Tesla Truck

Now this could be interesting...............then my NG generator could be bkup to the powerwall............

 

Tesla has recently released these: (for what it's worth)



And:

 

black one looks like darth vader model.................

 

As interesting as the idea of unlimited range would be it's not practical. It takes about 3.5 hours using a 240V/50A circuit to give a Telsa about 100 miles range. Specifically 33.6kW needs to be returned to the battery (their built-in charger is 9.6kW).

If you have a typically sized solar panel you use for topping your fridge battery it's probably about 100W, maybe 50W even. Assuming you have typical efficiency and incidence your 100W might average 50% over the whole day if the sun is good.

So if your truck is dead and needs to go 100 miles back home from camp you're going to wait 672 hours or almost 2 months (56 days) with 12 hours of daylight if you have 50W on average from your panel.

Or put another way, if you want to go 100 miles a day and want to move every day you need to sit still during daylight for some amount of time. So let's say we're talking a typical summer day in an average place, perhaps the Midwest. So you're getting 12 hours of daylight, so you want to do 6 hours of driving and 6 hours of charging.

You'll need to be able to do 5.6kW for 6 hours, which means 24 x 240W panels. Those are usually about 35 lbs each and around 60" x 48" x 2", which means you'll carry 840 lbs of solar panels that take 80 sq-ft of cargo space (with 480 sq-ft of surface that needs to be exposed to sunlight) to charge enough for 100 miles in 6 hours.

That's why an EV off highway truck isn't practical. You need a reliable, high capacity power source. Since you want to be active during the day a hybrid is necessary. But it still needs to be a decent sized generator, 3kW or so, that runs all night.

 

Several companies, including Tesla, are working on "charge as you go" systems. It will be built into the road and will charge the battery without being plugged in, similar to the new cell phone chargers that you just put down on a dock instead of plugging it in. To your point above, it will work on-road, but obviously not feasible for any off-road use. Some interesting times ahead of us.

 

When battery technology catches up - and it will - the range for EVs will be comparable to typical gas vehicles. If that's the case, why couldn't you go off road in one? Plenty of folks go off road without carrying extra gas. Solar charging in the field is impractical, but the idea that this prevents off road use is incorrect.

Also, just like cans of gas, I can imagine people carrying extra auxiliary battery packs. I carry one now for my phone. In a pickup truck you could add gerry can sized battery units as needed for extra range.

Just because we can't do it now, doesn't mean it won't be normal in a decade.

 

The running out of fuel comparison is true, you have a given range and work within it. The question is comparable range and practicality.

Perhaps battery technology will eventually work out. Gasoline is around 44 MJ/kg and weighs about 0.75 kg per liter. So a standard 20L jerry can gets you 660 MJ. Or in American terms, a gallon of gasoline is about 6 lbs and gets us the equivalent of 36kW-hr and a 5 gallon can gets you about 180 kW-hr.

An 18650 cell gets you about 45 kJ and weighs about 50 grams, e.g. you get about 0.9 MJ/kg. That's the problem, if 20L of gasoline gets you 100 miles then you need to carry 733 kg (1,615 lbs) of spare battery to get the same extra 100 miles that 32 lbs of gasoline got you.

Put this another way. A Tesla can carry about 50 kW-hr of energy onboard. This is roughly equivalent to 1.5 gallons of gasoline. So you can in theory fully power a Tesla more than 3 times on a single jerry can of gasoline. This of course ignores that an internal combustion engine is inefficient at converting the fuel into work.

It's all about power density and there's a really long way to go to figure this out. It's not a matter of figuring out technology, it's physics. We'll figure out how to make things better. The next step is lithium metal batteries (which aren't current rechargeable). They get about 4 MJ/kg, so it's about one order improvement in density. Batteries aren't a new thing either, we've been working on them for a very long time already. It's possible that improvements aren't decades away or maybe ever. Fuel cells are the next step.

But it's not an apples-to-apples. Batteries are energy carriers, not energy sources. Fuel is an energy source, the sun is an energy source. There's no foreseeable future where you can carry spare batteries in the same way as you carry spare fuel. We need to focus on finding better energy sources with less negative sides. Solar cells and wind generation require a lot of heavy metal mining and toxic processing and aren't that space efficient at doing it. Hydroelectric ruins landscapes and ecosystems with dams, nuclear, coal, etc. of course are polluters. Hydrogen is currently a net negative, since it takes more energy (via steam reforming or electrolysis) to create than you get back out. It's somewhat ironic that the majority of industrial hydrogen currently is produced as a byproduct of petroleum refining.

Full electric vehicles only can be justified for zero tailpipe emissions and therefore as a way to move city pollution and disperse it. If the market wants people to embrace electric vehicles they need to focus on hybrids that fit lifestyles. A diesel electric truck would be simply awesome. I worry about the complexity but I also used to worry about EFI when I got my first truck without a carburetor, too. There's a $1 billion prize sitting out there for anyone who can match battery energy density to gasoline, so there's incentive for ya.

 

^Funny enough many giant off-road dump trucks are diesel electric. They implement it effectively to eliminate the traditional transmission and portions of the drivetrain.

 

Not directly related, but Nova did an episode on battery technology that was really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZrQ5yPsLI

Lot's of money and resources being applied to this. The future will exciting!

 

Completely agree, there's well established ways with mining trucks and locomotives. They are absolutely all about squeezing the most work from a fuel source.

 

sweet!

 

Somebody Photoshop this and add a plate bumper, a bed rack, and a RTT!

 

Also in "heavy duty local transport": https://www.wrightspeed.com/

A mini multi-fuel turbine driving a generator, and an all-electric drivetrain. Whose going to swap it into one of these?

 

Another $1 billion for anyone who can come up with the charging infrastructure to feed such dense batteries

Think about a gas station with all pumps in full use at Costco. To transfer the equivalent chemical energy in electricity in the same duration, the power draw is something like 5% of a nuclear reactor output.

 

Yup. That's what I was implying earlier. If it takes 5 minutes to empty a jerry can into your tank that's the same energy transferred as 3-1/3 full Telsa Model S recharges, which would take about 31.5 hours using their regular NEMA14-50 (9.6kW-hr) charger.

 

12-26-2017 article on the future truck platform

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/...-truck-in-tweet-to-canadian-pot-seed-company/

 

^Yep, should be interesting: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945713737729634304https://twitter.com/sustainableanna/status/945719213284626433https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945729229001334784
Truck Trend's artist's impressions:

 

I await in suspense. The Model S will be a company vehicle next year, and maybe this will be part of the fleet in the future if it can deliver on par with an F-150