More electrical lorries

[Gromitt]

That actually exists, testing starts in January.

https://www.einride.eu

[woody]

That is going to be a hell of an interesting windscreen wiper, to keep the ibex clean 

[Gromitt]

There are no windscreen, no driver, no cabin, completely autonomous or remotely driven.

[mc172]

A 125 mile range isn't going to cut it. It's laughable.

Dover is pretty much the point of entry into the UK from Europe for freight and it's at the centre of the 125 mile range circle in darker blue in the image I've attached. Yes, you can get to London, but even London is at least a 140 mile round trip from and back to Dover. This assumes your truck is fully charged (if such a thing were ever possible) by the time you arrive in Dover.

You've got to get the truck to Calais in the first place... Well why not charge your truck on the ferry? The ferry could provide electricity.

[Benta]

Nice website pictures, ugly truck.
But doesn't this amount of hot air also contribute to global warming?

[rstofer]

3 years ago my Chevy Spark EV had a range of about 80 miles.  Today my Chevy Bolt has a range over 200 miles.  The same thing will happen with these trucks.  Energy density in the batteries will improve, battery weight will be reduced, range will increase.

Never bet against technology.

[nctnico]

A 125 mile range isn't going to cut it. It's laughable.

Electric trucks are for use in cities and not for long haul. Freight trains are better for hauling stuff over long distances IF they could get the average speed up to more than 30km/h.

[glarsson]

Average. If freight trains, due to congested lines, have to wait on a side line to let passenger trains pass, the average speed drops quickly.

[ivaylo]

Yeah, aren't we trying to reinvent electric railroads here? Why aren't those still not self driving, BTW? In the US the bulk of rail transportation is still not even electric. Trucks getting electric, using batteries before rail can get electric is plain weird. Not commenting on the Swedish experiment here, just think Musk messed with people's heads...

[Jeroen3]

Yeah, aren't we trying to reinvent electric railroads here? Why aren't those still not self driving, BTW?

Railway is about 20 years behind current technology. Because trains last a long time, and there is a lot of politics involved.

[Gromitt]

Yeah, aren't we trying to reinvent electric railroads here? Why aren't those still not self driving, BTW?

The same reason that airplanes doesn't fly them self. The general public want a pilot/traindriver in charge.

[JPortici]

And there are truck and commercial veichle drivers that keep believing they can run past the crossroad before it will close
And there are crossroads without barriers
And there are crossroads that were supposed to have barriers but not anymore for today, because of aforementioned drivers

situations where a human driver is preferred

we still have train in service that were built in the 60-80's but their engines/electronics keep getting updated every few years

[Zero999]

And there are truck and commercial veichle drivers that keep believing they can run past the crossroad before it will close
And there are crossroads without barriers
And there are crossroads that were supposed to have barriers but not anymore for today, because of aforementioned drivers

situations where a human driver is preferred

we still have train in service that were built in the 60-80's but their engines/electronics keep getting updated every few years

I don't see why that's a reason not to have self-driving trains. A computer can react more quickly, to an obstacle ahead and stop the train more quickly than a human could.

[JPortici]

AFAIK there is already enough intelligence in the train for it to stop automatically in case of danger, humans are required for handling the other people while the train slowly moves past the crossroad

[rrinker]

 Anywhere they have ATC, Automatic Train Control, the computer can and will override the human engineer  if it is exceeding the speed for the location and conditions. This has been mandated on all US Class 1 railroads. The problem with an idiot driving around crossing gates - the reaction time of the human engineer is such a slight factor in the overall time it takes to stop the train, replacing the human with a faster acting computer won't help all that much. A track speed it takes a mile or more to stop a train. And even with the latest modern air brake systems that can open the "big hole" in the brake pipe on each car when the brake is put in the emergency position, there's still a measurable propagation time until the brakes actually apply on every car in the train.

 The word ivaylo used is critical here - "reinvent". At one time there were large stretches of US railways running under electric power. It even was the subject of one of the ORIGINAL Tom Swift books. "Tom Swift and his Electric Railway" was effectively about the big electric locomotive then being introduced on the Milwaukee Road. There were plans to electrify even more miles of rail line, but 1929 and the stock market crash happened. Then WWII and by the end of that the railroads were in bad shape and it was far cheaper to use the now proven diesel-electric technology. About the only electrified railroad that exists int he US today is purely passenger, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington DC with an offshoot from Philadelphia to Harrisburg. All former Pennsylvania RR electrified territory that has stayed that way since the 1930's.

[ajb]

The US has 140,000 miles of freight rail, spanning dense urban areas and remote wilderness areas, so the costs to make the switch now would be enormous.  Especially when you consider that a railroad can't even start to reap any benefits until a substantial part of their network has been upgraded, and until the upgrade is complete they have to manage two sets of equipment that are not interchangeable. 

The US can hardly even get its act together on commuter rail, where the potential benefits are much more immediate, due to lack of long-term vision, so don't hold your breath on freight rail making such a leap.

[james_s]

I like having a human at the controls, for all their faults there are still things a human can do that AI cannot come close to. With as much stuff as is automated these days sometimes it's still nice to interact with a real person, I hate those automated telephone support systems that always take 10 times as long as working with an actual person.

I think it will be a long time before a self driving truck can reliably work in a crowded urban environment outside of the carefully controlled and extremely well documented routes that the various tech companies are working with. In a world where everything is run by computers it would not be a problem, but these machines are going to have to interact among human drivers and pedestrians for a very long time.

