I think the article underplays the transition. They're not just-now being sold, it's already the norm. I was in Chengdu last summer and all the huge trucks hauling sand and rocks at construction sites where electric already (and not brand new.. they'd clearly been used quite a bit). The days of trucks making huge plums of smoke at intersections are gone. As I understood it ICE trucks are extremely limited in the hours they're allowed to operate in cities.
So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot. Maybe there are quite a few trucks between cities and in the countryside that I just wasn't seeing.
I'm curious if the batteries can be swapped. Vehicles (trucks and taxis) are generally used in shifts, so you don't want to have the car just sitting around charging half the time
My guess is that the long distance trucks (the old blue ones) are still mostly diesel and the trucks inside cities for local work are transitioning first? Every city could also be really different in terms of where they are in adoption, CD could be further along than lower tier cities. I didn’t notice any trucks at all when I was in Beijing last April, so I’m guessing that they still aren’t allowed inside the fifth ring in the day time electric or not.
Yeah, it's going to be heavily biased towards short-distance stuff. Long-distance heavy electric trucks which can handle European work cycles just about exist as of recently, but I'm guessing that Chinese rules on how long truckers can work without rest are less stringent than European ones (American ones certainly are).
To electrify long distance trucks Bosch developed a fuel-cell power module (FCPM) it is already using for internal logistics. For long disctances f-cell and hydrogen tank are lighter than batteries would be.
It supposedly can do 1000km without stops. https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/mobility-topics/fuel-cell-...
Only high speed trucks have a crew of drivers to rotate through to drive without more than a toilet break.
Hydrogen is very expensive compared to just batteries. The weight savings only make up for the horrible efficiency of hydrogen once you are looking at an airplane.
Just use a battery, really.
And put transport over distances that exceed one driver shift on trains.
Plus no range reduction in cold conditions. Plus you can store hydrogen long-term for winter. And transport Liquid Hydrogen with huge energy density per truck/ship to remote places. https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre... Sounds like a win for northern quartersphere.
You need massive infrastructure investments to freeze it, vehicles are more expensive because the tanks need to freeze it, fuel in stations need to freeze it, tanker trucks that deliver it need to freeze it, there is a lot of energy lost in freezing snd heating it back up.
China doesn’t feel rich enough to build all of that when charging stations are pretty straightforward and cheap. Probably the only thing holding back electric for long hauls now is the lack of infrastructure (grid is needed to build charging stations, and truckers prefer untolled routes without much of that), and also sunk costs on their existing trucks (which tend to last what feel likes forever with cheap repairs).
Hydrogen trucks are mostly a solution looking for a problem.
Most countries have duty hour limits for safety reasons, as having a trucker drive for 20 hours at a time is a really bad idea. Similarly, they usually have a mandatory mid-duty break.
Combined with the speed limit for heavy-duty vehicles, this provides a clear upper bound on the range any truck needs to have, and today's electric trucks are really close to it - or even exceed this already.
This reduces hydrogen trucks to multi-driver trips (incredibly rare due to the significant additional cost) and multi-day trips without rest stops (Australia?).
Considering that the market is going to be tiny: who's going to buy expensive hard-to-maintain trucks, and how are they going to refuel them? Wouldn't it make more sense to just build diesel-electric trucks and fuel that handful with carbon sequestered diesel?
Hydrogen failed in cars for the same predictable reasons it will fail in trucking.
It’s far too complicated and too expensive, and it’s only selling point (long distance per charge and slow charging) are things that BEVs are continuously getting better at.
Hydrogen continues to be a predatory delay strategy.
There's a difference with cars in that people want elegant things for their car. With a heavy truck you can just kind of load a large battery pack onto a platform with a fork lift, or similar.
The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
When large corporations fail to adapt to changing technology, it gives smaller companies a chance to break in and take over markets.
We are seeing exactly the same thing happening right now with China catching up to the US economy. And by refusing to adapt to better technology that saves us money, we are seriously handicapping our future.
In my opinion, the dramatic change coming isn't just about combustion. The economics of electricity and energy are about to change profoundly over the next 20 years.
We are simultaneously witnessing the potential demise of the Western economic empire and the rise of the Eastern economic bloc (specifically China, Southeast Asia, and India), alongside the global shift to a new electricity age.
I frequently hear people argue that solar power isn't feasible for their specific location, but this perspective may soon render them economically uncompetitive. Trends clearly show that the production of almost everything is transitioning to electricity. Crucially, solar and battery storage are rapidly becoming the cheapest forms of electricity and continue to drop in price.
We will soon reach a critical inflection point where we produce new solar panels and batteries using the very solar energy they generate. At this stage, subsequent generations of panels and batteries will become cheaper purely through the energy input cost reduction, even without new technological breakthroughs. Consequently, countries lacking significant investment in solar or wind resources are highly likely to become energy poor and economically uncompetitive.
the exact same thing was said for japan when their economy boomed. Whether china falls to the same fate, or actually sustain and overtake the west, is yet to be determined. However, trump's policies aren't really helping (but in fact, is actually enabling them). By removing the US as a large consumer, the CCP could be forced to switch to internal consumption model instead, which both increases the standard of living of the people there, as well as decrease the reliance on exporting (so lower economic leverage).
Not to mention the west's economic policies are disparate between supposed allied countries - with friends like that, who needs enemies?
I've been hearing that China will hit a plateau, like Japan, for at least 20 years now... Meanwhile, China is now pumping out BEV trucks, affordable electric cars, sixth generation military jets, and nuclear aircraft carriers.
A key benefit of being the world's factory is that factories are easier to convert to war time uses than banks and software offices are. Some kinds of software is clearly going to be important for the next world war, but a lot of the service economy is essentially dead weight. If China switches to an economy based on internal consumption it's likely that its industrial capacity will decline.
> The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
It's instructive to compare and contrast the countries, and I think the driving forces are actually quite simple.
Both countries desire energy independence and thriving domestic industry. Who doesn't?
But while the USA is a net fossil fuel exporter, China is a net importer. While the USA has a long-established automobile industry and shown willingness to bail it out more than once, China is a relative newcomer to this industry.
China is for better or worse prepared to set industrial strategy more rigorously and over longer time periods than others.
A while back China took a bet on non-fossil fuel technologies as a source of both energy independence and a way to get early into a new industry. This is now paying off hugely. It's not purely a green ideological choice, they still use coal heavily. It was strategic - to reduce dependence on imported oil, and "leapfrog" into being a major player in an emerging industry, rather than trying to catch up with ICE engines.
Meanwhile the USA continues to shore up the fossil-fuel chain from extraction to consumption in ICE automobiles. I find this short-sighted and unwise in many ways. And the negative consequences are likely coming soon. but it is not a very surprising choice given where they are and how they make such decisions.
One thing I always find fascinating is, if you look at global warming denialism globally, it largely only exists as a political force in oil (or occasionally coal) producing nations. In terms of big-ish democratic countries, it's a mainstream right-wing stance pretty much only in the US, Australia, Canada, and Indonesia.
The US is essentially embracing a delusion which happens to (arguably) financially benefit it _right now_, but will be dreadful for its future.
(It's broadly popular with fringe far-right groups like Reform and the AfD, granted)
IMHO that missed big parts of the picture, because it's kind of like saying that because we have an ample supply of trees for punch cards, there's no need to invest in magnetic tape and hard drives. There are big differences in the fundamental capabilities and costs of renewables versus fuel based economies.
Not only is an electrified economy powered by renewables a far cheaper future, it is also the difference between renting your energy infrastructure and owning it. With fuel based systems, the US is still susceptible to global fuel prices, as long as we participate in the global market, which leads to highly unstable prices. With renewables, you buy and then own, and don't have to worry about price instability; you have 30 years of stability from a solar panel. And when it reaches end of life, it continues working, giving more than a decade of opportunity to buy at the most convenient time and price.
Countries that switch earlier will have advantages. Countries that base their economy on being providers for panels and batteries may or may not see similar benefits, but renewables, even when purchased from other countries, give cheaper and more secure energy supply than even oil fields in your own country.
