Tesla Semi truck unveil & test ride set for Oct 26th !

free radical wrote:

wnjj wrote:

stsmark wrote:
Great point Copperhead, as I understand they have 2 that are going to be real world test mules with a carrier to see how they fit in. Seems like a reasonable plan.

Yep. https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/08/20190815-ecascadia.html

My cousin is a mechanical engineer working for that group.

Traditional OEM’s will find it much easier to electrify their platforms than stubborn Elon will to produce anything reliable. This BEV “technology” isn’t exactly rocket science. Shipping quality vehicles to meet a wide variety of customer markets is much more difficult.

Those Cascadia trucks have only 200 mile range,
Where will you REcharge it after that?

Tesla semi gets 500 -600 miles,
and largest Supercharger network in the country

https://electrek.co/2019/08/15/tesla-semi-electric-truck-exceeds-range-expectation-test-driver/

Production takes time
Good things come to those who wait

I have been for almost 40 years, and still am, involved directly in the freight transportation industry. A 500-600 mile range is not going to cut it for quite a bit of what goes on in trucking.

Let's look at a typical OTR trucking scenario. The day is started. The hours of service electronic log gets started also. The driver has 14 hours in which to run 11 hours of actual driving. In the midst of that 14 hours, the driver must log off duty and not move the truck for 30 minutes sometime before the first 8 hours of the 14 lapse. Traffic conditions, road construction, weather all effect how far one can get in that 11 hours. The general rule to gauge timing is to calculate time based on an average of 55 mph. So, 11 hours gets one a total of about 600 miles in one day, on average. Conditions may be such that one may cover more or less. The old days of Smokey and the Bandit are long gone. One starts they day by getting a a load and it must be 560 miles away at a customer by 0700 the next morning. One can do the miles sure enough, but they must take a 10 hour break at the end of the day. If they stop at a place that can charge the semi truck back up, they will not be able to complete the full 10 hours to make the customer by the 0700 appointment time to deliver the load. If the make the run to an area near the customer so they can meet the appointment time, they are not at an area that they are able to charge the truck. So while they can make the delivery, they have no reserve of power to do anything else after they do so.

And if one cannot meet the appointment, many customers will force a reschedule to the next day. Typical food store warehouses, Walmart, etc have delivery windows that they are firm on. The typical road driver is paid by the mile. They are not going to sit for 24 hrs just to deliver the next day. And even if they are paid by the hour, a employer is not going to pay $25 or more an hour for a driver to sit 24 hours because of some goofy electric truck. They know these things go on and will not invest in electric trucks.

These electric truck, for quite a while, will only be good for local P&D work. They have a considerable way to go to make any inroads into the OTR trucking market. Only when there is reliable onboard charging and the network for fuel (hydrogen fuel being the target fuel of choice by these electric truck makers) is almost as broad as the diesel fuel market is now will electric really come into its own. Very unlikely to happen in what is left of my lifetime.

What goes on in Europe is not what goes on in the U.S., and Elon Musk has not a clue of what goes on in the dynamic of day to day trucking environment and logistics. But then, I would never expect him to be up to speed on that as it is not his area of expertise. And the only fleets that are going to take an active interest in using such a product is local P&D outfits like Fedex, UPS, and terminal to terminal fleet operations. And then, only those who are all in on the greenie agenda and play the green card as a perception to the general public. But that local P&D stuff is but a fraction of the total of over 6 million commercial trucks operating in the U.S.

But most of the food in this country is not moved by local P&D and the typical package folks. Food, especially produce and meat, is moved primarily by long haul truck. And then it is done quite a bit with team driver trucks that typically run 20+ hours a day. Produce has a time frame or it will start to go bad on the truck.

Even if companies could afford 3 times the trucks they now typically keep in inventory to do a switching or pony express sort of thing to keep a load moving cross country, where are the drivers to operate them? Self driving trucks are decades from being able to operate autonomously in every dock or customer property scenario. It will always take a driver to make the final delivery even if the truck does the autonomous stuff cross country. A driver will always need to man the truck. And even then, Electronic Driver Hours of Service is in effect. Where do you propose we get the additional 1 million drivers that would be needed to fill that gap? And relaying trucks, doing a pony express sort of thing, dropping one truck to charge by grabbing a fresh charged truck to continue the run, how do you propose companies come up with the $300-400,000 per truck that would be needed for that sort of thing? Especially factoring that to accomplish this type or scenario, 3 times the number of trucks would need to be purchased by a company to cover that.

You think what you buy now is expensive, this would quadruple the average consumer cost in no time for all products. Are you ready for that reality?

Again, folks who clamor for these electric trucks have no real clue what is involved in freight logistics in the U.S. and Canada. They have a very limited application. They are a reality but only on a limited scale.