It's also a valid concern that once we replace all of the unskilled and semiskilled jobs with machines, what will people do for work? For a long time technology has meant replacing some jobs with other jobs but at an accelerating pace we are replacing many jobs with no jobs. Not everyone can be an automation/AI engineer and we need orders of magnitude fewer of those than the positions the machines replace.

[nctnico]

The US has 140,000 miles of freight rail, spanning dense urban areas and remote wilderness areas, so the costs to make the switch now would be enormous.  Especially when you consider that a railroad can't even start to reap any benefits until a substantial part of their network has been upgraded, and until the upgrade is complete they have to manage two sets of equipment that are not interchangeable. 

Who said you can't put batteries on a train? That would make more sense than putting them on a truck because you can haul way more tons of batteries and the friction of the steel wheels on a train is way less than tyres on asphalt.

[Jeroen3]

Most trains are already electric. Even the ones running on diesel are just generators on electric wheels.
Some are indeed hydraulic, they would need some changes.

But can you get enough power out of the batteries to get the train moving from standstill?

[james_s]

I'm sure you could, it's just a matter of having large enough batteries. For something at the power scale of a train though I think it would make a lot more sense to take in the electricity externally from an overhead wire or 3rd rail as has been done for around a century. A hybrid diesel/externally supplied electric model works for city buses and could just as easily be used for trains in areas where pollution is a problem.

[nctnico]

Most trains are already electric. Even the ones running on diesel are just generators on electric wheels.
Some are indeed hydraulic, they would need some changes.

But can you get enough power out of the batteries to get the train moving from standstill?

The same way any vehicle does that. You don't need a lot of power to make something move. Remember the formula for calculating the kinetic energy of a moving object.

[rstofer]

I like having a human at the controls, for all their faults there are still things a human can do that AI cannot come close to. With as much stuff as is automated these days sometimes it's still nice to interact with a real person, I hate those automated telephone support systems that always take 10 times as long as working with an actual person.

Without doing a formal survey, it seems to me that all of the recent train accidents have been operator induced.  Too fast, missed a signal, fell asleep, etc.  As long as we add ATC to the trains, I don't mind if they keep the driver.  These is always some possibility he will stay awake.

ATC has very little to do with automated phone systems.

[ajb]

Who said you can't put batteries on a train? That would make more sense than putting them on a truck because you can haul way more tons of batteries and the friction of the steel wheels on a train is way less than tyres on asphalt.

It's really the same scenario as long haul trucking, except more so.  Let's see:  A relatively large diesel-electric locomotive has a fuel capacity of about 5000gal(us), or about 15,700kg.  Even accounting for ~50% thermodynamic efficiency of the engine, it would take about 523 metric tons of lithium batteries to provide equivalent energy storage capacity.  Even deducting about 20t for the diesel engine and generator, That makes about a 3.8x increase in the weight of 180t locomotive, and would require an additional 16 axles, before even accounting for the additional structural, mechanical, and electrical equipment required.  The batteries would take up something like 12x the volume of the equivalent in diesel, but the limiting factor on size will probably be the 22+ axles you now need to fit under everything.  The worst part, though, is that all of that extra weight comes out of the allowable trailing tonnage, which might be about 5000t for a locomotive of this class--so that's about a 10% performance penalty (again, only accounting for the weight of the batteries themselves).  Sure, you could add additional traction motors to some of your new axles, but that trades pulling capacity for range, and further increases the weight and cost of the locomotive. 

To top it off, locomotives probably can't take nearly as much advantage of regenerative braking as trucks can, because there's so much energy involved in slowing down a fully loaded train that the locomotive can only capture a small fraction of it, and they try not to do that very often anyway.   Oh, and of course there's charging time to consider.  At ~366GJ, it will take about four days to charge a battery of that size if you can do it at 1MW.   

[ebastler]

That actually exists, testing starts in January.
https://www.einride.eu

Hmm, what exactly are they going to test in January?
All they show is renderings. Is there an actual prototpe?

[nctnico]

Who said you can't put batteries on a train? That would make more sense than putting them on a truck because you can haul way more tons of batteries and the friction of the steel wheels on a train is way less than tyres on asphalt.

It's really the same scenario as long haul trucking, except more so.  Let's see:  A relatively large diesel-electric locomotive has a fuel capacity of about 5000gal(us), or about 15,700kg.  Even accounting for ~50% thermodynamic efficiency of the engine, it would take about 523 metric tons of lithium batteries to provide equivalent energy storage capacity.  Even deducting about 20t for the diesel engine and generator, That makes about a 3.8x increase in the weight of 180t locomotive, and would require an additional 16 axles, before even accounting for the additional structural, mechanical, and electrical equipment required.  The batteries would take up something like 12x the volume of the equivalent in diesel, but the limiting factor on size will probably be the 22+ axles you now need to fit under everything.  The worst part, though, is that all of that extra weight comes out of the allowable

Currently diesel trains already use extra wagons to carry fuel so you can do the same with the batteries. Charging time doesn't matter because you can remove the emtpy battery wagons and replace them with charged ones. Still it is true that the energy density of diesel fuel is very hard to replace. Then again you don't need to start with very heavy trains which run very long distances. The advantage of (cargo) trains and trucks is that their route is very predictable so you can plan the battery capacity and range much easier than when dealing with 'consumer' cars which also need to cater for the few percent of the trips which need a lot of range.