A couple of points in the article that are interesting:
- EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper. The same would presumably true for diesel trucks. And that "extra" cost for that stuff would be the same elsewhere. It's not a reason EV trucks would be more expensive specifically anywhere.
- China is starting to export these things around the world. I think this is very disruptive because it means the EU/US are increasingly isolated with higher cost of transport locally.
- The ASP of EV trucks is dropping below those of diesel trucks. This is being driven by battery cost, which in China is of course closely following production cost of those and in any EV truck is (or was) the biggest cost component. Going from 150$/kwh to 50$ or lower is a big deal. Prices could be trending towards 10$/kwh mid term for some chemistries. At 150$ it's 90K, at 50$, 600kwh is 30K. at 10$ it's 6000$. It stops being the largest cost factor on the truck somewhere along that curve. That's going to happen everywhere. It's just economics and physics. There's no logical reason for an EV truck to be more expensive than a diesel truck long term.
- Diesel usage is in decline in China. That's a real world effect that's hard to ignore. In China that means less imports are needed. It's a big economic shift in their favor to be needing less diesel/oil. Road miles tend to be dominated by newer vehicles: this effect might be faster than market shares suggest.
The EU has very expensive diesel. Those effects would be exaggerated here. It also has very strictly enforced rest breaks every 4.5 hours. Ideally spaced to allow for a 45 minute charging break. 600kwh is all you need for long distance trucking in the EU.
IMHO, the EU will catch up much quicker than the US: it has a bigger economical incentive. The US is producing its own fuel. China and the EU are not. Unless they switch to electric.
I'd assume diesel usage is in decline throughout the developed world, tbh. Diesel vans and buses are gradually getting replaced with BEVs (and sometimes hybrids), diesel trains are being electrified (sometimes with batteries, now!), and while heavy BEV trucks are in their infancy outside China, they're beginning to show up in significant numbers in Europe.
China's certainly leading the way here, but Europe's not doing nothing.
> I'd assume diesel usage is in decline throughout the developed world, tbh.
yes, also for another reason: At one point, Diesel was promoted as being better due to less CO2. This was reversed when it was realised that it is dirtier- worse due to N02 and PM10 emissions.
I wonder how the economics are shifted in China which is dependent on foreign oil but has plenty of (some very dirty, some clean) electricity? I'm sure subsidies are playing a great role(as they do in all things in China) and national security concerns are making EV trucks more viable.
At a macro level, more exports and less imports mean things should be good for their trade balance. Though you might rightfully worry about e.g. debt and other misaligned things in the Chinese economy. They have poor utilization of their production capacity for e.g. batteries.
The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
Subsidies are a very political/ideological talking point. But the traditional fossil fuel economy isn't exactly free from subsidies, incentives, tariffs, and other government instruments. The US having a dependence on oil and gas is hard to separate from its huge budgets for incentivizing and protecting that.
The Chinese have been very strategic about their R&D in the last few decades. It's paying off though. Demand for their clean tech exports is increasing and just when oil/gas markets are becoming increasingly volatile they are managing to be less dependent on those.
> The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
No. It's for both reasons, cheaper and cleaner. The pollution in cities was absolutely dire and a real health hazard as well as an embarrassment internationally. EVs including scooters and trucks are a large part of the reason the air is cleaner now.
When I was in Wuhan, I talked with an engineer who was having his second child. I asked what he thought about raising kids in such bad air pollution. He said at least it is getting better each year.
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.
Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]
This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.
Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.
Don't know about heavy trucks, but I can say this. I'm currently looking after a house being renovated in rural and hilly Northern England. There are a lots of trade folk coming by doing various things, all in the UK ubiquitous white vans. The decorator has an EV van. The sparky has an EV van. The groundworks folk have an EV van. When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs, then a shift is really happening.
This one I'm always a bit dubious of, because, well, they're likely to have a lot of emergency callouts after a blackout. How are they charging their van?
ESB Networks, the Irish state grid operator, increasingly uses electric vans. I suppose maybe they have a backup generator wherever they keep them? On the face of it, it seems like they'd be the _last_ thing you'd want to electrify.
You’re optimizing for the 0.01% here. Also, cars don’t lose their charge completely just because a blackout happens. Unless you pull in to the depot/charging area low on charge and then immediately a blackout happens, and then you need to go out while it’s still happened… driving it around shouldn’t be an issue.
Then, the other 99.9% of the time you get cheaper, quieter driving.
Is this something common in Europe? We’ve had our fair share of blackouts in the US, some lasting days, and I’ve never ever heard of someone’s breaker panel (I assume that’s what you mean by distribution box) needing any service as a result of the blackout.
I've had one power cut in the last decade (urban area, wiring generally underground), but I know people in rural areas who have power cuts a lot due to storms, and sometimes there are problems coming back up. Think it's mostly old-fashioned 'fuse boxes' with actual literal fuses in them that have problems (you don't strictly need an electrician to sort that, but some people are nervous of the giant fuses and I'm not sure I blame them...)
I don't think it's a particularly _common_ issue, but it definitely happens to some extent.
> When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs
And I'm glad they are using EVs, but also wondering if it's not mainly the tax writedown rules (in our country EVs are written down as investment to lower your taxes in 2 years vs. the standard 4 I think, and this can dramatically lower your tax base). But perhaps I'm overly cynical.
There are some electric trucks driving around Australian cities already as well.
Though I love the sound of a straight cut gear, I suspect they'll want to work on quieting that drivetrain a bit. Thankfully there is a lot of prior art.
It's from the truck, it's the transmission of the truck which is evident by changing pitch as the truck downshifts while slowing down.
It likely uses a transmission as a tradeoff between torque and RPM of the electric motor or because it's a simpler task to retrofit an existing truck driveline with an electric motor bolted onto it.
These are so noisy because of the use of straight cut gears, which you choose when preferring strength over noise and comfort. Most regular cars use helical gears which reduces the noise due to continuously meshing between gear teeth, whereas straight cut gears are like a paddle wheel, so the teeth are smacking into eachother head on each time they engage. That is also why they clunk when getting on and off throttle.
We have some similar trucks running around Australia at the moment and the sound is the same, I'm also familiar with the sound from motorsport!
Some cars have 2 gears as well. One for the acceleration and one for cruising efficiency and top speed. So my guess is to get it going easier and then have 2nd as the eco gear for the speed they cruise at.
I am unsure sorry, electric motors do still have efficiency curves so that could be it. But I think a retrofit to an existing driveline makes more sense.
Food for thought though, trucks are much much heavier loaded than cars. 100-150+ tonne vs like 1.5-4 tonnes for a car. Cars are trivial by comparison.
Perhaps the motor they have available doesn't have enough torque for it without gearing down.
Seems like there is a lot of dislike of this comment but not a lot of discussion about. Is it not true that china is dominating here? Or that this is becoming the norm? Isn't the instant negative reaction to this comment the exact problem? Maybe if we decided to get better instead of get mad we would see articles about the west dominating more often.
Comments often follow a u-curve, where immediate downvotes are countered after a few minutes. I suspect the cause is at least in part people directly downvoting from the https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments page
It’s apparent that the USA is falling deeply behind on all of these things. I look at the rest of my life now as the final days in Babylon and try to still enjoy going down in the sinking ship. I vote to stop it, but my votes haven’t mattered in a long time. It’s important to still do them anyway.
There isn't a major political party in the USA willing to undergo the reforms needed to compete.
I don't know what voting does, other than produce a false air of approval around the administration. I think that if voter turnout was low enough, it would speak for itself and encourage more radical political strategy.
you vote mattered. It's just that there are more people who didn't vote the way you wanted them. But that's OK, because this is how it is supposed to work.
mattering doesn't mean you get what you wanted/voted for. Mattering means your vote was counted among the hundreds of millions, and the ultimate consensus reached, and the minority voters have accept the result of the majority voters.
I think people have (recently at least) mistakenly believed that democracy means your vote is a demand to be fulfilled, and if it isn't, then democracy is failing.
