alt Hacker NewsFor people that want to make the calculation: A truck does not need a 15 ton battery. In Europe, we have mandatory breaks for truck drivers. So you need a battery pack for max 400km of range, let's say 500km. When you have a break, you charge. For this, you need like 1500kWh battery pack, which weigths like ... wait, 15 tons. But this is not entirely correct, the real values reported are between 120-150Kwh/100km, that means a half of the stated number, 7.5 tons for the battery pack.
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It’s weird that he’s so in the numbers but then doesn’t carry through with the battery electric truck calculations. He just dismisses it out of hand.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
> When you have a break, you charge.
You cannot do that, because there will never be that many charging places around. Never. The situation is so bad now that there are barely enough places for trucks to get parking spots, let alone parking spots with electric charges. I'm talking about Europe, my brother is a truck driver (right now is on a ride to Morocco, he picked something up with his truck from Hungary), I know those stories about parking spots from him.
Those mandatory breaks are 45 minutes long. You're not charging 750 kWh in 45 minutes. With a fast charger 750 kWh is 2 to 7 hours. At the far more common level 2 chargers it's 18 hours. Either mandatory breaks need to be substantially longer, you need a substantially larger battery than just that required to go between breaks, or you need some sort of specialized technology for dramatically speeding up charging rates well beyond those for personal EVs, any of which cut hard into the economics.