The only reason why you’d need on-road recharging for hypothetical autonomous semi trucks is if they’re regularly traveling outside the range of their batteries, which is probably in the 400-500mi range.
In a well designed infrastructure system, that shouldn’t happen often. Instead the hops of hundreds of miles should be handled by trains, leaving semi trucks for the last dozens of miles from train hub to area of need.
Some long haul trucking will happen, but it should be a slim minority of cases.
You might still want want "in flight" charging even for shorter trips just to keep trucks moving but I guess the world where load/unload times aren't enough is pretty unrealistic.
Adding an extra step (rail hub to short haul truck transition, potentially at both ends of the trip) adds cost. This cost is (and will be for the foreseeable future) less than having the less efficient semi-truck do the entire trip at least for the kinds of loads that are currently carried by semi-truck. JIT inventory systems also don't play nice with rail.
Semi trucks are cheaper because they receive a $125B+ yearly subsidy in the form of road maintenance. Semi trucks do 99% of the damage to our public roads, but only pay 35% of the cost.
I suspect that rail would be much more price competitive if we took that subsidy away.
You’re right about JIT, but we’re also seeing the downsides of JIT infrastructure during this pandemic. I suspect that we’ll see a push for more redundancy in our supply chain for reasons completely unrelated to trucks vs. trains.
Assuming we're resurfacing our roads once every 5 years, if we banned trucks it would take 100x longer to accumulate the same amount of damage, so we'd be able to resurface only once every 500 years?
I would expect there to be a significant amount of damage done just by the elements, independent of usage.
There’s also the fact that roads are built up to trucking standards. Without trucks the roads would be thinner, reducing cost and pollution (concrete is a major source of CO2).
Sure. I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion that trucks undercontribute to road maintenance costs. I just don't think those numbers are sufficient to prove it.
This is utterly false and in a trivially verifiable way in this age of street view.
Raised highways sometimes have concrete decks because the strength can be attractive but the overwhelming majority of highways are asphalt. At or below grade highways are almost always asphalt. Tunnels are often concrete but those are a vanishingly small minority of miles.
AFAIU, the original Interstate Highway System was all concrete. These days states usually resurface heavily trafficked segments with asphalt (of various varieties) atop the old concrete. Apparently, at least as of 2006 60% of the system was still concrete pavement: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2006/3127/2006-3127.pdf Which is not surprising as IME long segments of the IHS are often still concrete pavement, especially in the South and West; it's only in urban areas where asphalt surfacing seems ubiquitous.
I'm not sure how new segments are built today, but they may very well still use concrete underlayment, or at least something more substantial than loose aggregate. Road tech these days is way more complicated than just concrete v. asphalt. I would guess that for remote segments, and given the load requirements, it may still be cost effective to keep using concrete surfacing.
If you’re going to call something “utterly and trivially verifiable (sic) false” you should actually check. Interstate highways use more cement than asphalt.
“The analysis shows that a total of approximately 1.5 billion metric tons (Gt) of aggregates, 35 million metric tons (Mt) of asphalt, 48 Mt of cement, and 6 Mt of steel is in place in interstate highways.”
The only reason why you’d need on-road recharging for hypothetical autonomous semi trucks is if they’re regularly traveling outside the range of their batteries, which is probably in the 400-500mi range.
In a well designed infrastructure system, that shouldn’t happen often. Instead the hops of hundreds of miles should be handled by trains, leaving semi trucks for the last dozens of miles from train hub to area of need.
Some long haul trucking will happen, but it should be a slim minority of cases.