The USSR was considered by many prominent intellectuals a valid counterpoint to the Western capitalist structure, up until the moment it collapsed, and then it wasn't true socialism. Some humbleness should be in order when considering imperfect knowledge
Perhaps competition in the cold war reinvigorated the USA or expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Imagine a boat has a hole in it, and is sinking. Some of the crew-members make a big deal about it, and run a campaign to plug the hole and bail the water out. In the end, it does not sink and the remaining crewmembers conclude that it was not a big deal and that the campaign was unnecessary. It is a survivor's bias.
Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
> Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
Not necessarily. Whether it sinks depends on three things: hole location, rate of flooding, and watertight compartment design.
What’s an example of a systematic (systemic?) problem that will ruin a country if left unsolved?
I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power the bureaucracy has to extract even more wealth increases over time. In the USA, the military industrial complex is the biggest example of this, the general self-licking ice cream cone.
I don't think it depends on hole location or rate of flooding. If the rate is greater than zero, and if the second derivative is non-negative (i.e. it isn't self regulating, the rate of loss itself does not decrease over time like a self-healing wound) then eventually it will flood. If the second derivative is zero, and the hole is very small relative to the size of the ship, it will take a while.
Our government is not well compartmentalized. The evolution of the US government has trended towards increasing federal over state power (for some good reasons). Maybe programs like social security are compartmentalized in the sense that if they collapse, they don't bring down other sectors of government.
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything.
I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
Cold War involved a lot of imperfect knowledge - until Gorbachev, soviet leaders were utterly convinced that USA plans to attack first. On one hand, it was paranoia, on the other hand, US intelligence actions including gleeful setup of mass scale murder in Indonesia reinvigorated that belief.
China has been largely capitalist since the late 1980s. Economically, it's similar to many Western countries—in fact, its government and welfare spending is lower than the Western average. Where it differs dramatically is in its political structure (one-party state versus democracy).
I would say the primary difference is that the state supersedes capital, rather than the other way around. The Chinese state permits capitalism, but only when it's to the benefit of China's economy and wellbeing.
So, for instance they just banned sports betting outright, as it's not productive or contributing to the economy.
The state runs the "commanding heights" of the economy, the banks, and directs investment, coordinates with industry. Of course it invests in infrastructure development.
First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard.
Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
China is full of Potemkin villages. They strategically invest huge resources into areas the West finds politically advantageous, but somehow only grow exactly the 5% they say is required. It’s had to square the circle when so much is obviously nonsense
This honestly isn't a discussion about governmental systems. The US and 'western nations' have built big things and pushed for big things many times in the past and can do it again. We pump trillions in subsidies and direct funding into 'strategic' resources that are flat out bad policy and the people pushing that know it. This is a question of actual people making obviously bad decisions and not being held responsible for the obviously bad outcomes. I hope that the rise of china gives us the correct motivation. The motivation to do more, to be honest and to start competing instead of just using our weight to put up barriers so we don't have to compete. The first step is making decisions backed by evidence and understanding and not emotion and appeals to fear. Basically, we need to grow up and start putting in the work again.
China does not allow the West to compete in their market. If you want to complain about artificial barriers, ask why Google can’t get a search engine there
I would not call highly disposable and cheap heavy duty vehicles an "intelligent investment." It's headline chasing and there's always very little tying their touted efforts to any actual improvements in the environment our economic outcomes.
China imports most of its oil. With EVs China needs to import less oil, this works really well for their national security. Even if the environmental benefit was zero (and it isn’t), this would still be the best choice for them and much of the world that doesn’t produce much oil. It isn’t really complicated.
I agree that mining is probably the worst of it, but trucks usually last a decade and a couple million kilometers, after which they’re shipped off to Africa or the Middle East where they’re kept on the road for much longer.
I would not know, here were I live I see most of the heavy duty trucks (owned by small companies at least) with 10-15+ years of service, looking at the license plates.
That depends on how you define "heavy duty". Cement trucks and dump trucks rarely last more than a few years before they need major repairs of transmission and suspension. The frame itself might last more, around 10 years.
H2 Trucks are dead, just from the economics. Watch the latest video from Elektrotrucker on youtube where he does the math. His BEV long haul actros comes out to a price per km of 0.35 EUR whereas the h2 Truck ends up at 1.35 EUR. There is a reason why Charging networks for BEV trucks are expanding while h2 stations are being taken down.
Couldn't find where he or how you arrive at those numbers. Anyway it's not solely about energy costs per km but total cost. And here the lower weight of FCPM trucks comes into play. What they discuss at the ceremony:
A truck, including its load, must not weigh more than 40 tons. Let's take two comparable trucks: one with a battery, the other with a fuel cell. It turns out that the fuel cell truck's drive system is four tons lighter. This means its payload capacity is greater. Therefore, up to 20 percent fewer trucks are needed to transport the same goods. Instead of five trucks, there are only four on the road.
In the best case you can save acquisition costs, driver wages and insurance for one truck per every four others. It's going to take a while until you make that up with saved energy costs.
"take a while"?
A quarter to a third of a conventional European long haul truck is fuel.
And what unrealistic truck are you looking at? European long haul battery trucks currently have around 600 kWh of LFP; that's just around 3 tons; how is adding a fuel cell negative 1 ton of weight? No, the cable to the charging port is light enough to carry by one human, even if it's not negligible, that's still more than an order of magnitude below so won't change anything here.
Note that the trucks are already allowed 2 tons extra road weight, so it's actually not unusual to have basically the same load capacity (within +-500kg).
It does matter if you have a rotating crew driving express long haul, because then you don't have a mandatory 45 minutes of lunch break during which you can plug in to a 300~400 kW charger (and e.g. take a walk or visit a bathroom or actually have lunch) to get a shift limit of range out of such a "small" battery.
They probably took a battery truck with (in a worker-and-road-safety oriented market like Europe) excessively much no-recharge range to match their fuel cell setup. But you do that because it's fairly tame to add the marginal range of a full shift limit to a fuel cell truck; it's not economic to size a long haul battery to suffice without recharging for anywhere near the weight limit.
Green hydrogen is substantially more expensive than diesel per energy; and electric trucks can already beat diesel's in TCO depending on the kind of usage (e.g. notably express long haul is not competitive, but most highway single-driver operations are).
I'm no expert but a far stretch but if this most basic fact is already wrong then my trust in the remaining stuff diminishes. On top of that they is only relevant if all truck loads were limited by weight.
So, I believe that argument to be wrong in its entirety. And if we then factor in the CO2 costs, hydrogen is the clear loser in all regards.
It's much simpler. In the EU, truckers have to do mandatory 45 min breaks after 4 1/2 hours of driving. With the latest truck generation, this is enough time to recharge to get through the rest of the shift. 400 kW charging is sufficient in this scenario. No wasteful expensive H2 or fancy battery swapping technology required.
Those BEV trucks come in both swappable battery and fast-charging models. Most support dual chargers for simultaneous charging. A 600kWh battery can be fully charged in about an hour with two 350kW chargers. Two more common 180kW charger takes around two hours. Some trucks even support four chargers at once. But for the small and cheap trucks used in city, they may take 4 hours for charging to run 200km.
I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
> I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
Mines tend to be underground, or then a big hole in the ground, so the truck would be going uphill when fully loaded and down empty, no?
Unless we're talking about a mine up on a mountain?
We use fewer critical raw materials for our fuel cell, unlike the lithium and cobalt typically used in batteries. Our use of these materials is considerably reduced.
Sodium batteries won't help here as they are even more heavy.
For the infrastructure, for long-distance transport, we need approximately 140 filling stations across all of Europe. That's a completely different scale than for battery-electric cars. In other words, there isn't that much to do.
In Germany alone there are about 14000 gas stations, 350 at the Autobahn; housing some of the 160000 charging points.
Modern trucks don't use cobalt batteries. LFP are better for that workload as they can be cycled much deeper (making up almost all the weight difference when just looking at nominal capacity) and are substantially safer and actually somewhat cheaper than the NMC chemistry that uses the cobalt.
