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It doesn't matter if there's only one charging station every 50 miles, they'll give you a route that has you stopping where they are.

Charge time doesn't matter because you already have mandatory breaks, and if you pull a lot of grades, you'll actually make better time because that thing has a thousand horse power unit.

10 years ago, EVs were experimental slop subsidized by greenies, now it's production stuff being bought by bean-counters.
The thing is they're expensive, say like $250k.

But if you're getting 8 MPG with your diesel and an electric gets 2 kWh/mile, if you're paying 20 cents per kWh then that's $3.20 per 8 miles, so you're saving like $3 per 8 miles.

If you're averaging 500 miles per day, you're saving $187/day.

Your driver's $300/day and you're gonna amortize that truck over 5 years, so that's costing you about $166 per working day (lets figure the truck is moving 300 days out of a year).

Now you take that and you look at maintenance and repair on these DEF/DPF shits and at the end of the day it just makes sense.

The sad story is gonna be for all the owner-operators who are driving their 1990s detroit diesel with no emissions, and they're gonna get fucked over on fuel and the big companies are gonna eat their lunch on freight rates.
> charging infrastructure hasnt been proven

It's not like you have to prove that the chargers will work, like as if they might mysteriously not start up and we need physicists to figure out why...

It's just a question of whether there are enough of them on the routes you want and if the price of power at the chargers is economical.

Now there's a lot of short haul shit, and for that they're just gonna charge it at the warehouse. Long distance you have to actually find the chargers and confirm the price of power and so on, but this is classic work for an office worker at a large trucking company.

If you're small, you go on trucking dot com and you find a contract and bid. If you're big, you know your main routes, you know basically how many trucks are gonna go over interstate 5 (for example) in a year, so you're gonna put electrics where there ARE chargers and where you're doing a lot of driving.

Like I said, this was theoretical 10 years ago, at this point it's pretty much inevitable...
With cars, the math is different.

I have a diesel car and I have no reason to buy anything else. That's because the amount I drive is very little so fuel cost is marginal compared to amortization of the vehicle.

A lot of people did buy electrics, they're like 90% in Norway, but that's more a lifestyle purchase, like buying a Harley Davidson. Norwegians are rich enough they can throw down for a Tesla.

But in China, EVs are 20% of trucking, and 50% of cars so it's not like something needs to be proven at this point...

@Evil_Bender @cjd @medievalwars The fundamental flaw with EV tech, as I see it, is EVs solve no problems while introducing a whole host of new ones.

Here's the rub: The elites really REALLY want EV tech bc muh climate change. We're going to have to deal with it for now.

Long term, I bet we see EV box trucks making deliveries in cities. Think of something like an electric F-350. But eventually everyone will see the hype for what it is and that's hype.

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> EVs solve no problems while introducing a whole host of new ones

If you're Europe or China, they solve a big problem: You need dollars to buy gas and if you try to work around that, the US get bitchy

> Long term, I bet we see EV box trucks making deliveries in cities.

My wife bought a phone and the guy who delivered it was in an electric van, and we're not city at all.

> But eventually everyone will see the hype for what it is and that's hype.

It was hype up until 2019 - which was the last year "muh climate" was a thing. Ever since then it's been 😷 💉 and then 🇺🇦 , 🇵🇸 , etc. Even Greta had to get a new job.

But then 2020 was the first year that EVs actually started getting traction, see chart. Everybody who trades in when their warrantee expires doesn't care about reliability or repairability, if the price difference between gas and power is bigger than the price difference of the car, they just buy the EV.

People that trade in when their warrantee period is up have no real reason to care about longevity - and there are some absolute pieces of shit out there on both the EV side and the ICE side (wet belts, CVT transmissions, that infamous Hyundai 2.4l engine, ...) Totally ruins the used market, sadly.

@cjd @Evil_Bender @pepsi_man I dont think anybody is choosing electric vehicles for their business because it really makes sense economically, given the fact that it is not proven yet, and most likely there will be issues that cant be predicted.

