the early EV days comparing the energy density of a gallon of gas with the batteries of the day and concluding that EVs are impossible because a single gallon is equivalent to hundreds of pounds of batteries. You could fill your car with batteries and fit maybe 3 gallons worth, and who wants a 3 gallon gas tank and a trunk full of cells? It was a dumb analysis, even then. This one is marginally better but still makes pessimistic estimates on basically every front.
Yes, you are correct that any added component that adds weight is a disadvantage. If you have better numbers than the article, let’s see yours. And at least with a pound of diesel, you don’t put it in the tank if you aren’t going to need it.
Tesla hasn’t changed the chemistry at play one bit. But even then, 380 Wh/kg is truly amazing and the 4680 is going to have a big impact on light vehicles and drayage, but it’s still weight and distance limited.
Of course the lack of an ICE engine and fuel saves weight. And max weight of loaded truck is capped by law at 36 tons. So what you need to know is a comparison of the Semi unloaded and a fully gassed up regular unloaded truck. If the capacity is significantly less that factors into more loads having to be hauled by x% and offset other potential cost savings.
So here’s an analysis of that. Taking out and putting in.
If we are going to go fully to EVs then what will drive the development in recharge facilities won’t be people doing the occasional long trip, it will be commercial vehicles that have to drive long distances every day, if these commercial vehicles are to go electric then there will have to be some sort of recharge facilities that don’t add significantly to the duration of the trip
And therein lie the apples and oranges. Yes, a medium-range, sleeper-less, unit using SotA lightweighting technology weighs in at less than the average long-range unit carrying enough fuel for a far longer trip.
Except the OP was asking about a light-duty vehicle manufacturer making the change in 2035. As we’ve seen in real time, smaller vehicles are easy to electrify. So even if we do eventually go all-electric, there will be a gap before the long-distance commercial vehicles catch up. Absent policy drivers or new technology.
Although I believe heavy vehicles have a shorter lifetime, which could narrow that gap as light ICEs will take longer to cycle out.
We’ve seen some data on spikes in holiday travel, but I wonder what the spike in near-interstate fuel purchases is. I expect it to be smaller due to vehicle efficiency.
I don’t think you read the link.
The stripped down “glider” the quote refers to is a current same class 8 long haul aero line haul tractor stripped out of the Diesel engines, transmission, fuel, and so on. Then adding back in the electric components 500 mile range battery inclusive. Total about the same as state of the art aero class 8 tractors, which are lighter ( and thus capacity for bigger loads) than others on the road.
Apples to apples. Same loads possible.
Bring this back to the op. Yes trucking with EVs will be possible, and it will require infrastructure from extra generation distributed along the way, to the charging stations to all points between.
This will be the heavy backbone that the much smaller long distance drivers of lighter weight vehicles charging needs will be added on to, in that hypothetical future of all vehicle sold are electric, leading to a gradual replacement of the ICE vehicles in the national fleet
@LSLGuy, couldn’t you just set up a system where individual unit owners can pay to get a charging hookup for their individual assigned parking spots? Presumably, it’d be just a few of them at first, and your electrical infrastructure should be able to handle a few added loads. As the number gradually increases, then you could start looking into increasing the complex’s connection to the grid, and so on.
As far as peak times and so on go, one point that’s often overlooked is that car-charging nicely complements alternative energy like wind. The biggest problem with wind is that it isn’t blowing all the time. You can mitigate that significantly by averaging over a large area (though then you get transmission losses), but you can also mitigate it by averaging over time. Install smart meters that can change the rate in real time, and the power company charges a lower rate (constantly communicated to the meters) while the wind turbines are spinning than while they’re not. Then, the user with a car that takes 6 hours to charge, plugs in 12 hours before they need to leave in the morning. And the charger tracks the price, and charges only when the electricity is cheap, while still making sure to get the charging finished by the time you set for it to be ready. Presto, the cars run entirely on renewable energy, the windmills never go to waste, and the baseline generators keep at a nice, steady, predictable level.
I read enough to know that their estimate weighs in at over 5000 lb more than the T680 (with a 52" sleeper, fueled for the same range) they reference. And that’s even before correcting for the difference between actual T680 component weights and the “average” weights they’re using for their estimate.