The picture of two rows of electric trucks is marked "ChatGPT generated". Note that some of the trucks shown have three front grille slots, while some have two. Also, those trucks appear to have fuel tanks.
The author is mostly talking about what someone else saw at the China Commercial Vehicles Show.
Low-credibility source.
There's plenty of info about that show, with real pictures.[1] BYD has a full range of electric trucks, but what they're pushing seems to be the T3 and T4 trucks. The new T4 is a straight truck, available as a box truck, flatbed, or open top truck. Or they'll sell the chassis for custom jobs. Claimed range is "up to 250km". It's intended for city use with once daily charging. The T3, which has been out for a few years, is an ordinary electric van, comparable to a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. These are high-volume commercial products. Light and medium electric trucks are taking over fleet operations.
BYD has a new line of heavy electric trucks, launched in April.[2] This isn't BYD's first try at heavy electric trucks. They delivered some (at least hundreds, but not tens of thousands) in 2022. The 2025 model is at least their third try. They don't claim to have cracked long-haul trucking. "BYD Tractor Q3: Focusing on Short – Haul Transportation and Breaking Through Medium – and Long – Haul Transportation" is their marketing pitch.
There are multiple battery options, and for charging, the Q3 can be plugged into up to four chargers at once. Long-haul operation is possible, but it's not yet the target market.
So the BYD heavy trucks aren't mainstream in China yet, but they're a lot closer than Tesla's Semi (yet another re-announcement: [3]) or the Nikola (only works going downhill and required a Trump pardon for the CEO).
Volvo has a range of electric trucks, mostly sold in Europe.
There is also Mercedes eActros line and MAN eTGX. There are already thousands of them in Europe. Funny how that just happened, without fanfares and trillion dollar evaluations.
Speaking of which, I don’t know why would anyone still wait for Tesla Semi or any other up-and-comers. Promised better efficiency sounds good on paper, but means nothing if the product doesn’t exist or is an unreliable prototype with no service support.
Now Chinese want to enter the market with cheaper trucks, but - as the article clearly mentions - these are not yet ready to be used in Europe or the States, and making them ready will increase the price.
Let’s all remember Bill Gates’ prediction from 2020:
> Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
He's not wrong. Nothing has fundamentally changed in battery technology since 2020 - power densities are about the same. A "long haul" EV tractor unit gets about 500km range and weighs ~4 tons more than a diesel equivalent.
As always, I realise that on this here orange website it is highly inappropriate to read the article, but the article is about mass adoption of BEV heavy trucks.
Cargo ships and passenger jets are another matter, of course, and we won't be seeing battery ships (except for regional ferries) or battery planes of any sort anytime soon, but he was wrong about trucks.
Considering that the quote specifically talks about "long-haul vehicles", and that the article that no one read explicitly said "The long haul story is different. European and North American long haul operators require far more from a truck than a Chinese domestic short range tractor offers", I do not see why Gates' comment aged so badly.
Ehhh, it's surprisingly practical to pack a bit of a ship with batteries to get 3~5 days of range, at least for ships as efficient per unit mass an an Emma Maersk and above.
What's less practical is the grid to support the fast charger that can recharge it in the ~10 hours it takes to unload and reload it.
Trans-atlantic battery container ship is technically feasible.
It won't be economic until you charge the oil burners loads for the CO2, and even then it might be that some kind of non-carbon burner of fuel cell beats it. Looking at ammonia concepts, for example.
Anything but airplanes. Current airliners have a fuel fraction between 24 and 47%, so any decrease in energy density massively compromises performance. The energy density of jet fuel is two orders of magnitude higher than modern batteries, and jet engines have efficiencies of a few ten percent.
Nonetheless, folks are working the problem. Albeit most of the current designs look more like short-haul passenger craft or automated cargo drones to connect remote communities.
It feels like this would be a very tricky problem, seeing as it seems most large planes have "it's much lighter when landing than taking off" as part of the design constraints, seeing as maximum takeoff weight > maximum landing weight for most airliners (generally speaking, I think). It's probably not insurmountable, but it seems unclear how we fix this when takeoff weight == landing weight for electric planes.
Higher landing weight mostly just means you need stronger landing gear and wings (which adds weight, which reduces range...) It's an unfortunate cycle, but not insurmountable.
All commercial aircraft are capable of landing at takeoff weight (to deal with aborted takeoff, and other similar emergency scenarios). They just aren't certified to do so routinely, and doing so repeatedly may put a lot of stress on the landing gear and airframe.
And the breaks notably may melt besides the landing gear suffering irreparable damage (to where you need to replace the landing gear).
That's planned for and to be handled by the required fire fighting truck coming out and hosing them down if they start any signs of starting a fire, even though that will shatter the brake discs that were still good.
The certified landing weight is about what weight they can be and still take off with no maintenance needed and just a regular refueling and perhaps crew change due to shift limits. But nothing done to the plane besides refueling. And yeah, it's because the extra capacity is just for extra fuel for extra range, so it's not worth the spendings on landing it more than just safely once.
We might just replace aeroplanes altogether with ultra-high-speed maglev.
Although the cost calculation for this would be totally different—hundreds of billions up-front for world-crossing tunnels and infrastructure and rolling stock, but then nearly no running cost.
The Chuō Shinkansen will be an interesting small-scale experiment in proper high-speed maglev in regular, long-distance passenger service.
The thing we do technically know how to do just haven't yet because there are no economic incentives to even tackle the finer engineering aspects let alone the regulatory approval ones, is to put a large vacuum-insulated (like a thermos/dewar) liquid hydrogen tank in the middle of a jet or a more-spherical shape front and back of the wing; and then just adjusting the plumbing and combustion chambers and nozzles to work for hydrogen instead of regular diesel-like jet fuel.
We have gas turbines running on hydrogen. They just work. We have tanks like it, just none tuned for the needs and wants of an airplane specifically.
They are more range than a normal jet fuel tank, because hydrogen is just so much lighter per energy.
The only issue is that the insulation needs and the sheer volume make it impractical to keep in regular jetliner wings.
Thus the need for putting a more-spherical tank in the tube shaped fuselage body of the plane.
I think such a plane would be around 5x as expensive today to operate due to fuel costs, and have otherwise pretty comparable performance specs.
There would probably be a separate front and rear cabin, though.
If you tax the CO2 enough you'd trigger such or similar to be put into production.
I live in China, and even I am surprised to see completely electric heavy trucks that are eerily quiet compared to diesel ones and carrying building materials, just cruising by on public roads. No idea how well or expensive they run, though.
take both this article and my opinion with a large chunk of salt.
Industries like car manufacturing, textile, farming and so on are just too old, everybody can join without much difficulty, not fancy ones, just usable.
The competition is too intensive they just don't make much money and they are not the future. Investing too much in these industries are meaningless. Just use tariff walls to keep some local factories/farms open for strategic reasons(in case of war) and employment.
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Climate change and carbon emission is another story. For most people money for next bill is much more important.
The text in teeny font under the headline picture is "ChatGPT generated. Chinese electric truck production lines expanding rapidly in 2024 and 2025."
So, in other words, the leading image is a lie. When people say false things that purport to be true in text we call it lying or fraud. I don't understand why when they do it with an image it's not the same thing. Putting teeny, easily missed font that says "ChatGPT generated" doesn't make it OK. I might feel less strongly if the author put a disclaimer, in larger font, that said (more accurately IMO), "The above image is fake."
I think the article underplays the transition. They're not just-now being sold, it's already the norm. I was in Chengdu last summer and all the huge trucks hauling sand and rocks at construction sites where electric already (and not brand new.. they'd clearly been used quite a bit). The days of trucks making huge plums of smoke at intersections are gone. As I understood it ICE trucks are extremely limited in the hours they're allowed to operate in cities.
So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot. Maybe there are quite a few trucks between cities and in the countryside that I just wasn't seeing.
I'm curious if the batteries can be swapped. Vehicles (trucks and taxis) are generally used in shifts, so you don't want to have the car just sitting around charging half the time
My guess is that the long distance trucks (the old blue ones) are still mostly diesel and the trucks inside cities for local work are transitioning first? Every city could also be really different in terms of where they are in adoption, CD could be further along than lower tier cities. I didn’t notice any trucks at all when I was in Beijing last April, so I’m guessing that they still aren’t allowed inside the fifth ring in the day time electric or not.
