Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
I was with you up to the last part. The large majority of truckers that are driving Class 8 trucks are not waiting for trucks to load/unload:
- There's about 3 times more trailers than tractors, and a trailer is about a third of a cost of a tractor.
- Typical truck shipping workflow at large (short haul) shipping companies: truckers arrive with a load at the trucking yard, drop it off, hook the next trailer and pull it to the next destination.
- Truck drivers are paid by mile and they want to stand around waiting as little as possible. Truck drivers are federally mandated to work at most 11 hours in a 24 hour time period, with at least 30 minute breaks every 8 hours - which is usually taken as 2x 15 minutes. Any restriction beyond that, be it trailer loading/unloading or recharging, reduces the income of the trucker.
- The trailers at the trucking yard, port or railway head are loaded, unloaded and moved around by local employees independently and asynchrously of truck drivers.
- Forget "Ice Road Truckers" driving EV trucks anytime soon: that's long haul and team driving - EV trucks probably won't be competitive in that space for years due to lack of range. Nor do they have to be competitive there: 70% of the U.S. trucking market is "short haul" with 200-300 miles hops and many of the trucks are idle at night, when the trucks can recharge.
- Shipping companies only care about long term profits, the one time cost of installing a 1 MW, 5 MW or 20 MW power grid connection are a very small factor if EV trucks are significantly more profitable than diesel trucks - which they are.
- Trucking companies primarily care about the following costs:
- Purchase cost of the truck, per mile of expected lifetime.
- Fuel cost of the truck, per mile and per tons of load.
- Labor cost of the truck, per mile.
- Maintenance cost of the truck, per mile.
- Average safe speed a truck can achieve with a full load on a given route. If an EV truck can pull at 40-50 mph up to a mountain pass and can then go down 40-50 mph on full regen braking that's a big competitive advantage to diesel trucks that can only go up 10-20 mph burning a lot of fuel.
- If a truck has to be recharged for 1 hour every 10 hours, then that's simply a 10% correction to the numbers above. Even with that correction EV trucks are significantly more profitable than diesel trucks, even without FSD. There's shipments (such as full weight loads over mountainous terrain mentioned above) where EV trucks are vastly more profitable.
Buying a passenger car is a big emotional and life style decision, but buying a truck is mostly a bottom line calculation - which is why I think FUD has far less effect on the calculations of shipping companies, which is why I expect much faster electrification in the trucking industry.
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