Yet EPA officials said the rule will not mandate the adoption of a particular zero-emission technology. Rather, it will require manufacturers to reduce emissions by choosing from several cleaner technologies, including electric trucks, hybrid trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
For comparison, The New York Times coverage
Edison Motors has already proven hybrid retrofit trucks can be inexpensive, less complicated, and far more fuel-efficient than traditional diesel trucks while burning cleaner and offering a huge amount of all-speed torque to the wheels and even more energy efficiency from regenerative braking, so truckers really don’t have a leg to stand on here if they’re against moving the industry forward. If any of the naysayers actually used a hybrid truck and saw the relatively low cost to retrofit compared to a new truck, and the lower total cost of ownership, they wouldn’t want to go back.
What Edison is doing – aside from being a social media company that makes vehicles on the side – is purpose built industrial applications. Vehicles designed to do a job, not general purpose trucks. Their use case is highly niche and what they’re doing, at least on paper, fills that niche pretty much perfectly. They aren’t making the kind of trucks that make up a majority of vehicle emissions. The “retrofits” they sell are just toys for pickup trucks. It’s a cool tech that I’m glad to see being experimented with, but it isn’t addressing anything to do with the trucking industry. Maybe it’ll be beneficial for certain builder/contractors, but frankly the BEV pickups that you can already buy / are in the carmaker pipeline are probably more fit to purpose for those use cases (that is, needing to be able to have a small pickup truck that can also serve as a generator for short-term jobsites that don’t have power). Something like the F150 Lightning can already get in a full day of serious work on a charge, go home, charge overnight, and be ready to do it again tomorrow.
And for real trucks, battery trucks are almost as dumb as battery trains.
We’re not talking about local delivery vehicles, here. The thing about local delivery vehicles is that they don’t need much range, they return to a local hub frequently, and they don’t need to maintain huge uptime. For local delivery vehicles, BEVs make total sense and can even save an operator money both in fuel and maintenance. They fit the use case of battery electric really well and the industry going in that direction is probably inevitable, though it may need some encouragement to hurry up and get to it. But companies like Amazon and FedEx are already moving in that direction because it just makes sense.
But long-haul trucks? No damn way. The hint that it is stupid is how much Tesla is trying to make it happen. They’re practically carrying around as much weight for the battery as they are for the damn cargo. And that ESAL value scales in a wildly exponential factor. Going from ~40-88 kN/axle is roughly a 12x increase in rate of road damage. Heavier trucks shred pavement and are thus a burden on society, not something to be encouraged. We already can’t afford to keep our roads in good repair for myriad dumbfuck transportation policy reasons.
There’s zero chance of a sustainable future where the trucking industry continues functioning the way it does today. It must change, dramatically, and in a steel-on-steel direction. We can’t keep having fossil powered trucks and BEV trucks are not going to fix the problem. Hybrid electric and BEV trucks are better, but they aren’t good, and both will never make economic sense unless significant costs are externalized to the state (you know, just like emissions and highways already are for the current trucking industry). And god help me, someone needs to invite all the CEOs and board members of most of the class 1 railroads to fly in some Boeings, because they’re the reason we haven’t long since gone in that direction.