He states that they have spent a lot of time talking to truckers and truck companies. I would guess they believe that with an electric drive train repairs and maintenance will be an order of magnitude lower (not sure how that works for tires and wheels). Body damage should also be much lower with automatic breaking and other features of enhanced autopilot. As Musk said, broken glass is a big cost for trucking as you can drive with a broken windshield. They think they have a super glass that is "nuclear blast" proof.
Over the last centuries there were a number of truck and bus manufacturers who tried the single/middle seat design. It was never a seller for any of those.
If you take someone with you, you don't want to sit him/her to sit behind you. You want them to sit next to you. If you are on the road in the city, you have often colleagues with you, like in a moving company and alike. Such trucks are used in construction work where things damage easily because someone else crashes in your truck. No assistant in your truck will prevent that.
Honestly, it seems they may have talked to some friends or their delivery companies, but not with companies from the industry.
Because of economics of scale, you design one versatile truck chassis. That can then be easily modified like longer vs. shorter for the super structure, the driver cabin is modified in size so that you have a sleeping possibility or not and all those things.
Just take a look, the very same long haul truck is also used by the construction workers. Only the the cabin is a little bit shorter.
That's true when you're big already like Iveco or Caterpillar, but when you're trying to enter a new market it makes sense to cater to a specific subset of the market.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next version included more seats (rearranged towards the cabin center because the driver no longer has to drive), or zero seats (because the driver* no longer has to drive).
Definitely feels like an intentional step towards "don't worry, Tesla will be driving these for you soon anyway".
Tires, wheels, suspension, bearings, steering, brakes and drive axles (one from each electric motor to its wheel) will be the same as a regular truck, maintenance-wise.
The maintenance reduction basically only related to the motor itself. And, supposedly the "nuclear blast proof" windshield. A collision with a deer probably be much, much more expensive compared to a truck with a safari grill or plow mounted for safety.
Brakes in trucks are already using regenerative braking for about 20 years right now and its called retarder. Because conventional braking is too expansive.
I took an interest in this and looked up "retarder" on Wikipedia and it mentions engine braking (and exhaust braking), hydraulic retarders and electric retarders which are eddy current brakes more commonly used in the railways. Which one are you referring to?
According to the article, most commonly these are not used for regenerative braking, the energy is wasted as heat instead.
Eddy current brakes can be used for regenerative braking if there's an electric drive train (and high power electronics to handle it) but more typically the energy is just wasted as heat in a cooled resistor grid.
Mechanical/hydraulic braking can be used to spool up a flywheel and this was used in Formula 1 in late 2000's (now they use electrical regenerative braking instead).
Which of these techniques is commonly used in trucks?
Sorry, for not checking Wikipedia. Because I work in the industry as an electrical engineer defining standards, and owning a historic truck myself just for fun, because I can.
Originally, it is right that retarders were introduced to just having a non-destructive brake by just wasting the energy. That was around the 1980s. This was just to save maintenance cost as brakes were a big part of that costs.
The trucking industry is about costs and every little penny you can safe. So, years ago it started: Why do we waste that energy and do not re-charge the battery with that, because that reduces load from the generator and that will reduces fuel consumption?
Retarders have a huge impact in costs when your are counting miles. Retarders are having the disadvantage you can't brake to full stop with them. That's why they never worked in cars, because they are always additional to conventional brakes. So they add complexity and weight, both of which you want to reduce in cars.
What fraction of the energy recovered by braking is actually stored? I would have thought the battery on a non-electric or non-hybrid truck would be far too small. Surely the battery gets topped off and then the extra power is dumped as heat right?
Is the energy from braking really so small that it can't even fully charge the starter battery?
Honest questions. I figured that since regenerative braking in cars seems to double fuel efficiency, that order of half the power used to accelerate was recovered and I would have thought that was a very large amount of power to store.
Or is it because of the nature of long-haul trips? I know hybrids have much less advantage on the highway, maybe for long-haul trips the ratio of energy lost as air friction to energy lost in braking is vastly different.
> What fraction of the energy recovered by braking is actually stored? I would have thought the battery on a non-electric or non-hybrid truck would be far too small. Surely the battery gets topped off and then the extra power is dumped as heat right?
It is always the question of what type of truck you are running. Do you just have storage goods, or do you have goods that need refrigeration? In the later you need energy to power that. As your truck does not know in advance what kind of trailer will be towed (connected, what is the right word?) the truck needs to be prepared.
Yes, extra power is dumped. But that is true for any kind of vehicle.
> Or is it because of the nature of long-haul trips? I know hybrids have much less advantage on the highway, maybe for long-haul trips the ratio of energy lost as air friction to energy lost in braking is vastly different.
Actually, Hybrid is very good concept for long-haul. Because on highways you can do coasting (sailing as we say in German) very efficient when you are in cruise control. Because with all the little hills up and down at the same speed, hybrid takes its full advantage.
There will always be situations where you can no longer recover energy, fully electric or hybrid. Your battery could be full, or overheating. At that point, you have to waste the energy.
I believe the normal way to handle this scenario is to just fall back to mechanical braking.
Why do most/all electric and hybrid cars have regenerative braking while ICE cars don't? It's because, as the GP said, the battery would be quickly topped up and extra energy wasted. Only electric vehicles doing frequent stops/downhills can make productive use of regenerative braking.
Potential energy lost by a truck going 10 m (vertically) downhill: 40 000 kg * g * 10 m = 4e6 J.
Capacity of car starter battery: 40 Ah * 12V = 400 Wh = 1e6 J. Let's guess a truck battery has 4 times the capacity of a car battery, so 4e6 J to full charge.
That's just down one small hill and all subsequent braking energy for the entire trip is wasted.
To drive the point home, a Swiss company is working on a mining truck that will be a net generator of electricity - it goes up the mountain empty, but when it goes down it is full of heavy ore, and regenerative breaking charges the batteries more than was used to climb the mountain. The extra 10kWh can then be fed back into the grid.
... Also because electric regenerative braking requires a battery and electric motor (for propulsion, the starter is useless for this). Once you fit regenerative braking into an ICE vehicle it becomes a hybrid vehicle, leaving no ICE vehicles with regenerative braking. :)
(I don't think you would call a vehicle with mechanical KERS system a "hybrid", although it technically is as there are multiple propulsion systems in the vehicle.)
Firefighter here. I wouldn't be especially worried about the glass. Hitting it with a hammer isn't all that impressive (take a hammer to your driver's side window... I bet you'll be surprised how ineffective it is).
Strong glass doesn't necessary has to be hard to remove glass. Those are two different things.
Pressing a mechanical button or two should easily disassemble the glass gracefully. At the same while the glass is fixed it should ideally be immune to damage.
Doesn't really matter, it is just marketing. I guess somewhere through the design phase they did some calculations on how much force it can take and checked it against silly things for Musk to say.
The only point is that it's stronger than normal glass, which is backed up with the video comparing the two different types of glass in a more realistic scenario.
