[Elon Musk] recently staged one of his characteristic high-profile product launches, at which he unveiled a new Tesla electric semi-truck. It was long on promise and short on battery pack weight figures, so of course [Real Engineering] smelled a rat. His video investigating the issue is below the break, but it’s not the link that caught our eye for this article. As part of the investigation he also created an online calculator to estimate the battery size required for a given performance on any electric vehicle.
It’s not perfectly intuitive, for example it uses SI units rather than real-world ones so for comparison with usual automotive figures a little mental conversion is needed from kilometres and hours to metres and seconds if you’re a metric user, and miles if you use Imperial-derived units. But still it’s a fascinating tool to play with if you have an interest in designing electric cars or conversions, as you can tweak the figures for your chosen vehicle indefinitely to find the bad news for your battery pack cost.
It’s very interesting from a technical standpoint to see a credible attempt at an electric truck, and we hope that the existing truck manufacturers will show us more realistic prototypes of their own. But we can’t help thinking that the overall efficiency of electric long-distance trucking could be improved hugely were they to make a truck capable of hauling more than one trailer at once. Any safety issues could be offset by giving these super-trucks their own highways, and with such dedicated infrastructure the power could be supplied from roadside cables rather than heavy batteries. In such circumstances these long trains of electrically hauled containers could be rather successful, perhaps we might call them railroads.
Sadly nobody has yet produced a semi-truck conversion to grace these pages. The closest we’ve probably come is a pickup-truck.
“Perhaps we might call them railroads”
Hahaha! YES!
Or a Tram
I agree but there are two factors:
1. How many countries actually got a good railway system, which is electrified (looking at emissions).
2. You cannot drop my packages to my house from the train as I live 5 miles away from it.
In reality what needs to happen is: Improve on upon the track system and then get electric lorries (trucks for the Americans), to deliver it around the city. Europe is perfect for that test, where you have high density of populace in some cities.
1. Most of Europe.
2. You get your parcels at home from a <3.5t little truck anyway.
I’ve never quiet worked out why large trucks exist for goods transportation. Apart from satisfying militant union mobs.
There will always be special cases where the rail doesn’t suit but from what I see here in the part of Australia I live in most of the trucks on the highway go from one distribution center to another.
Trucks should only be needed for short runs from regional distribution center to the consumers home which is the ideal situation for electric vehicles.
Rail is only good if you have a large, monolithic load like coal, gravel and such, and you’re trying to send it over a long distance. And you can plan the transport in advance, sometimes months ahead. It works wonderfully when you want to transport several thousand tonnes of coal to a power plant on a regular basis. Not so much for small loads coming from a large number of suppliers, like consumer goods usually do.
Load a truck on a train at one distribution hub near the starting point, unload it ad distribution hub near destination point. This combines cheapness and safety of trains with versatility of trucks…
And we have this boring invention call containers….
I’ve sent cars around australia from point to point that was also served by rail. It was much much cheaper to send them on a truck.
While in theory this sounds good there is a massive problem, frequently in the uk, locomotives are moved by road! Yes road,railway locos on semi trailers by road.
When restoring the bluebell railway most of the imberhorn cutting land fill was taken away by trucks, because it was cheaper, a lot cheaper.
“It’s not perfectly intuitive, for example it uses SI units rather than real-world ones so for comparison with usual automotive figures a little mental conversion is needed from kilometres and hours to metres and seconds if you’re a metric user, and miles if you use Imperial-derived units. ”
*wink*wink*nudge*nudge* Merry Christmas, Jenny.
Yes. Imperial Rome :-)
Clickbait much?
I’ll take the clock-bait: SI *is* intuitive for 95% of the planet of course! Unfortunately, for a US article it’s the 95% of the planet that barely exists ;-)
But, oh what an unintuitive nightmare they are, having to multiply and divide by powers of 10 all the time when you could be using a random assortment of base 12/16/8 whilst conjuring up those “British” horse powers; foot pounds per square inch or other ‘real-world’ hilarities ;-)
Click-bait! Stupid autocorrect which I didn’t check!
“Any safety issues could be offset by giving these super-trucks their own highways” Perhaps we could provide electricity and rails, we could call them Railroads!
Agree with you there… but then you get the situation where three adjacent states come up with their own rail standards independently… then bicker about whose standard should be used.
Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria… for example.
Nothing new here…
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/01/bumper-cars-o-1.html#more
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/01/bumper-cars-o-1.html
He’s representing weight ratio’s by using a representation of volume.
Not really interesting with such a ratio. And I don’t like the style of the presentation either. No Tesla for me.
Hauling more than one trailer at once? You mean like this?
Whatever happened to the battery swap stations that were faster than a fill up?
Tesla uses 70kWh batteries for the model S.
The efficiencies aren’t identical, but 70kWh is what you get from 1.72 gallons of diesel fuel. Or put differently, one of those 5 gallon refill tanks of diesel contains the same energy as three Tesla batteries.
I’m not sure if I would room left when replacing my Pickup’s diesel tank with 22 Tesla batteries.
Also note that the initial version is not a city, start-stop application, but a long-haul railroad like application (also see self-driving trucks that need tens of thousands in technology that railroads don’t need).
Probably only about 6 batteries, due to better efficiencies, but, yes, still an issue.
“for example it uses SI units rather than real-world ones”
I prefer SI units a lot over re… “american”-units… maybe you should get used to them when authoring tech articles for an international audience…
The British govt have a plan, a few years ago diesel cars were the cleanest thing ever, in fact they left a trail of wild flowers wherever they went, so British people bought diesl cars, loads of them.
Then a sciency type boffin did some maths, it went like this, oil is going to run out, battery cars are ok. battery trucks,diggers,tractors and everything else are not now and never will be ok, we can grow diesel, but not if we have this many diesel cars.
So now diesel cars are the dirtiest thing known to man, except maybe pornhub, bit at least thats environmentaly friendly, being mostly electric.
As an aid to those that dont know, 38tonne trucks carry roughly 24tonnes trucks that pick up from a rail head are allowed to weigh 44 tonnes, 27 .6 tonnes of cargo plus the container at 3.750 tonnes.
An engine,gearbox and full tank of fuel weigh roughly 2 tonnes, the question is can you propel 42 tonnes around for 8 hours at 56 mph with a battery that weighs 1.5 tonnes?
I’m assuming the electric moter and controller weigh 500 kgs.
Sorry it’s all metric, but if you’re capable of solving the actual problem you’re more than capable of doing some faily badic maths.
Or even “fairly basic” maths.
Ahem…”It’s not perfectly intuitive, for example it uses SI units rather than real-world ones”
By “real world” do you mean “olympic size swimming pools”, “football pitches”, “human hairs”, and “double decker buses”?
I’m waiting for the media to describe HMS Queen Elizabeth’s displacement not in tons but in “olympic size swimming pools”.