Yeah, it's going to be heavily biased towards short-distance stuff. Long-distance heavy electric trucks which can handle European work cycles just about exist as of recently, but I'm guessing that Chinese rules on how long truckers can work without rest are less stringent than European ones (American ones certainly are).
To electrify long distance trucks Bosch developed a fuel-cell power module (FCPM) it is already using for internal logistics. For long disctances f-cell and hydrogen tank are lighter than batteries would be. It supposedly can do 1000km without stops. https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/mobility-topics/fuel-cell-...
See also my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075305#46076161
Only high speed trucks have a crew of drivers to rotate through to drive without more than a toilet break. Hydrogen is very expensive compared to just batteries. The weight savings only make up for the horrible efficiency of hydrogen once you are looking at an airplane. Just use a battery, really. And put transport over distances that exceed one driver shift on trains.
The weight reductions may reduce TCO by one fifth through increased capacity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075305#46078485
Plus no range reduction in cold conditions. Plus you can store hydrogen long-term for winter. And transport Liquid Hydrogen with huge energy density per truck/ship to remote places. https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre... Sounds like a win for northern quartersphere.
You need massive infrastructure investments to freeze it, vehicles are more expensive because the tanks need to freeze it, fuel in stations need to freeze it, tanker trucks that deliver it need to freeze it, there is a lot of energy lost in freezing snd heating it back up.
China doesn’t feel rich enough to build all of that when charging stations are pretty straightforward and cheap. Probably the only thing holding back electric for long hauls now is the lack of infrastructure (grid is needed to build charging stations, and truckers prefer untolled routes without much of that), and also sunk costs on their existing trucks (which tend to last what feel likes forever with cheap repairs).
Hydrogen trucks are mostly a solution looking for a problem.
Most countries have duty hour limits for safety reasons, as having a trucker drive for 20 hours at a time is a really bad idea. Similarly, they usually have a mandatory mid-duty break.
Combined with the speed limit for heavy-duty vehicles, this provides a clear upper bound on the range any truck needs to have, and today's electric trucks are really close to it - or even exceed this already.
This reduces hydrogen trucks to multi-driver trips (incredibly rare due to the significant additional cost) and multi-day trips without rest stops (Australia?).
Considering that the market is going to be tiny: who's going to buy expensive hard-to-maintain trucks, and how are they going to refuel them? Wouldn't it make more sense to just build diesel-electric trucks and fuel that handful with carbon sequestered diesel?
Perfect fit for platooning/self driving trucks. Also fast charging is more weary on batteries.
Fast charging is fine if they keep it between 20 and 80.
Hydrogen failed in cars for the same predictable reasons it will fail in trucking.
It’s far too complicated and too expensive, and it’s only selling point (long distance per charge and slow charging) are things that BEVs are continuously getting better at.
Hydrogen continues to be a predatory delay strategy.
I think maybe a better solution for long distance trucks is swappable batteries like Jauns https://fullycharged.show/episodes/this-giant-electric-semi-...
There's a difference with cars in that people want elegant things for their car. With a heavy truck you can just kind of load a large battery pack onto a platform with a fork lift, or similar.
At that point just swap the trailers?
Toyota has also been working on "hydrogen cartridges" that can be quick swapped including just delivering them like fuel cans
by betting on the wrong horse Toyota positions itself for irrelevancy
All those Hydrogen programs in EU are just milking subsidies https://electrek.co/2025/11/22/daimler-ceo-just-dropped-some... and arent serious.
> So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot.
Chengdu is more on the "developed" scale of China (China is big). My guess is that 3rd tier cities and below are still behind on electrification.
The peak for combustion engines was nearly a decade ago now:
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-sales-of-com...
The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
When large corporations fail to adapt to changing technology, it gives smaller companies a chance to break in and take over markets.
We are seeing exactly the same thing happening right now with China catching up to the US economy. And by refusing to adapt to better technology that saves us money, we are seriously handicapping our future.
In my opinion, the dramatic change coming isn't just about combustion. The economics of electricity and energy are about to change profoundly over the next 20 years.
We are simultaneously witnessing the potential demise of the Western economic empire and the rise of the Eastern economic bloc (specifically China, Southeast Asia, and India), alongside the global shift to a new electricity age.
I frequently hear people argue that solar power isn't feasible for their specific location, but this perspective may soon render them economically uncompetitive. Trends clearly show that the production of almost everything is transitioning to electricity. Crucially, solar and battery storage are rapidly becoming the cheapest forms of electricity and continue to drop in price.
We will soon reach a critical inflection point where we produce new solar panels and batteries using the very solar energy they generate. At this stage, subsequent generations of panels and batteries will become cheaper purely through the energy input cost reduction, even without new technological breakthroughs. Consequently, countries lacking significant investment in solar or wind resources are highly likely to become energy poor and economically uncompetitive.
> rise of the Eastern economic bloc
the exact same thing was said for japan when their economy boomed. Whether china falls to the same fate, or actually sustain and overtake the west, is yet to be determined. However, trump's policies aren't really helping (but in fact, is actually enabling them). By removing the US as a large consumer, the CCP could be forced to switch to internal consumption model instead, which both increases the standard of living of the people there, as well as decrease the reliance on exporting (so lower economic leverage).
Not to mention the west's economic policies are disparate between supposed allied countries - with friends like that, who needs enemies?
I've been hearing that China will hit a plateau, like Japan, for at least 20 years now... Meanwhile, China is now pumping out BEV trucks, affordable electric cars, sixth generation military jets, and nuclear aircraft carriers.
A key benefit of being the world's factory is that factories are easier to convert to war time uses than banks and software offices are. Some kinds of software is clearly going to be important for the next world war, but a lot of the service economy is essentially dead weight. If China switches to an economy based on internal consumption it's likely that its industrial capacity will decline.
> The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
It's instructive to compare and contrast the countries, and I think the driving forces are actually quite simple.
Both countries desire energy independence and thriving domestic industry. Who doesn't?
But while the USA is a net fossil fuel exporter, China is a net importer. While the USA has a long-established automobile industry and shown willingness to bail it out more than once, China is a relative newcomer to this industry.
China is for better or worse prepared to set industrial strategy more rigorously and over longer time periods than others.
A while back China took a bet on non-fossil fuel technologies as a source of both energy independence and a way to get early into a new industry. This is now paying off hugely. It's not purely a green ideological choice, they still use coal heavily. It was strategic - to reduce dependence on imported oil, and "leapfrog" into being a major player in an emerging industry, rather than trying to catch up with ICE engines.
Meanwhile the USA continues to shore up the fossil-fuel chain from extraction to consumption in ICE automobiles. I find this short-sighted and unwise in many ways. And the negative consequences are likely coming soon. but it is not a very surprising choice given where they are and how they make such decisions.
One thing I always find fascinating is, if you look at global warming denialism globally, it largely only exists as a political force in oil (or occasionally coal) producing nations. In terms of big-ish democratic countries, it's a mainstream right-wing stance pretty much only in the US, Australia, Canada, and Indonesia.
The US is essentially embracing a delusion which happens to (arguably) financially benefit it _right now_, but will be dreadful for its future.
(It's broadly popular with fringe far-right groups like Reform and the AfD, granted)
The US has huge oil supplies from Texas and Canada so there was never a real need to invest in EV. All paid for with American dollars.
IMHO that missed big parts of the picture, because it's kind of like saying that because we have an ample supply of trees for punch cards, there's no need to invest in magnetic tape and hard drives. There are big differences in the fundamental capabilities and costs of renewables versus fuel based economies.
Not only is an electrified economy powered by renewables a far cheaper future, it is also the difference between renting your energy infrastructure and owning it. With fuel based systems, the US is still susceptible to global fuel prices, as long as we participate in the global market, which leads to highly unstable prices. With renewables, you buy and then own, and don't have to worry about price instability; you have 30 years of stability from a solar panel. And when it reaches end of life, it continues working, giving more than a decade of opportunity to buy at the most convenient time and price.
