In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Volvo Class 8 Electric Trucks....Coming to America in 2021
Horse Plains Drifter
Forums Admins, Member, Moderator Posts: 40,250 ***** Forums Admin
Comments
Sounds too good to be true.
They are going to make them right here in The New River Valley.
https://www.southwesttimes.com/2020/12/volvo-to-make-electric-trucks-in-the-nrv/
Yep. Have several friends who work there.
I don't have enough extension cords. Guess I will pass. 🙂
Excellent idea. The torque from electric motors is unbeatable.
The Volvo VNR Electric is designed for customer applications and driving cycles with local and regional distribution ranges, including food and beverage and pick-up and delivery routes. The 264-kWh lithium-ion batteries, which charge up to 80 percent in 70 minutes, have an operating range of up to 150 miles based on the truck’s configuration.
Drivers going to spend more time getting the truck charged than they will driving
Beer trucks will have automatic locks during charging.
I hope the whole trucking industry goes electric. No more riding the Jake brake by my house at 3:00 in the morning.
Electric vehicles will continue to evolve. Maybe not to the point of totally replacing combustion engines, but will be more than half the vehicles on the road in 20 years.
The motor technology is there and has been for some time. The battery technology is still evolving.
People who buy electric vehicles today are subsidizing the R and D of tomorrow.
I heard electric cars and trucks can be very dangerous for first responders when involved in a crash.
I don't see them catching on with that kind of mileage range in a semi. Drivers won't make any money sitting there charging the batteries. They need a fuel powered generator to keep them moving on the road.
Joe
Heck yeah, from some of what I’ve read, voltage is between 400 and 800 VDC. (Porsche, I thought, is coming out at 800.)
That’s enough to zap you if you bump an exposed component. Not like surprise you as in higher voltage low amperage fence charger, but fry you with the large amperage behind it. Then think of rain and part of the car in a puddle.
I would expect voltages to clime higher in big vehicles. Think of how much more use (battery life) you get out of higher voltage cordless drill batteries than you did on the lower voltage ones from say 10 years ago.
Power or Wattage = Volts * Amps
So if you want more power, as in heavier vehicle or longer distances, up the amps or the voltage. Voltage is cheaper.
local deliveries, bread trucks, beer, pop,ect may benefit with lots of stop and go and not lot mileage in big city, it they could come up with removable easily replaced battery pack, driver could stop for lunch, have packed changed out while eating and go for another 150 miles after lunch, pretty much most delivery routes would be covered...
Don't forget about high water and having electric motors installed in wheel rims for efficient ratings. You better have good insurance policies.
serf
Im all for it!
Might be like a trains and some big excavating equipment.
Electric motors but they are driven by big diesel generators.
Since our great number of bark biters and the shutting down of coal fired power plants, hang on folks the brown outs will be black outs for us rural folks.
"The 264-kWh lithium-ion batteries, which charge up to 80 percent in 70 minutes, have an operating range of up to 150 miles based on the truck’s configuration."
Y'all boys are right. 150 miles, and then you need to stop for 70 minutes? This truck would have very limited usage.
For a comparison, my brother just drove from Asheville NC to Lake Charles La. in his shiny new Tesla. 800 mile trip. The official range of the Tesla is 300 miles. In reality, you can hardly make 220 miles in this car. I saw him write the check for this car just 5 months ago, $63,000. And, brother loves the car and I have driven it, it is a joy to drive.
So, yesterday brother is cruising down I 10 in Louisiana, and he is headed into Baton Rouge, he has driven 140 miles, and east of Baton Rouge, it is 70 miles to the next Tesla charging station. He might get there right on the nose, or he might run out a few miles short of the charging station. See, in the electric car, if you have to use the heater it cuts your mileage quite a bit. Also, headlights and a/c hurt your mileage greatly. He would be stranded on the shoulder of I 10 in east Louisiana, calling for a roll-back tow truck.
So he had to stop in Baton Rouge for a charge, after driving for only 2 hours. Officially you can recharge in 45 minutes, but in fact it takes an hour.
And so it went on brother's trip, drive for 2 hours or so, and stop for a one hour charge. Further, after a long day on the road on Tuesday, he arrived at Lake Charles, but he knew there was no charging station at the motel. So he had to go to the charging station for an hour prior to going to the motel.
The Tesla is a great car for bopping around town or, where we live, would be great for an Autumn drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway to the top of Mount Mitchell. That is a 45 miles drive. No problem in the Tesla. Plus brother has a Tesla charging station in his carport which I wired up for him.
But on his next long trip brother will leave the Tesla in the garage, and he will drive the Nissan pickup instead.
These 18 wheelers are claiming a 150 mile range but I bet that is exaggerated. Throw in, driving that thing on a 95 degree Georgia day and running that a/c, I bet your range would be 100 miles. Same thing, put that big truck in Minnesota at 10 below I bet you are not going to make 100 miles.
Big rig would need at least a Cat C-13 in the sleeper to make the trip that was any distance
Some of you aren't reading comprehension champions. These are local delivery trucks, not long-haul semis. For that use, electric vehicles are a natural. As mentioned above by one of the more astute among us, such trucks could be completely recharged during lunch hour, and even if not, few of them log more than 100 miles a day.