Companies do it because they want to appear green or whatever, and if the numbers are not bad either on paper then they go ahead.

If it was truly worth it we would see everybody using electric vehicles already.

Those toy scooter things people stand in are alright for going to work down the street I guess.

50cc motorbikes are much better with gas than electricity, they are already very efficient, and their tanks have like 5-7 liters, thats like 200km per tank.
> If it was truly worth it we would see everybody using electric vehicles already.

Batteries are a technological moving target. What that means is 15 years ago the economics were crap, now they're decent, in 15 years they'll be the only game in town.

Moving targets are extremely sneaky because everyone always dismisses them because they look at where they are, not where they're going...

LCD screens: Little toy shit for a calculator. Could never ever ever ever ever replace TVs and monitors. But they were improving, and they kept improving, and then one day bam, CRT tubes disappear forever.

Digital cameras: Terrible resolution, bad color, slow frame-rate... No possible threat to the film industry. Then they just moved up the chain from disposable cameras, instant cameras, and everything until eventually even full cinema movie cameras went digital.

Many similar examples.
Hybrids have really weird economics. All of the big OEMs went all-in on hybrids a decade ago and they all got buttfucked by Tesla because they were building two drivetrains and Elon was only building one.

And as battery costs came down, everything they had done got blown to shit.

There are SOME places where hybrids could make sense, but I don't know if anybody has a stomach to go into them right now - outside of niche bespoke players like Edison.

The problem is, it takes you 5-10 years to do the engineering and release the product, build a market, fix the issues that arise, and so on - and while you were doing that, battery prices fall by 50% and suddenly your idea doesn't even make sense on paper...
Hybrid *cars* never made that much sense. Range extended EVs a little more because you can charge them at home, but the whole thing ended up being a bad idea and it lost the OEMs a lot of money.

Moving target
Moving target
Moving target (!!!)

The OEMs though battery tech wouldn't improve that fast and so their product would have a nice lifespan... That is not what happened AT ALL.
Correct, I'm basically describing a corner case that is much closer in application to a vocational truck role (heavy towed loads, medium distances, limited/nonexistent charging availability)

This is a very different use space than guy that commutes to work 30-40 miles over mostly flat pavement, an ideal place to have a simple EV.

Yeah, super tricky b/c right now the Tesla semi long range version is 500 miles. Battery nerd shit that's in the lab now may be able to double that, so anyone who is trying to do a hybrid is racing the battery industry, and that a race that a lot of people tried and lost.

Current best battery chemistry (currently) can charge 0-100 in 6 minutes.

You have to send The Wrath Of God through that charge cable, but the Chinese have figured it out.

They use big buffer batteries to charge from the grid and then dump them into your car when you connect.

There's new chemistry can do 3 minutes, but at that point it's so much power that you need a different charge plug.
It's the price that's the issue. It's not worth putting in the capital. The return isn't there.

I won't get into the nightmare markets / agreements this had created, like fly-by-night contractors with unenforceable warranties, roof easements, problems selling real property because the solar lessor won't sign off or can't be found, leaky roofs, etc. I've seen it all.
Yea, somebody I know was a sales guy for this, in Cali.

But I mean the price people are paying for this stuff is not The Price.

India isn't paying more than 10 cents a watt for their panels, and you look at putting in a 10kw system in the US, that's not $1000.
Here it's common to use a non-grid-tie inverter w/ a battery and use the grid to top up the battery in case there isn't enough sun, but otherwise just run off the battery.

Here's like 6k€ for 11kw of capacity, plus another 11kw of spare solar panels because they sell them by the pallet.

Is it just impossible to get those kind of prices in the US ?
3.5k per kw is INSANE.

I don't care warrantee and insurance and shit, that can cost like 50% of the hardware, that's legitimate. 10x the cost of the system is theivery.

Anyway, there's the explanation of why it makes sense in India and not in California...
I grew up in operations. Every dollar is projected and risk taken into account with tolerances. A lot of people make the mistake of looking at pure monetary outlay alone.