Countries that switch earlier will have advantages. Countries that base their economy on being providers for panels and batteries may or may not see similar benefits, but renewables, even when purchased from other countries, give cheaper and more secure energy supply than even oil fields in your own country.
Welcome to Germany
A couple of points in the article that are interesting:
- EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper. The same would presumably true for diesel trucks. And that "extra" cost for that stuff would be the same elsewhere. It's not a reason EV trucks would be more expensive specifically anywhere.
- China is starting to export these things around the world. I think this is very disruptive because it means the EU/US are increasingly isolated with higher cost of transport locally.
- The ASP of EV trucks is dropping below those of diesel trucks. This is being driven by battery cost, which in China is of course closely following production cost of those and in any EV truck is (or was) the biggest cost component. Going from 150$/kwh to 50$ or lower is a big deal. Prices could be trending towards 10$/kwh mid term for some chemistries. At 150$ it's 90K, at 50$, 600kwh is 30K. at 10$ it's 6000$. It stops being the largest cost factor on the truck somewhere along that curve. That's going to happen everywhere. It's just economics and physics. There's no logical reason for an EV truck to be more expensive than a diesel truck long term.
- Diesel usage is in decline in China. That's a real world effect that's hard to ignore. In China that means less imports are needed. It's a big economic shift in their favor to be needing less diesel/oil. Road miles tend to be dominated by newer vehicles: this effect might be faster than market shares suggest.
The EU has very expensive diesel. Those effects would be exaggerated here. It also has very strictly enforced rest breaks every 4.5 hours. Ideally spaced to allow for a 45 minute charging break. 600kwh is all you need for long distance trucking in the EU.
IMHO, the EU will catch up much quicker than the US: it has a bigger economical incentive. The US is producing its own fuel. China and the EU are not. Unless they switch to electric.
> Diesel usage is in decline in China.
I'd assume diesel usage is in decline throughout the developed world, tbh. Diesel vans and buses are gradually getting replaced with BEVs (and sometimes hybrids), diesel trains are being electrified (sometimes with batteries, now!), and while heavy BEV trucks are in their infancy outside China, they're beginning to show up in significant numbers in Europe.
China's certainly leading the way here, but Europe's not doing nothing.
> I'd assume diesel usage is in decline throughout the developed world, tbh.
yes, also for another reason: At one point, Diesel was promoted as being better due to less CO2. This was reversed when it was realised that it is dirtier- worse due to N02 and PM10 emissions.
See, for instance:
"2015-present: decline of diesel cars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_diesel_car#2015...
"London must be ‘diesel-free’ by 2030" https://cleanair.london/health/diesel-free-by-2030/
I wonder how the economics are shifted in China which is dependent on foreign oil but has plenty of (some very dirty, some clean) electricity? I'm sure subsidies are playing a great role(as they do in all things in China) and national security concerns are making EV trucks more viable.
At a macro level, more exports and less imports mean things should be good for their trade balance. Though you might rightfully worry about e.g. debt and other misaligned things in the Chinese economy. They have poor utilization of their production capacity for e.g. batteries.
The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
Subsidies are a very political/ideological talking point. But the traditional fossil fuel economy isn't exactly free from subsidies, incentives, tariffs, and other government instruments. The US having a dependence on oil and gas is hard to separate from its huge budgets for incentivizing and protecting that.
The Chinese have been very strategic about their R&D in the last few decades. It's paying off though. Demand for their clean tech exports is increasing and just when oil/gas markets are becoming increasingly volatile they are managing to be less dependent on those.
> The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
No. It's for both reasons, cheaper and cleaner. The pollution in cities was absolutely dire and a real health hazard as well as an embarrassment internationally. EVs including scooters and trucks are a large part of the reason the air is cleaner now.
When I was in Wuhan, I talked with an engineer who was having his second child. I asked what he thought about raising kids in such bad air pollution. He said at least it is getting better each year.
> EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper.
the article does claim that even if chinese trucks are brought up to the same standards they will still be far cheaper
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.
Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]
This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.
Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.
[1] https://www.auto-anders.de/eactros-600 [2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...
Don't know about heavy trucks, but I can say this. I'm currently looking after a house being renovated in rural and hilly Northern England. There are a lots of trade folk coming by doing various things, all in the UK ubiquitous white vans. The decorator has an EV van. The sparky has an EV van. The groundworks folk have an EV van. When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs, then a shift is really happening.
> The sparky has an EV van.
This one I'm always a bit dubious of, because, well, they're likely to have a lot of emergency callouts after a blackout. How are they charging their van?
ESB Networks, the Irish state grid operator, increasingly uses electric vans. I suppose maybe they have a backup generator wherever they keep them? On the face of it, it seems like they'd be the _last_ thing you'd want to electrify.
You’re optimizing for the 0.01% here. Also, cars don’t lose their charge completely just because a blackout happens. Unless you pull in to the depot/charging area low on charge and then immediately a blackout happens, and then you need to go out while it’s still happened… driving it around shouldn’t be an issue.
Then, the other 99.9% of the time you get cheaper, quieter driving.
Oh, yeah, definitely, but specifically for electricians it's a really _important_ 0.01%, I'd have thought.
Most electricians don’t do this type of work, I’d say. For a grid operator, sure. For the standard guy coming to your house to do some wiring? No way.
After a major blackout, I think it's fairly common for electricians to have a lot of work on; distribution boxes etc often don't take it well.
Is this something common in Europe? We’ve had our fair share of blackouts in the US, some lasting days, and I’ve never ever heard of someone’s breaker panel (I assume that’s what you mean by distribution box) needing any service as a result of the blackout.
I've had one power cut in the last decade (urban area, wiring generally underground), but I know people in rural areas who have power cuts a lot due to storms, and sometimes there are problems coming back up. Think it's mostly old-fashioned 'fuse boxes' with actual literal fuses in them that have problems (you don't strictly need an electrician to sort that, but some people are nervous of the giant fuses and I'm not sure I blame them...)
I don't think it's a particularly _common_ issue, but it definitely happens to some extent.
> When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs
And I'm glad they are using EVs, but also wondering if it's not mainly the tax writedown rules (in our country EVs are written down as investment to lower your taxes in 2 years vs. the standard 4 I think, and this can dramatically lower your tax base). But perhaps I'm overly cynical.
It is absolutely magnificent to see a electric truck full of sand driving through the street, here is a (sorry, verry bad quality) video of a BYD one I caught: https://youtube.com/shorts/B0akomAQgkM?si=B1JEkKrTk6w7q5Bq
There are some electric trucks driving around Australian cities already as well.
Though I love the sound of a straight cut gear, I suspect they'll want to work on quieting that drivetrain a bit. Thankfully there is a lot of prior art.
It sounds like a 2CV in reverse. The classic non-synchro-mesh sound used for cheapo reverse gears in the 1980s and 90s.
Thanks for sharing, is that engine sound coming from the truck?
It's from the truck, it's the transmission of the truck which is evident by changing pitch as the truck downshifts while slowing down.
It likely uses a transmission as a tradeoff between torque and RPM of the electric motor or because it's a simpler task to retrofit an existing truck driveline with an electric motor bolted onto it.
These are so noisy because of the use of straight cut gears, which you choose when preferring strength over noise and comfort. Most regular cars use helical gears which reduces the noise due to continuously meshing between gear teeth, whereas straight cut gears are like a paddle wheel, so the teeth are smacking into eachother head on each time they engage. That is also why they clunk when getting on and off throttle.
We have some similar trucks running around Australia at the moment and the sound is the same, I'm also familiar with the sound from motorsport!
Are there weight/performance reasons why an electric truck would need a multi-speed transmission? Most electric cars only have a single-speed
Some cars have 2 gears as well. One for the acceleration and one for cruising efficiency and top speed. So my guess is to get it going easier and then have 2nd as the eco gear for the speed they cruise at.
I am unsure sorry, electric motors do still have efficiency curves so that could be it. But I think a retrofit to an existing driveline makes more sense.
