I do not think the time is right for electric semis. We need a few battery breakthroughs before it becomes reasonable.
Right now they have to carry around far too much weight and bulk in batteries, and take far too long to charge, and the batteries don't have a long enough lifespan.
Right now this whole effort feels performative. Its greenwashing.
Some day it will likely become very practical, but that day is not today.
The time is right if you properly price the cost of diesel truck emissions. Certainly, you can always kick the can into the future if you're not willing to pay true costs and dump the externalities on everyone else. Current cost of CO2 is ~$185/ton emitted.
> The social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) measures the monetized value of the damages to society caused by an incremental metric tonne of CO2 emissions and is a key metric informing climate policy. Used by governments and other decision-makers in benefit–cost analysis for over a decade, SC-CO2 estimates draw on climate science, economics, demography and other disciplines. However, a 2017 report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine1 (NASEM) highlighted that current SC-CO2 estimates no longer reflect the latest research. The report provided a series of recommendations for improving the scientific basis, transparency and uncertainty characterization of SC-CO2 estimates. Here we show that improved probabilistic socioeconomic projections, climate models, damage functions, and discounting methods that collectively reflect theoretically consistent valuation of risk, substantially increase estimates of the SC-CO2. Our preferred mean SC-CO2 estimate is $185 per tonne of CO2 ($44–$413 per tCO2: 5%–95% range, 2020 US dollars) at a near-term risk-free discount rate of 2%, a value 3.6 times higher than the US government’s current value of $51 per tCO2. Our estimates incorporate updated scientific understanding throughout all components of SC-CO2 estimation in the new open-source Greenhouse Gas Impact Value Estimator (GIVE) model, in a manner fully responsive to the near-term NASEM recommendations. Our higher SC-CO2 values, compared with estimates currently used in policy evaluation, substantially increase the estimated benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation and thereby increase the expected net benefits of more stringent climate policies.
Wow. Back of the envelope math suggests that driving a typical passenger car 1000 miles should carry a tax of ~$75, which would be no small burden. At 40 mpg, gasoline cost for such a trip is less than $200 in most of the U.S. right now.
Edit: actually if you assume 40 mpg the social cost of emissions is closer to $40.
(Of course in practice you'd want to handle this as a tax on gasoline purchases, but that would need to be implemented federally to be effective, probably.)
In most European countries gasoline is taxed at more than 100% (or 50% of the price), so it seems that at least for passenger cars, the externalities are mostly mitigated.
Kind off. You don't need to spend the tax money helping the environment, you just need to restitute whatever utility those affected by the negative externality have lost. For example, people may be willing to accept an increase in CO2 in exchange of a direct transfer of $100 per ton emitted.
Assuming that tax money is being used effectively (lol), the negative externality could completely disappear with the right tax level. You could even turn driving into a positive externality if the tax is high enough, while still polluting.
I tried to emulate the math you showed, my Chevrolet Bolt EV emits 96g CO2 per mile when considering upstream emissions on the New Jersey electrical grid, my carbon tax on 96kg emissions per 1000 miles would be $17.76.
Seems about right. The EPA uses a conversion factor of 8887 g CO2 emitted per gallon of gasoline consumed. [1] Assuming 40 miles per gallon, as above, that's ~222 grams per mile for the theoretical ICE car, a little over 2x the emissions of your electric vehicle.
Incidentally, 2023 Bolt specs [2] indicate an efficiency of about 4 miles per kWh, and the EPA reference above states a typical US grid efficiency of 4.17 × 10^-4 metric tons CO2/kWh. This gives us 15.38 km per kg CO2. So ~105 kg of CO2 would be released by driving a Bolt for 1000 miles on typical grid sources. [3]
I'm surprised to learn the US grid is this inefficient. In theory, an ICE car with an efficiency of 85 mpg would emit less CO2 than an electric car. Obviously that's not reachable at this point, but a hybrid like a Prius that can hit 57 mpg cuts it a lot closer than I would've thought.
$185/ton of CO2 emitted is what the study estimates to be the actual economic impact of emitting a ton of CO2, right? The current price of carbon futures is $68.80 [0].
Edit to add: That $185 is in 2020 USD, which is $223.26 in current USD. [1]
There may be niches where it makes sense already (short haul, long/frequent stops) i.e. city delivery, city buses and similar. But more importantly, whether its greenwashing today doesn't matter. Once it's demonstrably possible to do something, cities will include trucks their ICE exclusion zones, where today all ICE cars or some times only diesel cars are banned but trucks/ambulances. At that point it doesn't matter whether its twice as expensive - you either drive an electric truck or the goods can't be delivered. "Practical" doesn't just mean "reasonably cost effective compared to diesel". The possibility to run diesels in many cities will disappear before the alternatives are cost effective. That's going to drive the alternatives even faster, but it's also going to cost in the short term.
