No honestly it is very much not. The way the trucking industry gets away with pretending it is efficient In the US is by offloading externalities onto its workers and municipalities.

It’s passing the buck right along, and that’s very easy to do so long as someone else gotta pay for it.

Edit: and yo, again about how somebody else has to pay for it, how many truckers you know ended up with a crank habit to make their deadline?

That’s company time you gotta pay on your family line.

Oh no, I I mean all logistics companies that happen to involve truckers. They by and large treat all of their workers like shit, it just gets a lot worse with “independent” trucking companies like you mentioned.

Even the best companies, that treat their workers the best (which basically doesn’t exist in the US), still offload a lot of externalities onto the localities that they work through, they just don’t offload it onto their workers directly.

You end up paying it through taxes to repair your roadways, only that’s the only way you see it when you’re a flyby town with only a gas station, and then wonder why no one in your town ever gets up unless they get out.

Edit: also, I’m not a demon mind that figures all this shit out for the company. I’m just someone with a weird intelligence that just so happened to have a lot of family in the trucking industry.

The demon minds will figure this shit out for the logistics companies, after your town has been burnt to the ground from them figuring it out.

Okay, we’ve already accounted for that for ICE trucking, but we don’t put that shit in our actual total volume of inventory by Mile, even now.

Like I’m not okay with how ICE trucking companies let off their externalities onto their workers and other people that have to be on the road. But they already do it.

And now you’re introducing another very different engine plan that is evaluated without any of of the logistical hurdles, only the specific engine costs.

That’s not gonna work.

Well that’s kinda my point, existing regulations about transportation of fuel trucks discourage them from going through tunnels, generally.

Regarding “black swans” when considering a logistics fleet that does not have a fairly secured transit line like trains (again the answer is always trains.), these sort of “black swan” events happen every day on on a major truck transit hub.

And something like a battery tunnel fire is equivalent to a black swan event like the Hindenburg.

You can’t just write them off as statistical noise.

Edit: like this isn’t me just shitting on EV’s it’s obviously the way of the future if you want to survive climate change.

But it’s going to involve infrastructure costs that are not reflected in the price per kwhat hour of travel. Like in general even with ICE trucks I think there should be laws and physical barriers that slow ALL traffic during tunnel entry, and probably roadway laws that make you follow other trucks 3 car lengths away when entering a tunnel.

It’s just when a tunnel accident happens that is full of fires that can’t be put out without killing people, and even then it does millions of damages to tunnel structures, that I think these kinds of logistical costs will actually be considered.

That’s because at the moment they are allowed to offload a lot of the externalities of their business not only onto their drivers, but on the public as a whole, i see that getting clipped down somewhat (hopefully) as those externalities start being subjected onto the average person in a more readily identifiable way.

That’s a capable enough fix in theory, but involves a lot more supply costs.

Edit: assuming both trucks have fully functional working engines and have just ran low on fuel:

You pay the person delivering the fuel to the ICE truck, the cost of their time and fuel costs, they deliver it, the truck gets on their way.

It takes maybe 15 mins to refuel the truck.

For a generator: you pay a lot more for the weight of the generator, plus fuel, plus the time it takes for the person who delivered the generator to run it and charge the EV.

It takes 15mins to set up the truck and the generator, and then at least another 30 to charge the truck assuming the best charging and generator tech available.

That’s not an insignificant amount when you consider you are also blocking off a road way to do this for a lot more time.

Yes, but the fires are of a completely different quality and require completely different methods of putting out.

Vodka burns different than styrofoam and gasoline.

That’s cool, I just kinda wonder about the truck that’s been stuck for 4 hours on an upward slope, like it’s not that that it doesn’t happen to ICE trucks either, if they got low on fuel and got stuck, but if that happens, they can get AAA or highway patrol to come out and give them a bit of fuel to get further down the line to the next station. What happens if an EV truck gets stuck in a situation like that where it tried to get over a hump that shouldn’t have taken much power, while not being at peak power itself, and then sat there for so long because of an accident that it could no longer get further up the hill?

Yeah brake regen can help particularly over inclines on the down slope, but as a contrary: what about when the EV had to be stuck on an upslope in bumper to bumper LA traffic? What about transit lines through the north during winter? Like I’m actually interested in seeing real world efficiency tests.

You can’t even put out those fires without flooding the tunnel with chemicals that will kill humans.

I think it was worth watching even with its lofty assumptions and math favoring Tesla, because that’s like: best case scenario if they deliver on all of their claims, and only assumes transportation and vehicle costs. And that’s not something that makes them look particularly good even then.

It’s a good video, but it has some problems.This only looks at the energy efficiency costs on a per mile basis, a lot of trucking profit is made by moving mass tonnage in a specific timeframe. Even with special dispensation to run at a higher total tonnage, if you’re still losing out on total cargo tonnage it won’t make sense yet.

It can make sense, for mid-range hops from a supplier shipping exactly one product (like coke or pepsi), and would eventually make more sense as charger infrastructure got further down the line. Especially since theoretically you also require less maintenance on EV’s in general.

But semis get in lots of accidents too, and I’ve yet to see one of these go up in flames in a tunnel.

I also question how well the efficiency and torque math works out if they have to go through a mountain range.

Edit: that actually lead me to a horrible thought, like it’s sometime before every car is an electric vehicle, but I know of tunnel accidents that have killed close to a hundred, what happens when every car involved is also a highly explosive hot burning fire that can’t be put out with water?

I could see the internal temps of the tunnel near the accident setting off other batteries and the internal temps of the tunnel in general to be too high to safely deploy rescuing teams. Hopefully this will be less of an issue if we can move to safer battery chemistries.

IIRC they upped the GVW to 83,000lbs about for electric semis, but that doesn’t matter much for long haul trucking, since the current battery package for the Tesla Semi is close to 11,000lbs.

Edit: Ah, it is in fact 82,000lbs: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/pol_plng_finance/policy/fastact/tswprovisions2019/index.htm