Food for thought though, trucks are much much heavier loaded than cars. 100-150+ tonne vs like 1.5-4 tonnes for a car. Cars are trivial by comparison.
Perhaps the motor they have available doesn't have enough torque for it without gearing down.
> Perhaps the motor they have available doesn't have enough torque for it without gearing down.
This is true of cars too - the single-speed transmission in a Tesla is a 9:1 reduction gear, for example.
Sounds like the person taking the video is on an electric bike.
I think its the truck, near the end the bike peels off to the left and you can hear the sound fading off to the right.
Op here, the sound is the truck, it sounds like a toy really haha.
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Seems like there is a lot of dislike of this comment but not a lot of discussion about. Is it not true that china is dominating here? Or that this is becoming the norm? Isn't the instant negative reaction to this comment the exact problem? Maybe if we decided to get better instead of get mad we would see articles about the west dominating more often.
Comments often follow a u-curve, where immediate downvotes are countered after a few minutes. I suspect the cause is at least in part people directly downvoting from the https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments page
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The guidelines ask us to avoid commenting like this:
Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Besides, I can't see many mentions of the word Tesla in this thread. Just seems more of a (false) stereotype than reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
what was the mistake? it seems like the cards are stacked against anyone trying to build in the USA vs China.
It’s apparent that the USA is falling deeply behind on all of these things. I look at the rest of my life now as the final days in Babylon and try to still enjoy going down in the sinking ship. I vote to stop it, but my votes haven’t mattered in a long time. It’s important to still do them anyway.
There isn't a major political party in the USA willing to undergo the reforms needed to compete.
I don't know what voting does, other than produce a false air of approval around the administration. I think that if voter turnout was low enough, it would speak for itself and encourage more radical political strategy.
One party is more open-minded about it, and ready to use their brains.
> my votes haven’t mattered in a long time
you vote mattered. It's just that there are more people who didn't vote the way you wanted them. But that's OK, because this is how it is supposed to work.
At least, in theory.
in theory the probability of your vote mattering is about as high as winning the lottery
mattering doesn't mean you get what you wanted/voted for. Mattering means your vote was counted among the hundreds of millions, and the ultimate consensus reached, and the minority voters have accept the result of the majority voters.
I think people have (recently at least) mistakenly believed that democracy means your vote is a demand to be fulfilled, and if it isn't, then democracy is failing.
The USSR was considered by many prominent intellectuals a valid counterpoint to the Western capitalist structure, up until the moment it collapsed, and then it wasn't true socialism. Some humbleness should be in order when considering imperfect knowledge
Perhaps competition in the cold war reinvigorated the USA or expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Imagine a boat has a hole in it, and is sinking. Some of the crew-members make a big deal about it, and run a campaign to plug the hole and bail the water out. In the end, it does not sink and the remaining crewmembers conclude that it was not a big deal and that the campaign was unnecessary. It is a survivor's bias.
Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
> Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
Not necessarily. Whether it sinks depends on three things: hole location, rate of flooding, and watertight compartment design.
What’s an example of a systematic (systemic?) problem that will ruin a country if left unsolved?
I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power the bureaucracy has to extract even more wealth increases over time. In the USA, the military industrial complex is the biggest example of this, the general self-licking ice cream cone.
I don't think it depends on hole location or rate of flooding. If the rate is greater than zero, and if the second derivative is non-negative (i.e. it isn't self regulating, the rate of loss itself does not decrease over time like a self-healing wound) then eventually it will flood. If the second derivative is zero, and the hole is very small relative to the size of the ship, it will take a while.
Our government is not well compartmentalized. The evolution of the US government has trended towards increasing federal over state power (for some good reasons). Maybe programs like social security are compartmentalized in the sense that if they collapse, they don't bring down other sectors of government.
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything. I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
> Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything
What do you think the cold war was exactly?
Cold War involved a lot of imperfect knowledge - until Gorbachev, soviet leaders were utterly convinced that USA plans to attack first. On one hand, it was paranoia, on the other hand, US intelligence actions including gleeful setup of mass scale murder in Indonesia reinvigorated that belief.
China has been largely capitalist since the late 1980s. Economically, it's similar to many Western countries—in fact, its government and welfare spending is lower than the Western average. Where it differs dramatically is in its political structure (one-party state versus democracy).
I would say the primary difference is that the state supersedes capital, rather than the other way around. The Chinese state permits capitalism, but only when it's to the benefit of China's economy and wellbeing.
So, for instance they just banned sports betting outright, as it's not productive or contributing to the economy.
The state runs the "commanding heights" of the economy, the banks, and directs investment, coordinates with industry. Of course it invests in infrastructure development.
> The USSR
First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard. Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
China is full of Potemkin villages. They strategically invest huge resources into areas the West finds politically advantageous, but somehow only grow exactly the 5% they say is required. It’s had to square the circle when so much is obviously nonsense
This honestly isn't a discussion about governmental systems. The US and 'western nations' have built big things and pushed for big things many times in the past and can do it again. We pump trillions in subsidies and direct funding into 'strategic' resources that are flat out bad policy and the people pushing that know it. This is a question of actual people making obviously bad decisions and not being held responsible for the obviously bad outcomes. I hope that the rise of china gives us the correct motivation. The motivation to do more, to be honest and to start competing instead of just using our weight to put up barriers so we don't have to compete. The first step is making decisions backed by evidence and understanding and not emotion and appeals to fear. Basically, we need to grow up and start putting in the work again.
China does not allow the West to compete in their market. If you want to complain about artificial barriers, ask why Google can’t get a search engine there
> intelligent investment
I would not call highly disposable and cheap heavy duty vehicles an "intelligent investment." It's headline chasing and there's always very little tying their touted efforts to any actual improvements in the environment our economic outcomes.
China imports most of its oil. With EVs China needs to import less oil, this works really well for their national security. Even if the environmental benefit was zero (and it isn’t), this would still be the best choice for them and much of the world that doesn’t produce much oil. It isn’t really complicated.
Yup, if Taiwan is attacked and the straits at Indonesia are denied to Chinese merchant vessels, every EV is a net plus for the wartime economy.
Why? Heavy duty trucks are often disposable, they wear out quickly. Mining trucks are probably the worst example.
I agree that mining is probably the worst of it, but trucks usually last a decade and a couple million kilometers, after which they’re shipped off to Africa or the Middle East where they’re kept on the road for much longer.
I would not know, here were I live I see most of the heavy duty trucks (owned by small companies at least) with 10-15+ years of service, looking at the license plates.
That depends on how you define "heavy duty". Cement trucks and dump trucks rarely last more than a few years before they need major repairs of transmission and suspension. The frame itself might last more, around 10 years.
There's a fabulous YouTube channel on electric trucks in Germany if the topic interests you.
German version: https://youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
English: https://youtube.com/@electrictrucker this has fewer and shorter videos unfortunately.
There's a fabulous drive technology for electric trucks in Germany if powering it with hydrogen via fuel cell interests you. Got awarded the German Future Prize 2025 recently. https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/bosch-team-win...
It's for long distance/quick refill operations. I wonder how the BEV trucks handle this. Can they swap batteries or are limited to shorter distances?
Here's the award ceremony in German https://minily.org/gfp25-award-bosch-long-distance-truck-fce...
H2 Trucks are dead, just from the economics. Watch the latest video from Elektrotrucker on youtube where he does the math. His BEV long haul actros comes out to a price per km of 0.35 EUR whereas the h2 Truck ends up at 1.35 EUR. There is a reason why Charging networks for BEV trucks are expanding while h2 stations are being taken down.
Couldn't find where he or how you arrive at those numbers. Anyway it's not solely about energy costs per km but total cost. And here the lower weight of FCPM trucks comes into play. What they discuss at the ceremony:
A truck, including its load, must not weigh more than 40 tons. Let's take two comparable trucks: one with a battery, the other with a fuel cell. It turns out that the fuel cell truck's drive system is four tons lighter. This means its payload capacity is greater. Therefore, up to 20 percent fewer trucks are needed to transport the same goods. Instead of five trucks, there are only four on the road.