Given my experience with solar companies and related issues, risk is a major factor here.

If the math worked out, that could be dealt with, since the local contractors I trust would then do the work.
It might just make no sense.

But still you can easily do the math in your head of how if you're a utility, you go buy a great big field of trash land that doesn't grow anything, it's dirt cheap, you hire some cheap labor to throw a bunch of panels on it, and you're making real money...
This sort of thing has been done before, use a diesel engine as the home furnace and it makes heat and electricity. Lookup "CHP" (combined heat and power).

I think the biggest reason why it's marginal is because the hardware is quite expensive, and the cost of diesel makes the power more expensive than most grid power.

Diesel is the best you're gonna do in terms of efficiency, gasoline / propane / etc is always worse because those engines are less efficient. Diesel has 10kwh/liter chemical energy, and they're 40% efficient, so 4kwh usable, 3.745 L/gallon, so 15kwh/gallon. If you're paying 5$/gallon, you're paying 33 cents per kwh, which unless you're in California, that's higher than the grid price.

Also internal combustion engines do break down. Reliability is much lower than a classical furnace, and when they break down, people have no sympathy for why it broke down, they're just pissed and ready to throw it out.

There is some interesting stuff happening in the space, but it's pushing in a couple of directions:
1. Wood fired -> much cheaper than diesel
2. Sterling engine or turbine -> much higher reliability than an engine

Picture 2 is a wood pellet sterling furnace, 10kw of heat and 1kw of electrical power.
Woodgas is such a pain in the balls, the tar is super dirty and clogs things up. You can afford the scrubbers if it's a stationary installation, but if it's on a vehicle it's even worse. Then the wood needs to be perfectly shaped and dry enough.

If you're off-grid, you already need a solution to make power - so going with an EV means you just scale that same solution up a little bit more. Thomas Massie is off-grid and he drives a Tesla.

That sterling CHP is a good direction, but you want to be able to run on any wood, not just pressed pellets. It also needs to be more efficient because 1kw power 10kw heat is pretty bad. China has a thermoacoustic sterling that hits 30% so the tech is there.

And summertime = just use solar. The economics of generating power w/o moving parts or fuel is unbeatable.

I really like the concept behind the Thermodynamic Transformer - and I’m fairly certain it’d be a thoroughly excellent rig for a stationary tesla turbine power plant; I just don’t see any reason it’d go over-unity. Nevertheless the plain physics of increasing the temperature differential between either end of the turbine’s fluid path should increase its overall efficiency. That being said, I guess dupes won’t throw money at you unless you make huge promises 🤷🏻‍♂️

Is this the thing where you harvest energy from small temperature differences between, e.g. a river and the air?

AFAIK the problem with those is the temperature differences are so small that you need massive heat sinks to move thermal energy and still the power output is pretty bad.

I was thinking it might make sense in frigid cold where you have water access since the water is 0C and the air might be -30C, but according to GPT it's still not a very good temp difference.

I think I know what you’re referring to as a “thermoelectric generator” - which uses the Seebeck Effect and is a pretty neat way to magnify the brightness of a candle tenfold :smirk:

But in my case I’m just talking about Ferwerda’s experiment - which looks pretty cool honestly even if I doubt the over-unity claims. But essentially he’s spinning a tesla turbine by reducing the temperature at the outlet to cryogenic temps, while using hot water on the inlet side - so, not even boiling. At least that’s how I understand it. It’s pretty fascinating imo - but I’m not buying the PR 😆

Interesting, never heard of that.

> reducing the temperature at the outlet to cryogenic temps

Unless you have cryogenic temps for free - like e.g. if you're in the arctic - you need energy to make the cold side to begin with.

And if you are in the arctic, then you need quite a lot more energy to get the water hot... So it doesn't sound like it would be that useful...

Right, it’s not free of course; I think his claim is something like if you get it started, it can then generate enough electricity to keep the temperature down, with some left over. And it would be quite a find, and explains the over-unity talk; I just don’t think it would have fizzled out a couple years ago if it was really something