Wait...
Yes, in Europe the legally required rest periods can already be used for efficient charging, but this is not an benefiting exclusiv to the trailers, but for general electronic trucking.
And if a company wanted to, parking a trailer to let it charge is far cheaper than paying a truck/driver to sit around.
In Europe there's (simplified) a mandatory 45-minute rest break after 4.5 hours of driving. Similarly, there's a mandatory 11-hour rest period after the daily maximum of 10 hours of driving. And it is very strictly enforced, with every commercial truck having been equipped with a sealed and certified data logger, plenty of random checks by traffic police, and heavy fines for any kind of violation.
If the truck is already sitting idle ~half of the time due to driver rest requirements, why not take that opportunity to charge it as well? Similarly, if you are building the usual highway-side rest stop with truck parking, a petrol station, and a restaurant, why not add a charging station as well? It can even do double-duty as rapid car charger!
Trailers are supposed to be pretty dumb. This is what makes them valuable from a logistical perspective. If we hyper focus on reducing the carbon footprint of each specific shipment we may find we created an overall increase in aggregate once the higher order and deferred consequences come to bear.
With 13+ years ROI (electricity is not free) is this really beneficial?
Remember that all signs point towards more CO2 fees and higher gas prices in the coming years
Meanwhile I'm not the only US driver who has discovered how much cheaper a EV is, so even without CO2 fees things are changing - just slowly.
Regenerative and solar electricity is free, and regen braking additionally saves wear and tear on brake pads.
The real benefit I think is when stuff like tax codes, carbon credits and government subsidies come into play and ROI goes down significantly.
Or when the next war hits and diesel actually hits and bypasses the 2.50€/l mark.
11..15% Is not the bulk of the energy. But it's significantly more than "negligible".
Note that this trailer could be expected to be on the road most of the time. Which may not even be the common case: demand for goods varies a lot, so I'd expect that a lot of logistics companies aren't fully booked all the time. Maybe have a few drivers/trucks on the road, and a bunch of trailers on a parking lot doing nothing. In that scenario: need a trailer? Use whichever one is charged up furthest, while at a loading dock top it up (grid power/in-building storage) to whatever is needed to complete the trip, off it goes.
Also for US-based naysayers: Europe is a very different environment than the US. Most long hauls aren't that long, and there's a lot of [industrial zone local distribution center] <-> inner city traffic. Read: lots of start-stop, low speed cornering & wait time.
Like the whole supply chain for these trailers produce CO2 for each trailer it outputs.
I had a similar thought as my city replaced 500,000 curb side recycling bins because of the color. How many years of my personal environmental savings did that operation cost? They had people flown in from the other side of the country for months just to offload the bins from the trailers.
At what point does the second and third order side effects action offset the benefits.
You'd think you'd ever see some evidence of this happening and right now at the height of Tourist Season you'd expect to see the roads littered with smashed caravans, but no - it does not appear to happen.
So pretty much like everywhere outside the US?
Here in the UK it's not uncommon to pull a 1500kg caravan with a bog standard Ford Focus, without any problems at all, and well over two tonnes on a twin-axle one with something like a Volvo V60.
People come from all over Europe to holiday here with their caravans, and are towing them at "realistic Autobahn speeds" behind perfectly ordinary cars.
It just seems to be the US where you need a 7.5 tonner to pull a trailer the size of a suitcase.
Even if your car can pull the trailer, that doesn't mean you should. If the trailer is oversized the car and engine can pull it - but you need something much bigger/heaver to control the load if anything goes wrong. More than one person has had their car roll because they were towing a large trailer at high speed and a wind gust pushed them into the ditch. If they were towing at city street speeds they would have been okay, but not autobahn speeds.
You don't need a 7.5 tonner to pull a small trailer. However you do need to carefully check the tow rating, bad things happen if the tow vehicle is too small. You do need a 7.5 tonner to pull a large trailer though.
https://www.theautopian.com/heres-the-physics-behind-tongue-...
US trailers are generally designed with something like 10-15% tongue weight which allows for much higher dynamic stability but also requires a much stronger tow vehicle. As usual there is no free lunch in mechanical engineering.
If we had enough chargers that any trucker could pull into a truck stop at their prescribed rest period and find a free charger, electrifying trucks would indeed be a no-brainer. But in the world we currently live in we don't have enough chargers to make that reliable. We barely have enough non-electified parking spots, and in your world they would all have to be electrified as well. It's a mix of a chicken-and-egg problem on the commercial side and a lack of will on the government side
But there is never a lack of will from the government to try all kinds of pilot programs that look cool but are mostly caused by the need to somehow sidestep the lack of sufficient charging infrastructure
Not saying that electric trucks are bad, just one more problem to solve
Yes, I know it's a bit more involved than just pouring concrete and calling it a truck stop, but at some point politicians need to actually do something about this push for electrification.
That said I don't the cost is low enough for them yet.
https://schneiderjobs.com/truck-driving-jobs/driving-opportu...
So again, team driving is not ideal for the worker, only the mega carrier. You’ll make less as a team driver than a solo driver.
A big problem is that it doesn't count as a daily rest if the vehicle is moving. This means in practice that the longest you can drive in pairs is 4.5h A, 4.5h B, 4.5h A, 4.5h B, 1h A, 1h B, followed by at least 9 hours downtime. Still a 20-hour non-stop drive, but not even remotely 24/7. You'd need additional standby drivers at a remote base, at which point you could also just swap the trailer to another truck.
In practice this means it is rarely worth it. Combine it with the schedule going out-of-sync with the days, and for regular freight it is almost certainly more expensive than just giving each driver their own truck.
The exception to the rule is high-priority cargo which for one reason or another can't be done via air. Take Formula 1, for example: with back-to-back races they have just three days to tear everything down, drive it across Europe, and build it back up again. It's a 15-hour drive without any delays, so having a solo driver rest for an additional 9 hours halfway through is unacceptable. With a driver pair it is easily achievable, and the additional costs are irrelevant.
The normal US front-engine is rare in Europe.
The US extended sleeper generally doesn't exist in Europe
The European compact cabover generally doesn't exist in the US.
The scale influences this more than a little bit. The longest drives you'd find it sensible to make hauling freight inside Europe are between 12 and 18 hours of nonstop travel, while in the US they're more like 40-60 hours.
Those are unreliable and vary at the whim of the government and their need to fill a hole in the budget. The only reliable factor here is a subsidy on the purchase price for the trailer as that can not be withdrawn after a year. Carbon credits will disappear as soon as a significant part of transport has been electrified, electricity prices are still rising, tax exemptions are temporary at best.
Sure, but that doesn't matter to the guy buying the trailer. They got a tax break, credit, whatever, and through the magic of financialization they sold that tax break for $.92 on the dollar. So they don't really care what happens. And the $.08 hedges the middle man's risk. Etc. etc.
raulandrisan•17h ago
WindyTree•17h ago
Animats•17h ago
The usual tool for this is a mini-truck called a "yard goat".[1] There are also forklift attachments for this job.
[1] https://www.totalwarehouse.com/lonestar-battery-powered-trac...
blitzar•11h ago
fragmede•11h ago