Bikerbob
Our sonar system power supply output was roughly 80V dc at 4000amp. Takes a lot of current to push sound through water.
What Rocky said......
Ya know there was a time in this country when a farmer gleefully harnessed up his team of horses to go pull one of those new fangled Model T motor cars out of the mud. Those automobiles were the devil's invention, ya know.
Electric vehicles have no soul.
Our former Governor proposed a special tax on electric cars as they weren’t paying fuel tax. There was so much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands by the greenies that he gave up on the issue.
The company I used to work for had 700 trucks. Most of these were "sleepers" for over the road hauling, and we over the road drivers would routinely do 650 miles in a day. The last truck I drove had a range of 1100 miles.
We also had a fleet of short haul trucks we called them "day cabs." We had them in Greenville SC, and Columbia, and Charleston, Atlanta, and Chattanooga.
Now, it is true that on one day, a day cab might just make deliveries around Greenville and Spartanburg and only go 80 miles in the day. But, the next day, the guy would make one local delivery, and then he had to make a run to Atlanta and back.
Atlanta is 150 miles away. Or, it might be that a Charleston driver got orders for a "hot load" where he had to go to Columbia SC and back and do it fast. Both of these runs are too far for the electric truck to make it. My brother just demonstrated what a pain in the butt it is to have to stop for a one hour recharge.
Diesel day cabs have a range of 700 miles.
So if you were a manager at G&P Trucking, you would have no interest in buying any of the electric trucks.
As someone with vast experience in the trucking industry, and as a person with very good reading comprehension skills, I say again that these electric trucks would have very limited usage.
How much usage did your day cabs get excluding those occasional "out of town" runs? If local runs were the majority of their use, then electric day cabs would indeed make sense - and possibly save enough to buy one or two mid-range diesels for those unusual runs.
I'm agin 'em 'cause AOC is fer 'em.
A company that runs delivery trucks would have their own charging stations, don't you imagine? Just like having your own diesel tanks or natural gas pumps if that's what they run. There are grundles of companies that could make excellent use of electric delivery trucks. Not every company's vehicle needs are the same as all the others.
My brother says that for his Tesla the electricity costs about 1/2 of what gasoline would cost.
If a company had deliveries for the Big Rigs where they were all local, and where they did not exceed 100 miles in a day, the electric truck would be great.
They will continue to make advances in these electric vehicles. If and when they double the mileage, where an electric Big Rig could go 300 miles on a charge, they would be much more viable.
As their release says, the vehicle in question is designed for local and regional deliveries. It's not a long haul truck. I see an awful lot of semis delivering food to supermarkets, dry goods to big box stores, and the like - all from local to semi-local warehouse complexes. I'd bet that few if any of those rigs come close to 150 miles a day.
Where I think electric trucks would really pay off, though, would be for those fleets of UPS, FEDEX, USPS, Amazon and similar delivery services doing residential and small business deliveries.
When you buy a Tesla they give you a 220 cord and a 110 cord. If you plug in the 110 cord, it charges at a rate of 4 miles in an hour. If you charge for 10 hours, you can drive 40 miles.
For comparison, the 220 charger that I wired up in brother's garage gives you 22 miles in an hour. So he is easily getting a full charge over night.
All the Tesla charging stations are 220. They are called "Super Chargers" and they charge much faster than the 220 that I hooked up. Brother got a full charge in an hour at the Super Charger in Baton Rouge and it cost about $11.
There probably are places, maybe a Corner Pantry, or a motel where you could plug in your 110 cord and they wouldn't make you pay but that would be a long wait. Would take you about two days to get a full charge.
When I first got to Florida I worked for a couple places as a mechanic for a local delivery company those trucks put on a lot more miles then you would think. I could see electric as a spotter truck (yard dog) where they don't leave the compound
How many AA batteries will I need, to get me back home from the dollar store?
Savage that is a great idea. The electric truck would be perfect for a yard dog.
They never leave the terminal they just drive around the yard all day. And, the yard dog could get a recharge at lunch there at his home terminal.
I wonder if there will come a day when the roads will have an inductive cable laid down in them so that the vehicle will take power direct from the roadway like the inductive chargers that some cell phones use?
My "short day" in the tractor trailer or a bobtail was right at 210 miles a day. You have to consider what a 53ft trailer delivers in a day, and the cost to unload that and reload into several bobtails for local delivery too. I keep hearing how green and efficient these electric vehicles are, but not much on how green the disposal of the worn out batteries are.
Battery technology is advancing by leaps and bounds - or is it volts and amps? The Highlander Hybrid we just bought has a battery that Toyota warrants for 100,000 miles and they say it could be good for double that. And there are even more powerful ones with longer lives now being tested. Ones that don't use lithium, which is not abundant enough to serve the demand expected. There's even a battery now in test that uses air as the medium. I kid you not.
I drove a city bus in my hometown back in the early 90's. I would do on average about 100 miles in an 8 hour workday. An electric fleet would be ideal for such an operation.