Thinking aloud, I wonder it the auto train is also a chicken and egg situation. It’s so limited and inefficient because few people use it, and few people use it because it’s so limited and inefficient
I’d just love to take the autotrain from Minneapolis to Chicago, or from Minneapolis to Florida if only it were affordable and even possible, I’m assuming that it would be possible to have robots load the cars a lot faster than humans can if there were enough demand to invest in the intitial technology. Or build features into future self-driving cars that they can load themselves.
As far as costs, it’s a fair point to look at one night’s hotel, considering that if you want to arrive in Florida in the morning you’re spending the night in Georgia or someplace. At a Holiday Inn Express that’s $150 you don’t have to pay. That made us feel better about paying for the Yarmouth ferry back when they were doing overnight trips on a slow cruise type boat (now they’re doing fast day trips on a catamaran)
It’s not fair to factor in the cost of shipping a car since if you drove you wouldn’t have to ship a car, so you’re comparing the cost of driving, food, and one night hotel vs the train fare.
ISTM the advent of rental cars has destroyed the rationale for the autotrain. It was a 1950s-thinking invention first deployed way too late in the 1980s that’s grossly silly in the (pre-COVID) 2020s.
It’s now trivial to rent a car rather cheaply anywhere an autotrain might have enough customers to warrant a stop. The one thing modern vacationers don’t have is time to spare. Fly and rent a car will almost always be cheaper. And will add one or two days at the destination to whatever finite vacation time they have.
I could imagine a network of autotrains being useful to retirees and snowbirds taking more extended trips, where the incremental couple of days saved don’t matter. But these demographics are well-served today by rented or owned RVs, and/or flying coupled with the many services that will transport your car via truck door-to-door for remarkably little money. So while such a rail network would be useful, I predict it would not come anywhere near being economically viable.
Why the discussion about tractors? I have a 1959 Britannica atlas that show not roads but rails. We had a massive rail network – even in the west, there were few places more than 100 miles from a point of service. If we need to go all-electric, rail is the most obvious way to move freight efficiently. Long haul trucking is just too wasteful.
You can blame that on the Interstate Highway System. If it hadn’t been built, the trucking industry would likely be only a small fraction of what it is today. However, this is irrelevent to the question of electrification of vehicles. The trucking industry is big and electrification is not going to shrink it. Nor will arguments against it. So it has to be converted too.
There is a lot of interest in electric trucks for local deliveries, like for UPS or Fedex, or even to replace the Grumman LLV trucks the USPS has been running for decades. These sort of vehicles typically run less than a hundred miles in a day, and return to a fixed depot each evening.
So even if long-haul trucking has issues that make an electric conversion difficult, there are plenty of other trucks that can be converted.
The Tesla Semi, technology that will likely be improved upon over the next decade or so, can handle today’s standard load for Class 8 trucks. Maybe the best lightweighted aero Class 8 trucks can carry a percent more as max load carried, but trucking has been working fine with the standard containers opf standard weight maximums. My understanding is that the biggest … driver … of lightweighting is fuel efficiency, not bigger load capacity. And a smaller fuel tank is part of the lightweighting process.
Some interesting factoids. (pdf - from 2013 but most recent I found)
Trucking doesn’t require intermodal switching for the last 100 miles; it is not going away, even if rail can be improved to f=gain more market share.
As stated earlier, it seems very likely that long haul trucking is early pickings for autonomous vehicles, or minimally semi-autonomous vehicles train-like slaved to a lead truck driver in tight formation, platooning (increasing fuel efficiency/range). Such can be done with diesel tractors of course, but it articulates with electrification well.
But my point is that, at least in theory, rail freight (and passenger transport as well) allows for a large reduction in the battery dependency issue. For long haul transport, the requirement for battery payload could be reduced by moving the juice through the track system instead of hauling the weight of the batteries on the train. There are, yes, obvious limitations and drawbacks, but for transport of distances greater than a few hundred miles, it seems like electrified rail would have genuine advantages over BEV truck transport, even with autonomous trucks.