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The "externality" most discussed is generally carbon emissions, for obvious reasons. It used to be particulates, for local health reasons. Noise rarely gets a mention.

But, if someone from an all electric future was dropped off in 2016 i think they'd really notice noise above everything else. Traffic noise in cities is a massive "silent" irritant. Even outside of cities, it's amazing how far you need to be from a road to hear unadulterated wilderness. Off-road, dirt bikes, quads, water craft and such can really impact enjoyment of outdoor recreational places.

I don't think the psychological impacts of this are fully understood, but it is understood that they aren't trivial. The whole world will get so much more peaceful with combustion engines out of the picture.

Air travel is the one area where reducing noise would carry an obvious economic benefit to airlines. Unfortunately it's the one of hardest ones to solve.

Unfortunately electric cars won't solve the noise problem. The graph on http://www.leiserstrassenverkehr.bayern.de/laerm/entstehung/ (a German government website) compares the engine noise ("Antriebsgeräusch") with the tire noise ("Rollgeräusch") for different speeds ("Gesamtgeräusch" means "total noise"). The yellow line is for trucks, the blue lines for cars.

As you can see at a speed of 40 kph (25 mph) a car's tire noise is already higher than the engine noise and at even higher speed the engine noise doesn't really matter anymore. So even if your electric car engine is absolute silent, the total noise at speeds above 30 mph won't be all that different.

The only real solution is electric cars plus significantly reduced speed limits.

This - after leaving the city to live by the sea I hugely notice all traffic noise when I come back to London - it's just never ending. Much of London is blighted by aircraft noise too - again I never gave it much thought and believed my London garden was tranquil and calm, but in my new place I can easily go hours without being disturbed. And when a plane does fly over it's so much higher - I can't believe West London puts up with it.

That said - I now really notice the diesel smell and the fumes in central London. I used to cycle through it every day and couldn't see what the problem was, but as soon as I get off the tube I can smell the stink of smoke lorries and buses.

I'm on a balcony right up against national forest land as I'm typing this. My typing is the loudest thing I hear. If I stop typing, I don't just hear birds and wind, I hear insects. Lots of them. When I lived in NYC, it was incredibly loud, I was very aware of this, there's nothing at all silent about it. I think after a number of years people aren't merely used to it being noisy, they have some amount of permanent hearing damage, they're just not phased by delivery trucks banging around, sirens blaring, wheels on tracks squealing. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement when it comes to noise.
This will help reduce engine noise, as well as stink and heat from the truck's exhaust, both of which will be nice. Buses are also loud in city streets and both trucks and buses use braking systems that are fairly loud. I don't know what braking systems these will use but I'm guessing it still needs to be pretty heavy duty and could still be loud.
Most road noise is from the tyres though, modern IC engines are pretty quiet.
Noise is the main reason I'd like to leave the city to live in the country. To me it just feels insane how little of a concern this is to most people. Cities could be really nice places to live if they didn't allow cars in them, but instead they're ruined by pollution (noise and emissions).
> But, if someone from an all electric future was dropped off in 2016 i think they'd really notice noise above everything else.

Given the move to regulate hybrid and electric vehicles so that they make as much noise as traditional ICE vehicles (notionally, as a safety measure of visually-handicapped pedestrians), I'm not sure that that's the case.

So true, the only time I ever experienced true silence, was off piste skiing in St Anton, Austria. Stopping for a rest in a deserted valley, it was so beautiful and the silence was so peaceful, I was mesmerised until the silence was broken by a bird singing a few miles away. An incredible experience I'll never forget.
> Noise rarely gets a mention.

Today I was gifted with hearing a weed-whacker running continuously for a couple of hours outside my window.

I am now a more morally resilient critter, according to Friedrich "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger" Nietzsche.

