Item — HN Reader

> You’re assuming that range is actually useful.

I'm not assuming that. The entire trucking industry keeps talking about how they won't buy low range stuff. Also, while batteries are still slow to charge, any extra minute spent waiting to charge multiple times on a trip is money lost.

EDIT: instead of speculating, get hold of someone in those companies that put order down for Tesla Semi and ask them why in their right mind they would do that. Then come back and enlighten us with their response.

3 comments

Not quite, the long haul industry has ~zero interest in the 500 mile Tesla Semi, but that’s hardly the only market for semi’s.

Safeway, Walmart, etc are using semi’s for relatively short daily deliveries from regional warehouses. That model is very different from companies picking up random freight from LA’s port and shipping it to arbitrary locations across the US.

PS: As to your edit the list of buyers was exactly the kind of companies I described with long haul trucking companies ordering token amounts. Walmart, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, etc took a bigger bite.

Sysco: The food distributor has reserved 50 Semis. while Flexport: Ryan Peterson, the freight company's CEO, announced the company has ordered one Semi.

https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-that-ordered-tesla...

As a strawman, it should just possible to have a kind of "B-train" with a smaller, detachable battery unit just behind the tractor (apologies to truckers if I am using the wrong terminology). This way it would be possible to swap this out super fast. Maybe it could be at the back for faster swap.

And even if not, you could "pony express" a route across the USA with locations that just have the trucks charged and ready to go.

Pull in, grab dinner while the crew unhooks your trailer and hooks it to another already charged semi, and then off you go.

Wouldn't work for owner-operators but a large enough line could do it if they wanted to for the climate/PR benefits.

Of course, that kind of hauling can be done by railroads, too.

Isn’t having crews doing this hooking/unhooking going to kill the price competitiveness of EV semis?

I think pack at the back designs would be quick to swap out. Going on a long trip - use two.

Theres already designs for doing quick swaps, like always its the challenge of standardization:

https://youtu.be/g4EbWRDXzZw?t=49

Burning diesel with unpredictable prices is also money lost, there would have to be a tradeoff or niche where it makes sense