Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes Tesla's electric Semi truck, which has only been cruising highways since December, is facing its first recall over a faulty parking brake. Unlike other issues, this one won't be fixable with an over-the-air update. According to documents published by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the fault …
...because even in tiny New Zealand, they're looking promising - see for example https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/03/25/new-breed-of-electric-trucks-put-to-work-on-central-interceptor/ or on a smaller scale, https://www.greengorilla.co.nz/ev-trucks/.
As far as I can tell, as long as the EV trucks are not made by Tesla they seem to be deemed reliable enough to have companies invest in them.
Tesla trucks not so much because of the Musk effect: promising lots and delivering pretty much nothing of it. As a matter of fact, even the introduction event itself seemed to have been laced with rather creative interpretations of reality such as the actual load on the truck overtaking another one on a hill..
"There were not trying to look space-agey like Tesla's"
I have to admit, the image of the Tesla truck on the Register's front page does look like a villain's vehicle, more like a demon-possessed truck from a horror movie than you friendly local delivery team. (Maybe I am just a teensy bit paranoid.)
"Science says: CITATIONS?"
Science doesn't ask for citations wherein the conclusions are based on the most rudimentary aspects of physics, and are--as my physics and engineering texts from an earlier era were wont to say--"...obvious to even the most casual observer...".
The US Patent and Trademark Office does NOT ask for citations re your claims for a spiffy, brand-new, never-before-seen-or-ever-thought-of Perpetual Motion Machine. You do get a nice, cute little red flag in their computer system, though. Best part? No citations needed.
Wait, you're talking about the truck Tesla put together without very obvious ever talking to people who drive one for a living? That cabin has pretty much everything wrong with it that you could come up with because whoever dreamt up the layout has obviously never actually driven one for real.
How practical the truck is to actually use for long haul trucking due to absolute shit design (no surprise there, it's a Tesla) has nothing to do with how practical or usable (B)EV truck is. Especially for short haul (distribution, short distance, trash pickup, etc) it definitely works and many companies are proving that worldwide.
The Engineering Explained video I linked to above also mentions that something like 80% of trucks journeys are never loaded to the maximum legal weight for a truck. So sure, a BEV can carry slightly less than a diesel/petrol vehicle, but for many (not all, just many) use cases, that's perfectly fine.
"whoever dreamt up the layout has obviously never actually driven one for real."
Does this apply to the cabin designers of so many modern cars with multi-level touch screen menus you have *look at* when making changes rather than just reaching out and feeling the button to press or knob to turn without ever taking your eyes off the road? That would explain a lot :-)
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Science says: CITATIONS?
Maths.
One: total carrying capacity
Max on the road weight = x
Load capacity is thus x - truck weight.
Truck weight = frame + engine + fuel. Frame will be the same in both, but [engine + 2000l diesel] is not even a third of [engine + f*cking large battery], so there you go for load capacity.
Two: range and utility
Normal range of a diesel truck on a single tank is in the 2000km region. Refuelling time: approx 20 minutes. Availability of fuel: pretty much everywhere.
Range of Tesla truck: 500 km approx. Recharge time assuming an as yet non-existing supercharger network: 2..4h. Availability of superchargers: good luck finding one. You can also charge it at home, that will take a good week or so.
I have no mathematical equivalence for usability, but having to move through the cabin just to hand papers out of your window is also costing time. Real truck drivers universally agree that whoever Tesla talked to to design the cabin, it cannot possibly have involved anyone who drives a truck for a living. They got so much wrong it almost feels deliberate.
You don't need citations when the facts are so obvious even a 5 year old can work them out.
== Science says that EVs are not great at load carrying or towing over distance.
= Range of Tesla truck ... whoever Tesla talked
= You don't need citations when the facts are so obvious even a 5 year old can work them out.
Or when you want to quietly change the subject from wild claims that *NO* EV is any good to whether just the Tesla EV is any good.
That's one of the reasons why you cite - to identify what you are going to talk about and stick to it!
The only snag is that it's the externalities you left out of your equations that's making this stuff necessary - and the calculations are very different when you include them.
I'd be surprised if we didn't at some point see some sort of hybrid model with catenaries (or similar) on long-distance routes with batteries for the last leg or local distribution. I'm sure there will be lots of constraints, but maths of the form "we could never build a national rail network - do you realise how many steel plants we'd need?" won't be one of them.
handbrake failures are completely unheard of…
On my old Citroen XM, the handbrake [1] was pretty much the only thing that *didn't* fail..
[1] OK - they called it a 'foot operated parking brake' since it was actually a self-locking foot pedal. But it was connected to the brakes via cable and that cable never stopped working..
Don't need these newfangled hydraulics that can easily leak and then (gasp) spray lubricant over the bits that you're trying to stop moving. Real parking brakes use cables, but even cables have occasionally been known to snap.
Also, the brake adjusters/compensators in the hub fail.
Those are 3 methods of failure that I have personally experienced. I'm certain that there are other ways as well.
That's not how the parking brakes on semis work. They use a (theoretically) fail-safe setup where air holds off a spring-loaded brake by applying pressure to a diaphragm. To set the parking brake you release the air from the spring brake chamber. This means any air loss will eventually apply the spring brakes. (To tow a truck with air brakes you have to "cage" the brakes by using a threaded rod to compress the springs.)
How Tesla managed to screw that up, I can't imagine. It's a simple system that's been around since God was a boy.
"Independent mechanical systems" were why trains used to require a brakeman. A 100 years on, the systems are less independent and less mechanical, and we still get a train crash every couple of years where the driver has neglected to operate the independent mechanical system because it had to be operated as an independent mechanical system
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