I'm curious about this subject, I have a relative in the trucking logistics business. Details, please? It will make the holidays much more interesting to be ready with the information. Based on what I've seen so far, it sounds to me like a hybrid platform where the metal-air battery is what gets swapped makes the most sense. Then the "Flying J" truck centers would be where the recharging occurs, and all the drivers really need to do is take care of themselves and relax. I would still rather see Hyperloop deployed for freight. Unfortunately, the problem of that is the classic "square peg" of a shipping container and "round hole" of a hyperloop tube.
The first question always starts with how much energy do you need (for a typical day). Normally loaded long haulers with an 11 hour work day would need at least 2 MwH's of electricity (Problably closer to 3 MwH's but we were really trying to see if we could make the numbers work). So if we break that down with today's technology and 1 pack to go the entire distance you are looking at 17,500 lbs and $600,000 worth of batteries (assuming 250wh/kg and $300/kwh). Since as been previously posted, truckers make their money by hauling cargo and not battery packs, not only is the pack too expensive, but it compromises the effectiveness of the hauler as you will be hauling batteries vs cargo. So it becomes obvious that even with significant increases in battery technology that 1 battery pack to run the entire day (which is the current case with diesel tanks) is not feasible.
So my 2nd question comes down to how often is it acceptable for you to stop in the course of a day. If you stop too often, you never get anywhere (and you have to have more infrastructure) but if you dont stop often enough you get hit with your weight penalty (and higher value of the pack on board). The answer to this really comes down to driver/company preference, but for the sake of argument we decided on no more then 4 stops in a given day.
Now we quickly decided that supercharging with the current battery technology is just not feasible unless a higher C charge can be used as current charging rates and having to stop 4 times a day means that half your day you would be down due to charging. The other issue that a higher C rate even makes worse is the amount of power required to charge a big rig's batteries in a reasonable time could be enough to take up 5 percent of a single coal fired powerplant causing brownouts and grid overloading. As an example if you had a 600 kwh battery bank (1/4 daily need plus buffer) to charge at a simple 2C rate (80 percent full in say 20 minutes which is the rate of charge for a Leaf using CHAdeMO) would require a connection of 1.3 MW. Now 1.3MW is already a lot of power that can only be created near distribution centers, but what happens if you have 50 semi's wanting to charge at a truck stop?
So as our conversation progressed the only possible way that long haul trucks could make sense (keep in mind there may be many cases were local and regional trucks make sense) is with battery swapping. With today's technology you will still have a 5200 lbs battery that would cost $180,000 (for 600 kwh) which is still north of what most people would find acceptable even if you didn't require a battery swapping station every 200 miles.
Now there were benifits over the current diesel (noise, shaking, engine idle overnight, removing the cost of the engine) that I didn't account for. We briefly talked about series hybrid's but I have no idea on efficiency and frankly we changed subjects pretty quickly after that conversation.
So that was my off the cuff conversation.... Took up a good hour of the ride until we switched subjects on stupid car drivers that like to cut off 80,000 lbs of awesome.
