What is needed are 8 or 10-hour endurance trucks, even if at a lesser load, as that will cover a driver's day and allow recharge during rest periods.

500km doesn't even get me to the capital of my European country. Maybe you're thinking specifically about Eastern Europe or something, where there is a bunch of smaller countries closer together?

The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.

Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.

A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours

A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.

Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.

It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.

I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.

The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.

There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.

The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.

Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.

EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.

Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.

Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.

[1] https://www.peterbilt.com/trucks/zero-emission/567EV

This is what I got used to in California but unfortunately should you find a fantastic outdoor restaurant table to enjoy the European sunset, chances are somebody will be smoking right next to you and your kid.

I'm in The Netherlands and I feel that we aren't even close to the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany.

Maybe it's easier to justify the investments for a much larger country/market.

The problem isn't overloading the engine when you go up, it's overheating the brakes when you go down. The reasoning here is probably that EV semis will use regeneration for some of the braking thus avoiding the overheating to some extent.

One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.

EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box

As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.

> So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?

Yes, that's the nature of corporate headquarters. If the company doesn't want to be thought of as a Chinese company, it could relocate its corporate headquarters elsewhere.

This says nothing of the ownership structure and so on. A company could be just as Chinese due to ownership and/or control independently of where its corporate HQ is located. I don't think that this framing is especially useful, because there is no such thing as a stereotypical company or person. Individuals make up companies. Companies are just people, acting in concert.

To say a company is Chinese makes me wonder why that is important to the person saying it, and makes me wonder why that is the way they choose to phrase it, and makes me wish they would tell me more about actual individual people that exist and what their views and goals are. Corporations aren't people. People are corporations.