(He wrote that the year before going totally bonkers, so it might not work as advertised, like much else.)

apparently, such noise also affect the biosphere. Birds and animals change behavior based on this noise. Its one reason why traveling in developing/under-developed countries feels so different. The noise levels are very different.
Particulates and stuff that forms ozone are both still a big deal. The reason that the SF Bay area air-quality district funds free electricity at public car chargers is to reduce smog in the Bay area.
I think this could be a big deal depending on future politics. I would not be surprised if Manhattan in 10 years or so only allows etrucks over the bridge (with certain exemptions of course).

If that happens there could be some interesting but boring (oxymoron intended) business opportunities like transfer stations at the borders of urban areas (switch engines).

This could also dramatically improve the safety of trucks as there are still an enormous amount of trucks that are not automatic and do not have antilock breaks (or whatever the analogous tech is these days).

By mandating electric engines the safety improvements could be had at the same time.

I like the name: eTruck.

If the mayor of NYC has his way, that could happen. But unfortunately Albany (the capital of NY) will override it.

See the attempts by NYC to set up congestion pricing but Albany won't allow it happen.[1]

Personally I think other cities will start this first such as London, LA, Paris, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York...

Trucks seem to be the perfect candidate for electric propulsion. The high torque of electric motors just make sense for urban acceleration/deceleration. As a pedestrian, one of the things I hate the most is the the dense, black smoke from heavy trucks.
Agreed, particularly in an urban setting. In NYC the streets are quite literally with small to medium trucks, which are all almost certainly in violation of noise and pollution requirements. A fleet-type electric medium duty truck with swappable batteries would be awesome and I think governments should be bending over backwards to incentivize them.
Unfortunately the range is becoming a problem on big electric trucks. The batteries cannot store as much energy per weight unit as the chemical fuel. This can be circumvented by using electric wiring overhead.

Sweden is prototyping an electric highway for trucks. It'll make transport cheaper and less damaging to the environment.

well I would think school buses and even metro transit buses would make better options. School buses because they travel fixed routes, have specific points they will sit awhile (schools/depots/etc) and the fuel price fluctuations clobber systems.
Trucks seem to be the perfect candidate for hybrid engines. Electric motors and batteries for the power needed to accelerate and climb hills, and gasoline for the energy density needed to actually get very far.

Trucks only need 200 hp to cruise so a 100 hp engine would extend the battery range a lot. I bet you could even take one of these 100 mile EV trucks, put a Prius engine in there, and make it go all day and double or triple the miles per gallon over a normal truck with 600+ hp engine.

Trucks usually need long range which isn't very good with electric since that adds weight. Weight is a huge issue with trucks as well since they have load limits (some countries factor in the truck not just the haul). As trucks burn fuel they also become lighter, the effect isn't as huge as airplanes but it's still there.
This is where it'd make sense for the battery to be removable. A truck company could keep a bunch of charged batteries at their warehouse and swap batteries out every time a truck comes back for a new delivery.
If manufacturers were smart, they would make them easily moveable by forklift.
Why does this make particularly more sense for trucks than cars? Just because trucks don't need to have a down time for sleeping like a car with a single owner does?
For some local fleet jobs you can probably put batteries in the trailers (if the cargo is consistently not super heavy).
Electric trucks were common in cities a century ago. The truck museum at "The World's Largest Truck Stop" has a couple of well-preserved examples.

https://iowa80truckstop.com/inews/iowa-80-trucking-museum-to...

http://earlyelectric.com/carcompanies.html

Daimler says in a press release that it anticipates prices for its batteries to have dropped by a factor of 2.5 between 1997 and 2025, while battery performance will have increased in the same proportion.

Why are they "anticipating" a price drop starting in 1997?

They are anticipating a price drop from 1997 to 2025. Some of the price drop has already occurred, but from now til 2025 is an estimation.
In the fleet space Smith Electric worked on this since 2005 and it seems like their trucks are in the perpetual prototype mode. The battery energy density vs cost still seem to be the major factor. Interestingly enough even regular gasoline engines are pretty reare and diesel dominates the field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Electric_Vehicles
It is great to see that Mercedes is working at electrical trucks. Electrical cars are just the start, the real emission saving will be electrical trucks. Though one has to note that as stated in the article: 'a “conceivable” launch window of “the beginning of the next decade” for wide-scale production and real-world use.'

