alt Hacker NewsSelf-Powered Trailers Promise Leaner Freight Runs
Comments
Brave new world for the kinds of people who steal catalytic converters and the copper off air conditioners!
The placement of the Krone pack in the photo at link, makes me laugh: it would never survive in the USA, given the way truck drivers drive and the bumps and curbs etc. that trucks drive over. It would be ripped off or at least heavily damaged within 50K miles.
In the US, commercial trailers are used like these crappy sheds, you go get one and the ABS unit is gone, the only thing worth stealing. For any company where this doesn’t hold it’s a big deal. The bigger deal is really RV trailers. You power assist, with simple motors controlled by pulling, and you can pull a huge one with ANY car, you don’t need truck, just modified mirrors. Plus the RV trailer benefits from slow self movement and power wall when disconnected. Total off grid tiny home.
Cool, but I don’t see the real benefit. Electronic trucks already work quite well, start at around 150k (vs. 150k for a retrofitted e trailer), and are afaik mostly limited by the charging infrastructure. If you now add a an electronic trailer to your diesel truck, you now also have to care about charging.
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.
I have a hard time seeing this adopted in many markets due to overall system complexity and weird new edge cases.
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.
I think a cool application is that someone with a remote control could park these or manipulate them in the logistics park while the tractor trucks can immediately pick a different trailer and leave
These paired with Janus Electric[0] conversions would make a hell of a road train.
This trailer saves 7000l of diesel per year. Assuming 40l/100km, with this trailer you can go ~17.000 km more, which is 11-17% more, for the same fuel cost. Or ~12-15k EUR in fuel savings per year (assuming 1.8EUR/l).
With 13+ years ROI (electricity is not free) is this really beneficial?
Even a version without AC charging (just solar + regen) with a smaller battery seems like a good deal
It’s an interesting idea. A company called Hyliion https://www.hyliion.com/ tried something similar here in the US about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to have success in the market and ended up pivoting to power generation for data centers.
[dead]
It'd be nice if researchers compared the impact on environment of disposing of the batteries (toxic metals, chemicals, other components) with the impact on the environment of the truck burning fossil fuels. In the end, what's the net benefit? Maybe it's great, I don't know. I feel we're getting a very one-sided assessment, though.