This makes sense. However, as others have mentioned, I expect that it will in some cases be feasible to use Superchargers as those "slower chargers" to fill in gaps.
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Tesla's Supercharger Team was recently laid off. We discuss what this means for the company on today's TMC Podcast streaming live at 1PM PDT. You can watch on X or on YouTube where you can participate in the live chat.
Unlikely as in most cases I don't think you could even park a Semi with a trailer at the Supercharger without blocking a lot of stalls. I just don't see Tesla going down that route.
I'm sure that initial purchasers will likely have on-site charging at one/both ends of their routes.
Oh sarcasm, how clever.
I'm quite pleased with the pace of the Supercharger rollout. Now 1067 locations worldwide. I live in Georgia and find coverage in the Southeast region quite good. I've been driving a Tesla for 3 years.
supercharge.info This site has some nice charts.
Just from visual appearance I'd assume that would be possible, although I don't think there's enough room up front to install the tires required to get the 10K kg that's allowed in one or two jurisdictions. I don't suppose, at this point, they have different axles for different weight ratings anyway.
I took it to mean a warehouse could install supercharges (properly spaced) instead of Megachargers for overnight fill ups.
For the rare case, a supercharger to semi adapter cable could give it a boost. But a support truck with genset or powerpack is more likely. Still bad planning to need that though...
Oh, I just mean getting it to 12k on the steering with 20k tractor and 60k trailer. Concern was lack of mass at front due to battery pack location.
dc_h
Active Member
It’s amazing a guy with 200 million dollars has been able to start a car company and build a global charging, distribution and sales network in a decade. If they can repeatedly the progress through 2027, we will have a hard time remembering the stone ago 2010’s.
Perhaps for emergency use, but no employer is going to want to pay for the time spent at a slow charger and no paid-by-the-mile driver is going to be happy waiting for a slow charge. The truck needs to be loaded and traveling as much as possible. There are going to be exceptions, depending on the particular route and customer, where the truck has to sit overnight, but in general the truck should be moving and fully grossed out as much as possible. Freight revenue is mass times distance, so the quicker you can deliver and the more often you can fully load up the truck, the more income you can make. Slow chargers just don't have a place in this equation.
Are there any actual dimensional drawings? I haven't really done anything other than watch the reveal, read the posts, and extrapolated from the days when I was a professional in that area.
adiggs
Well-Known Member
I think the usage model to have in mind here are trucks that depart from and return to a central distribution center each day, and are parked over night. At these locations, a Supercharger class charger can refill the battery pack from empty to full overnight with nobody sitting around waiting.
Maybe if the Supercharger class charger is too expensive to build, and the needed charges are small enough, then you have a night driver role that is moving trucks in and out of the charging bays so that all the trucks get their overnight charge and are ready to go the next morning (so you might have 10 trucks and 4 charging bays, instead of needing 1 bay for every truck).
Actually, I think that the Supercharger class chargers will be the dominant privately owned charging system in situations where trucks are parked overnight.
This is definitely NOT in-the-wild charging; this is charging where the truck, the charger, and the electricity bill are all owned by the same company (I'm thinking UPS, Wal-Mart, USPS - that sort of situation).
Points of origin won't be on a nice equal grid all equally spaced, so it makes sense to have the more heavily trucked routes have closer together charging stations so that you don't have to stop early to charge after driving for 100 miles just to make the next station ~300 miles away.
Granted, you could just expect early charging at first charging station reached if necessary to reach the next one in the early days, but I'd think eventually they'd want to have the common OTR routes covered at something closer to 200~250 miles than 400+ miles, so that it's easier to stop and charge when you need/want to rather than every time you see a sign that says "LAST CHANCE FOR CHARGE NEXT 400 MILES".
On top of that, coal was cheaper than diesel. (Still is cheaper, as a matter of fact.) Whereas, in most places, electricity is cheaper than diesel now.
The biggest commercial disadvantage of steam engines was a terrible repair record -- they were often in the shop half the time. This is on top of the extremely labor-intensive aspects which he describes in the article (rewatering, refuelling, having a fireman on board just to stoke the coal).
But it was actually the maintenance which seems to have killed steam engines dead. British Rail made the quixotic decision to focus on new steam engines in the 1950s, which was disastrous financially. Thanks to heavy unionization, they didn't save anything on labor when they finally switched to diesel, but the maintenance savings were monumental.
See, it turns out steam is actually really destructive to materials, and keeping it pressurized is hard. This is actually one of the major reasons why thermal power plants are so unreliable and maintenance-heavy; the severely pressurized ones like nuclear reactors are worse in this regard.
I think we should see 30 years as a far upper bound, given that the steam->diesel transition suffered from the effects of coal being cheaper than diesel and early diesel engines being underpowered compared to steam engines, neither of which are present.
Electric trucks will have lower maintenance requirements than diesel trucks, though it won't be as extreme as the steam/diesel difference.
Perhaps the only thing which will delay the charging infrastructure deployment is land acquisition & permitting. (I suppose there could be a bottleneck at the battery factory, but that can be managed by reallocation of resources. There's also financing, but Tesla won't have a problem with that once Model 3 is in mass production.) I hope Tesla's already starting in on the land acquisition...
Keeping it safely pressurized is even harder. That's basically why there are no steam cars or tractors. Steam engines are not something where you can be sloppy with maintenance and get away with it.
Yes, I completely agree that Supercharger-class chargers would primarily be used overnight, and possibly at some destinations while loading/unloading. Public Superchargers would continue to be intended mainly for Model S/3/X drivers.
However, I continue to believe that the public Supercharger network may be useful to some fraction of early Semi owners, particularly those whose routes vary. For example, if on occasion an independent, Semi-driving trucker has a long, sketchy "jump" between Megachargers, then it may in those instances make sense to spend an hour or two at a Supercharger in between. Physically connecting to a Supercharger would generally require disconnecting the trailer and picking a stall that's not too boxed in. Obviously this would not be an ideal scenario and should be the exception and not the rule, but it could be better than having to take a diesel truck or not even make the trip at all.
As a Model S owner, if I'm taking a very long trip, I wouldn't leave the Model S at home just because of a gap or two in the Supercharger network; I'd find workarounds involving the use of non-Tesla charging stations. Similarly, I think some Semi owners will be motivated to find workarounds here and there.
This video spells out the difficulty devious diesel had gaining acceptance on the Island of Sodor.
Perhaps you need to brush up on your Hours of Service Regulations.
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