So it is an early prototype - it will be interesting to see which timeline Tesla has for their offering.

Tempted to say this is a market that will be heavily stacked in Merc's favour. Taking a gamble on a sports car is one thing, but if you're replacing your 100 Merc diesel trucks...what are you likely to go for?
> Anyone who’s ever been near a large truck...knows the absolute pain of hearing that huge chugging internal combustion engine wrestling with getting up to a pacing speed.

IMHO the noise from semi trucks is nothing compared to cruiser-style motorcycles.

As an aside I'd love a small to mid size electric pick up. I don't do much driving and we share a volt at home. But a lot of things I don't want to put into a car with a hatchback. Mulch, compost, gas cans, leaky bags of ice melt, plants from a nursery, etc.
DISCLAIMER - I work for GM, any opinions are my own.

Agreed, it's great that companies have electric and hybrid cars, but I want to see BEV/hybrid sports cars (besides the $150k BMW i8) and BEV/hybrid trucks.

GM is sponsoring the EcoCar 3 [1] competition, which uses a Camaro for the base vehicle - a hybrid Camaro, with real performance and efficiency, would be the best of both worlds.

GM previously produced 300V hybrid trucks[2], but apparently they didn't sell very well.

1. http://ecocar3.org/

2. http://www.gmfleet.com/chevrolet/silverado-1500-hybrid-truck... http://www.edmunds.com/cadillac/escalade-hybrid/

Is $crossover + weathertech is not an acceptable solution for your problem?
Okay, but I need to ask the important question here: when is this coming out on Euro Truck Simulator?
100 years from now, our cities will be much quieter.
I hope it doesn't take that long.
Can't wait!
Nice step. As they say, there's a couple of big advantages to electric for trucks: low noise and emissions are advantages for everyone around them, and the high torque of electric motors at low speed is convenient for the driver.
Someone needs to write a program called "dedazzeler" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedazzler) that can identify and remove the camouflage from vehicles that automakers so often like to use.
Wonder what the typical daily mileage is on a local urban tractor/trailer? 120 miles doesn't seem to me like near enough. Maybe eventually charging stations will become commonplace at most freight terminals so trucks can charge as they are being unloaded (though the unload may only take a few minutes if it's just a pallet or two).
Concrete camouflage paint for prototypes. Very savvy. I wonder if our heavy industry (GM, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc) benefit from NRO intelligence of what's going on in European and Asian industrial sites.
That swirly black and white pattern is fairly common for vehicle prototypes. It lets you drive around without the stupid "tent" on the vehicle while still making it difficult for people to turn spy photos into renderings of the final product.
Its just a prototype. Production not for another bazillion years or so.

Also the range is low as mtgx pointed out.

> That’s in part due to its max range of 200 kilometres (about 124 miles).

"If that's NEDC, then it's more like 85 miles EPA."

That is what I thought.

Annoucing the new electric semi truck, but not plans to build it. That seems to be a pretty thing way to claim the first "electric semi truck".

Fwiw, Daimler is an investor in Tesla
Yes, that's left over from an earlier alliance that appears to be pretty defunct. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#Daimler_AG
Given that most of the truckers I know are trading in their newer, more heavily computerized trucks for their old models that were simpler and more mechanical (in a staggering number of cases, for the exact machines that they traded up from), I'm not sure how this is going to go.
I hope that color is just a prank. It hurts my eyes just looking at it. Can car makers stop making "quirky" EV designs? Nobody is asking for them.

> That’s in part due to its max range of 200 kilometres (about 124 miles).

If that's NEDC, then it's more like 85 miles EPA.