Long haul trucking is solved by electrifying US highways. Trains can charge from overhead lines at 200+MPH doing the same for trucks at highway speeds is relatively trivial and allows for on trip charging.
An EV semi with a relatively modest 100 mile range battery easily solves the last mile problem off highways while weighing the same as a traditional ICE engine + fuel.
C'mon guys. "Relatively trivial" is not the two words I would use to describe electrifying highway grids.
And to convert road vehicles to conduct off that highway? The words I would use to describe/implement that is "Absolute Taxpayer Aversion". Billions and billions in R&D with no guarantee of adoption and likely greater operating costs for 10s of reasons.(Maintenance, contract costs, accidents, teething.
Many counties, even liberal ones, in the US still have dirt roads. In western ireland it's about half the roads are dirt that I saw. If we can't figue out laying concrete at scale, how can we accomplish this "trivially"?
There is zero need to electrify dirt roads, just specific loans on ~1% all us roads due to that 100 mile range battery I just mentioned.
We had electric trollies 140 years ago and modern trains have surfaces in contact at 3x the speeds and much higher power draws. Trucks in comparison don’t need constant power, so you can maintain the line without interfering with traffic.
But you don’t need to trust me it’s a proven technology with the obvious revenue stream of charging for electricity.
PS: America has dirt roads because dirt roads work well when you have low traffic. Their old, cheap, and therefore proven technology just like electrified roads.
Agreed, my point on dirt roads doesn't make much sense.
But point still stands, if state govt's struggle to repave arterial roads every few years to the standards of our taxes, do we think any national gov't would shoulder paying 10,0000 times that cost yearly to maintain bleeding edge technology across 100k highway miles?
In the 19th-20th century rail/trolley was used in the same way municipal buses are now. Great for absolutely defined schedules across short distances for local residents. Do you see that scaling up to highways though? Even if we used old school powered rail and cable technology to charge up highways for big rigs only, that would be such an unfathomable, enormous cost to implement and maintain. We can't maintain the rail network in this country, which is dwarfed in size by highways.
You seem to think this is expensive, but these systems are cheap enough to save money when used infrequently by electric trains. Highways see a lot more truck traffic.
At scale this isn’t the kind of thing state or federal government needs to pay for out of pocket, it’s a revenue generating opportunity like total roads and can be financed as such.
It’s a classic chicken and egg problem where you need enough miles of electrified highways to convince people to buy new or modify old trucks. Realistically if hot swapping batteries or hydrogen was the cheaper alternative that’s the correct infrastructure to build.
Passenger rail largely failed because of the last mile problem, but here batteries solves the issue. A mile of electric highway can easily let you drive several miles of non electric roads.
We were doing this 100 years ago for inner city trolly’s. Trains travel 3x the speed of highway trucks, vastly higher power draw, and we solved that decades ago. There’s even been successful demos of actual highway trucks and power delivery. With modern battery technology we don’t even need a continuous system just enough to keep trucks topped off on highways so maintenance is easy and existing automated toll lanes even cover billing.
So, yes it really is trivial as shown by how cheap existing demo’s have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road
An EV semi with a relatively modest 100 mile range battery easily solves the last mile problem off highways while weighing the same as a traditional ICE engine + fuel.