This is where it gets crazy though -- officially CA is requiring something like that starting in 2034, which would mean that the Port of LA/Long Beach would require like a second CA worth of electricity to charge trucks for the amount of traffic coming in and out. Everything I read about it basically claims that CA cannot actually function with this requirement, but I don't see the evidence of a future walkback...
This [1] says there were 340,386 truck movements from the Port of LA. Assume all 340,386 trucks need a full charge for each delivery, and have the battery of a Tesla Semi (900kWh). That's 306347400kWh = 306GWh.
Spread over the month, that's 9.87GWh per day, or 411MW. California produces around 500GWh each day, so we need a 2% increase. (Or, equivalently, a 2% decrease elsewhere.)
I think I mostly agree that, given current trends in generation and grid investment, it is pretty unlikely that CA can meet the goals. But also, I am pretty confident that CA _won't_ just let everything completely collapse into anarchy. One of a few things will happen:
1. Trends in generation/grid investment will change such that the EV transition _can_ happen.
2. The EV mandate will get walked back before much of anything changes.
3. The EV mandate will _start_ to get implemented, slowly, begin making things terrible proportionally to how far it has progressed, then, when things reach some (pre-total collapse) level of badness, get reversed, and things will go back to normal-ish after having wasted a bunch of money and having made some things somewhat worse.
4. And, I suppose for completeness, I should include the possibility of: nothing changes, nothing gets rolled back, and the grid utterly collapses under the overwhelming burden and the CA economy goes up in smoke and fire.
I do not think that last one has a significant chance of occurring. I think the most likely options are 3 and 2, followed somewhat distantly by 1, and much, _much_ more distantly by 4. If trend lines seem to point towards utter calamity, and any of the trend lines are under human control, the safe assumption is that something will change before total calamity.
The problem isn't macroeconomic. The problem is that Tesla Semi is not a fully baked product. It was rushed into "production" if you can call it that so that a "customer" can literally haul potato chips with it. Probably in order to meet some contractual deadline.
It is also hard to buy the argument that there is a shortage of batteries when there are other Tesla vehicles sitting unpurchased. Why miss a Semi sale when there is slack demand for Model 3/Y? Probably because actually delivering more of them is just a future liability.
Given their focus on streamlining manufacturing with automation, I'd be surprised if they have the staff to go around and rip batteries out of cars. But I could be wrong.
It's practical today with overhead power cables - these have already been trialled on major highways in Germany and Sweden. Although one of the test lines in Baden-Württemberg is going to be taken down, the test results from the Hessen test line on the A5 show that on an efficiency basis, the greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 16%-21% compared to diesel trucks. In parallel to these tests, there are also discussion in progress for a Europe-wide voltage standard to avoid the kind of problems that have stymied cross-border rail travel.
There are many people who say that the technology is not appropriate, and these are mainly based on two claims: firstly, that electric propulsion will not be more environmentally friendly whilst the electricity is still produced from fossil fuels, and secondly that existing electric trucks are less reliable than their diesel counterparts. Neither of these are reasons to abandon overhead lines on an efficiency basis, though - the concept is sound.
It's a little hard to compare countries when measurement techniques differ, but my rough layman's interpretation puts the proportion of renewable energy as a part of Germany's total electricity generation at around 40%. For the USA, this is just above 20%, and for the UK it's somewhere around 60%. And in Norway, well, that rounds up to 100% :)
That only takes into account electricity production, though - these countries might still import large amounts of oil and gas for burning, such as Germany, or simply buy their electricity from other countries.
> Right now they have to carry around far too much weight and bulk in batteries, and take far too long to charge, and the batteries don't have a long enough lifespan
That's why electric Semis are heavily subsidized by the IRA - in order to incentivize the economies of scale needed to spur innovation in the space.
It's a similar move to the PEV industry and Obama's, California's, and Texas' subsidies for it in the 2008-12 period establishing that market in North America.
To me this feels a bit backwards. The issue is not the semi part. It's nothing unique to semis. It's just that the scale of semis makes the flaws of current battery technology significantly more of an issue.
Really, the funding should go more directly to general battery RnD - not eSemis specifically.
"The iPhone is too slow for the web, the screen is too small, and it's too expensive. This is a waste of time" (About the iPhone 1).
"This Gemini program is a silly waste of time, and will never get to the moon".
"The MacBook Air is really underperformant and too expensive" (The first one).
and so on.
Things improve over time, but only when someone is willing to actually make them. Try stuff. Learn lessons. Improve the technology, drive the price down and make iterative improvements.
We need electric semis. Are the version 1.0 ones being made now fantastic in every way? no. Will they get better over time, of course.
In 20 years we'll look back and say damn I'm glad companies were willing to try new stuff and advance technology so that things could actually get better.
Sure, but you bring up all those examples specifically because they're exceptional. A lot of products that seem dumb do end up staying dumb.
I really do want electric vehicles to get better, but that doesn't change the fact that they objectively do suck right now.
