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- cross-posted to:
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One of the few positives to come out of the Western Asia war. We needed this petrol shock to do what we should have been doing much earlier. It’s great that the costs have gone down but lack of appropriate charges is still a problem.
Electric trucks had their strongest ever month of sales in March 2026, although they still account for a small proportion of total sales.
For the first time, electric models are available for the same up-front cost as their diesel equivalents, including for road trains.
There are anecdotal reports of a surge of interest in electric trucks as companies seek to reduce their exposure to the risk of future diesel price spikes.
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i mean, fuck me, rail, we know this. Last mile for etrucks. Just upgrade the rail lines ffs. straighten and fix the gauge issue, the start to electrify
Added bonus of 1000s of trucks off the roads
Are they being send by surfboards or something?
Electrifying a lot of freight is going to be very difficult. Most commentary is saying its going to be diesel for the foreseeable future, and this article doesn’t provide much detail.
Road trains here haul 90 tons of grain, and drive for 10 or 12 hours a day, on regional roads, admittedly over comparatively short distances.
Plenty of longer hauls where stopping for 30 minutes every 2 or 3 hours is a significant problem.
Theres also a whole lot of freight moved by rail, and im not aware of any plan to electrify that.
That said, deliveries around the city with electric trucks will be great.
Honestly though I feel like passenger vehicles are the low hanging fruit.
Well…we have electric busses. They do significant distances with significant weight. - not hardcore freight, but definitely hitting tonnage. Latrobe run springs foremost to mind. They run all day, hold the charge without issue (usually about 30% when back to depot) and charge overnight.
You don’t have to electrify everything on day one, though. A lot of trucks are probably doing less than 100km a day, with a lot of stop/start and idling which wastes a lot of diesel but an electric truck won’t care about.
There’s a lot of low hanging fruit to pick before we start worrying about regional road trains in off-grid areas.
I think you’d be very hard pressed to find a prime mover that travels less than 100km a day.
They’re expensive gear. You literally can’t afford to leave them idling around.
They aren’t idle, they’re just being loaded and unloaded or sitting in traffic instead of doing 110 on the freeway.
The transition to electric freight will be rapid once it begins.
The range of a road vehicle only needs to be as long as the driver’s bladder, and legal requirements are less than that.
New vehicles are a minor element, a more significant part should be conversion of existing vehicles once engine rebuilds are due, as per Janus. Their battery swap setup easily rivals diesel refuelling times.
Another benefit with articulated vehicles is the ability to include batteries and drive axels in the trailers. Not only does this increase range and efficiency with acceleration, but also increases the opportunity for regenerative breaking. They can also be charged when stored or during (un)loading.
Freight rail is mostly moved using diesel electric locomotives, I can see some of these being similarly refitted with batteries which feed the electric drive axels in place of the onboard diesel generators. They could then be charged from a generator on another locomotive they’re teamed with, or via a pantograph along the route or at their destination.
Some interesting ideas but I feel you might be oversimplifying things.
A “dumb” road train trailer costs around $200k. Just a big steel tub and wheels. There’s a significant additional cost both upfront and in maintenance to give them regenerative brakes, and drive, and battery axles, and control systems.
I’ve never heard of a prime mover having a diesel / electric conversion. The web site you linked doesn’t seem to be working (might be my fancy https dns) but I feel like that would be an extraordinarily large cost - more expensive and complex than simply purchasing a new electric truck. Of course, I don’t have any data to support that.
Battery swapping would be challenging in regional areas.
I think that once passenger and light trucks are mostly electric, the imperative to convert freight will diminish somewhat.
I’m well aware of the costs and configuration of semis, b-doubles/triples, and road trains. Modifications to the trailers and dollies wouldn’t be a requirement, but electrification opens a lot more possibilities, and don’t even require the prime mover to be modified first.
There are already road trains with trailers fitted with diesel engines and drive axles for extreme weight loads, and they would be a good test case for conversion.
The Janus system isn’t Diesel-Electric, they’ve developed an electric motor as a drop in replacement for a standard truck diesel engine, it mates to the existing gear box and drive train of the truck, and also replaces the fuel tanks with battery bays. My intro to them was around the time this video was published.
Battery swapping will be a challenge until the infrastructure is built out for longer routes, but it would be a one off outlay for a fleet operator, and will only become more practical the more it’s deployed.
I see the opposite correlation with higher light vehicle electrification. Once fuel demand drops enough, its unit production cost will increase, which will only make electric transport more attractive economically.
44 trucks in a month is not a particularly big wave, though I’ll grant it’s a sizeable step from previous sales.
Electric trucks do make sense for a lot of the last mile delivery sort of stuff (lowish and predictable max km per day, lots of stop/start, return to same base each day) so I expect this use case at least will become popular in the near future. As the article says though charging is a bit of a killer and will likely be more of a problem than the actual purchase price of the trucks. It’ll be interesting to see if it leads to a shift towards the big companies buying rather than leasing more of their depots due to the capital input required for charging infrastructure (small companies are probably just out of luck).
Whilst I agree that charging infrastructure needs to be improved, the vast majority of EV users will charge at home. With the average distance people drive being far less than 100km per day, a standard wall socket charger is more than enough to keep it topped up every evening which will easily keep it full (i.e. mostly at around 80%) for the majority of the time. Fast chargers are for road trips. Most people are fine with home charging but it does take a mental change to plug in daily, like a phone. The 22kw home chargers are quicker but not necessary in all cases.
All apartment parking should have plugs at each parking bay, even if only 10amp ones.
This is for freight trucks, not the “trucks” that people drive to their suburban supermarkets.
And in the case of freight, the lack of charging infrastructure is a significant problem, but hopefully the war will drive government and private operators into action.
This. For a freight truck, those 75 kW chargers are basically trickle chargers. They want 400 kW to put on a decent amount of charge during a half hour break. Their charging needs are a whole other level.
IIRC some of them don’t even come with onboard AC chargers, since even 43 kW AC would take 20 hours to charge them up anyway so most fleets aren’t going to do that.
I know, I kinda went off on a tangent based on the “appropriate chargers” line OP wrote. Mostly because the O&G lobbyists will use similar phrasing all the time to justify their reliance on oil.
