Tesla Launch of Pick-Up

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:

Semis are already viable and with advanced orders and future productions sold out.

Elon Musk success is seeing the light, not the clouds eclipsing it.

No, they are not viable. As I explained to time2roll in the other thread about the semis.

You are making a lot of assumptions based things working 100% as they should. These BEV trucks will only be for a small market of local drop and hook. Most of your day cab delivery drivers will go well over 500 miles in a given day. These trucks will be for a smaller market than you think and even that has challenges.

Imagine your a fleet manager for a fleet that operate within these trucks ranges. You buy these trucks, but then you have to install mega-chargers which cost money. You will need to buy solar panels and a battery to store the energy, but you have a problem. You need three acres of space that you don't have and will either have to buy more land around you, move to a place where you have plenty of space, buy a generator, or use utility power. Since one truck requires almost twice the energy that an average home uses in one month to fast charge, you will need A LOT of energy to charge a whole fleet or even a few trucks at a time.

You are in a condensed metro area like most delivery businesses are and there is no land available to you and moving your whole facility(and other facilities) to a new location(s) is just not viable. So you either have to buy several generators(and I am talking huge generators) that cost a few hundred thousand dollars each in or use the grid. You decide to use the grid so you call up the utilities and tell them how much power you will need. They will tell you that their current lines from the power plant to your location do not have the ability to deliver that much energy at one time and you will have to pay to run the wire you need which could also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and on top of that you are paying for electricity.

Now, you got you trucks and you got your way to charge them after spending an obscene amount of money that you now have to recoup so you need to get them on the road. A few weeks go by and one truck goes down due to a brake issue and Tesla says he will send one out to you. Since Tesla doesn't have a support network or parts distributions channels like most other OE's the part is going to take a week to get in from the factory.

In that time another truck goes down and another wasn't charged all the way from the night before. You call the local Tesla shop and they are all booked and completely out of spare trucks. You ask your shop technician to fix the truck, but he is not qualified work on an electric vehicles that could fry him if he touches the wrong wire. You call the local shops and they won't either.

On top of that, your dispatch is requesting a pick up, but that will put the truck outside of the 500 mile limit so now you will have to rent a diesel truck to go pick it up or refuse the load. The you reminded that there will be a cold front tomorrow so your trucks ranges will be reduced so now you have to calculate to see if all of your deliveries and pick ups are with that reduced range so you can rent more diesel trucks if they aren't.

This is just one day out of many different scenarios you need to worry about as a fleet manager. You don't care about which one is the most "efficient" when you need to get a job done. This is why BEV's aren't taken seriously from most people in the medium/heavy duty industry.

The other problem I did not list here is weight. Due to the weight of these trucks, you will need twice as many of them to carry the same weight due to DOT weight regulations. There more to it than just making a truck so no they are not viable in the real world.