And to be clear, they objectively suck, by nearly any measure, for a consumer. They break down more often [1], cost more to fix, they have shitty range, they take forever to charge, they're more expensive. Yes, you get to have a smug feeling of superiority for pretending to save the planet with electric cars, I guess that's worth something, but that doesn't undo the rest of the problems.
Until electric vehicles stop being crappy, corporations simply aren't going to use them, and they can hardly be blamed for it. I do think they'll get better, I think they'll get longer ranges and faster charging and the mechanical problems will get sorted out, but I don't think that pretending the problems aren't a real makes them go away.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-vehicles-consumer-repo... This one keeps bothering me because people keep saying that electric cars "cost more to fix but they're so much more reliable so it almost doesn't matter!!!!", when that's objectively not true, at least not yet.
> A lot of products that seem dumb do end up staying dumb.
Of course, some products will be a success and some will flop, but the successes can only happen so long as someone keeps trying and keeps improving it.
> I really do want electric vehicles to get better
Then you should be happy companies are trying to improve them. This is a good thing that Tesla (and others) are trying to make the semi work. It may eventually result in better outcomes for you, vs the alternative where nobody tries and it is guaranteed that nothing gets better.
> They break down more often [1], cost more to fix, they have shitty range, they take forever to charge, they're more expensive.
last week Consumer Reports listed Tesla as the lowest cost of 10 year ownership of any brand.
> Of course, some products will be a success and some will flop, but the successes can only happen so long as someone keeps trying and keeps improving it.
No argument here, I just was questioning the assertions because, and maybe I misread it, it seemed like you were suggesting the success was implied, which I disagreed with.
> Then you should be happy companies are trying to improve them. This is a good thing that Tesla (and others) are trying to make the semi work. It may eventually result in better outcomes for you, vs the alternative where nobody tries and it is guaranteed that nothing gets better.
Yes, I am glad companies are trying to fix them, but I don't blame other companies for not using them in their current state. They simply do not solve the problems that current corporations have to deal with for the reasons I listed.
What bothers me is that a lot of the electric car advocates seem to look at the future at the expense of the present. It's like saying "Everyone should use the Apple 1 computer right now because the Apple II will probably be better", and I don't really think that parses. Yes, it's good that Tesla and other companies are running the necessary experiments to make these things not suck, but that doesn't really change anything.
> last week Consumer Reports listed Tesla as the lowest cost of 10 year ownership of any brand.
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers corrected for the Cybertruck launch.
Also, I don't know how that squares with the thing I linked that indicates that as of December of last year Teslas were considerably less reliable than Lexus, Toyota, Buick, and Honda [1]. Consumer Reports is generally pretty good but I suspect that they're measuring different numbers for each article. It doesn't seem clear-cut to me.
I can't find it but swear one issue was that trying to fully utilize an ev semi with NCM batteries for distance hauling (i.e. driving it, fast charging it, driving again) brought up concerns about battery degradation, akin to the stories you hear about taxi/rideshare drivers using superchargers on an NCM EV without any charge limiting.
I thought the German experiments of allowing the trucks to charge while driving with overhead charging wires was clever and could be a potential solution to this, since then you wouldn't have to waste any time waiting for the truck to charge, but it looks like the infrastructure for that might be too expensive to justify that.
That's really the problem in broad strokes. Getting consumers off gas is all well and good, but even in the worst cases for some of the longest commutes I know of and people who love long road trips, that's probably at most 90 minutes of daily engine usage that's eliminated. That's just... fucking nothing compared to stuff like construction equipment and LTL trucks, that are both far larger in sheer engine size and carbon emissions, and run upwards from 12 hours a day. Bigger more consistently operating vehicles are better targets to actually get carbon emissions down, and they're far harder to electrify, as we're seeing.
Nobody wants to talk about the fact that just shipping less unnecessary shit would do tremendously more for the environment than the greenest tech available, in the same way it initially made such big waves during the early days of the pandemic. Like, imagine how much CO2 would be saved if we just shut down essential oils tomorrow. The whole thing, the entire industry, because it's flagrantly bullshit. I'm not even saying it's an industry that produces a ton of CO2, I'm just saying it's an industry that produces CO2 while accomplishing nothing useful.
Ammonia has no carbon atoms in it, just hydrogen and nitrogen which are abundant. It can be synthesized using the Haber process, and electrolysis, all energy inputs can be green. On the con side, its energy density isn't as good as fuel oil (half as energy dense). It needs to be compressed to stay liquid (like LNG). Also it's a poisonous gas. Could be corrosive to certain metals too. Maybe those issues can be worked around though.
I don't know if there will ever be a "right time" for electric semis. They need to be banned. They're super heavy death machines, far too dangerous to have on the road in instances of driver incapacitation.
Right now they have to carry around far too much weight and bulk in batteries, and take far too long to charge, and the batteries don't have a long enough lifespan.
Right now this whole effort feels performative. Its greenwashing.
Some day it will likely become very practical, but that day is not today.