In the best case you can save acquisition costs, driver wages and insurance for one truck per every four others. It's going to take a while until you make that up with saved energy costs.
"take a while"? A quarter to a third of a conventional European long haul truck is fuel. And what unrealistic truck are you looking at? European long haul battery trucks currently have around 600 kWh of LFP; that's just around 3 tons; how is adding a fuel cell negative 1 ton of weight? No, the cable to the charging port is light enough to carry by one human, even if it's not negligible, that's still more than an order of magnitude below so won't change anything here.
Note that the trucks are already allowed 2 tons extra road weight, so it's actually not unusual to have basically the same load capacity (within +-500kg). It does matter if you have a rotating crew driving express long haul, because then you don't have a mandatory 45 minutes of lunch break during which you can plug in to a 300~400 kW charger (and e.g. take a walk or visit a bathroom or actually have lunch) to get a shift limit of range out of such a "small" battery.
They probably took a battery truck with (in a worker-and-road-safety oriented market like Europe) excessively much no-recharge range to match their fuel cell setup. But you do that because it's fairly tame to add the marginal range of a full shift limit to a fuel cell truck; it's not economic to size a long haul battery to suffice without recharging for anywhere near the weight limit.
Green hydrogen is substantially more expensive than diesel per energy; and electric trucks can already beat diesel's in TCO depending on the kind of usage (e.g. notably express long haul is not competitive, but most highway single-driver operations are).
A battery truck is allowed to have 42 tons.
I'm no expert but a far stretch but if this most basic fact is already wrong then my trust in the remaining stuff diminishes. On top of that they is only relevant if all truck loads were limited by weight.
So, I believe that argument to be wrong in its entirety. And if we then factor in the CO2 costs, hydrogen is the clear loser in all regards.
It's much simpler. In the EU, truckers have to do mandatory 45 min breaks after 4 1/2 hours of driving. With the latest truck generation, this is enough time to recharge to get through the rest of the shift. 400 kW charging is sufficient in this scenario. No wasteful expensive H2 or fancy battery swapping technology required.
Those BEV trucks come in both swappable battery and fast-charging models. Most support dual chargers for simultaneous charging. A 600kWh battery can be fully charged in about an hour with two 350kW chargers. Two more common 180kW charger takes around two hours. Some trucks even support four chargers at once. But for the small and cheap trucks used in city, they may take 4 hours for charging to run 200km.
I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
> I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
Mines tend to be underground, or then a big hole in the ground, so the truck would be going uphill when fully loaded and down empty, no?
Unless we're talking about a mine up on a mountain?
Yep, on a mountain.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest...
Also, there's a similar train in development/roll-out -
https://www.theautopian.com/a-mining-company-built-a-battery...
The real award ceremony is reduction of green houses gases. I think BEV do this better than hydrogen for a long time now.
Hydrogen doesnt deem scalable.
We use fewer critical raw materials for our fuel cell, unlike the lithium and cobalt typically used in batteries. Our use of these materials is considerably reduced.
Sodium batteries won't help here as they are even more heavy.
For the infrastructure, for long-distance transport, we need approximately 140 filling stations across all of Europe. That's a completely different scale than for battery-electric cars. In other words, there isn't that much to do.
In Germany alone there are about 14000 gas stations, 350 at the Autobahn; housing some of the 160000 charging points.
Modern trucks don't use cobalt batteries. LFP are better for that workload as they can be cycled much deeper (making up almost all the weight difference when just looking at nominal capacity) and are substantially safer and actually somewhat cheaper than the NMC chemistry that uses the cobalt.
And lithium itself is not nearly that rare.
The picture of two rows of electric trucks is marked "ChatGPT generated". Note that some of the trucks shown have three front grille slots, while some have two. Also, those trucks appear to have fuel tanks. The author is mostly talking about what someone else saw at the China Commercial Vehicles Show. Low-credibility source.
There's plenty of info about that show, with real pictures.[1] BYD has a full range of electric trucks, but what they're pushing seems to be the T3 and T4 trucks. The new T4 is a straight truck, available as a box truck, flatbed, or open top truck. Or they'll sell the chassis for custom jobs. Claimed range is "up to 250km". It's intended for city use with once daily charging. The T3, which has been out for a few years, is an ordinary electric van, comparable to a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. These are high-volume commercial products. Light and medium electric trucks are taking over fleet operations.
BYD has a new line of heavy electric trucks, launched in April.[2] This isn't BYD's first try at heavy electric trucks. They delivered some (at least hundreds, but not tens of thousands) in 2022. The 2025 model is at least their third try. They don't claim to have cracked long-haul trucking. "BYD Tractor Q3: Focusing on Short – Haul Transportation and Breaking Through Medium – and Long – Haul Transportation" is their marketing pitch. There are multiple battery options, and for charging, the Q3 can be plugged into up to four chargers at once. Long-haul operation is possible, but it's not yet the target market.
So the BYD heavy trucks aren't mainstream in China yet, but they're a lot closer than Tesla's Semi (yet another re-announcement: [3]) or the Nikola (only works going downhill and required a Trump pardon for the CEO).
Volvo has a range of electric trucks, mostly sold in Europe.
[1] https://www.chinatrucks.org/news/2025/1110/article_11304.htm...
[2] https://www.ctinsa.com/ccnes/5550
[3] https://elonbuzz.com/the-tesla-semi-2026-update-is-here/
There is also Mercedes eActros line and MAN eTGX. There are already thousands of them in Europe. Funny how that just happened, without fanfares and trillion dollar evaluations.
Speaking of which, I don’t know why would anyone still wait for Tesla Semi or any other up-and-comers. Promised better efficiency sounds good on paper, but means nothing if the product doesn’t exist or is an unreliable prototype with no service support.
Now Chinese want to enter the market with cheaper trucks, but - as the article clearly mentions - these are not yet ready to be used in Europe or the States, and making them ready will increase the price.
Let’s all remember Bill Gates’ prediction from 2020:
> Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/moving-around-in-a-zero-carbon-wo...
It wasn’t a prediction, but a defence of investment if fossil fuels.
He's not wrong. Nothing has fundamentally changed in battery technology since 2020 - power densities are about the same. A "long haul" EV tractor unit gets about 500km range and weighs ~4 tons more than a diesel equivalent.
That did not age well.
Why? Do we have many electric 18-wheelers, cargo ships, or passenger jets?
As always, I realise that on this here orange website it is highly inappropriate to read the article, but the article is about mass adoption of BEV heavy trucks.
Cargo ships and passenger jets are another matter, of course, and we won't be seeing battery ships (except for regional ferries) or battery planes of any sort anytime soon, but he was wrong about trucks.
Considering that the quote specifically talks about "long-haul vehicles", and that the article that no one read explicitly said "The long haul story is different. European and North American long haul operators require far more from a truck than a Chinese domestic short range tractor offers", I do not see why Gates' comment aged so badly.
Ehhh, it's surprisingly practical to pack a bit of a ship with batteries to get 3~5 days of range, at least for ships as efficient per unit mass an an Emma Maersk and above.
What's less practical is the grid to support the fast charger that can recharge it in the ~10 hours it takes to unload and reload it.
Trans-atlantic battery container ship is technically feasible. It won't be economic until you charge the oil burners loads for the CO2, and even then it might be that some kind of non-carbon burner of fuel cell beats it. Looking at ammonia concepts, for example.
Seeing this issue, I’m actually wondering what else might be replaced by batteries in the future… airplanes?
Anything but airplanes. Current airliners have a fuel fraction between 24 and 47%, so any decrease in energy density massively compromises performance. The energy density of jet fuel is two orders of magnitude higher than modern batteries, and jet engines have efficiencies of a few ten percent.
Nonetheless, folks are working the problem. Albeit most of the current designs look more like short-haul passenger craft or automated cargo drones to connect remote communities.
It feels like this would be a very tricky problem, seeing as it seems most large planes have "it's much lighter when landing than taking off" as part of the design constraints, seeing as maximum takeoff weight > maximum landing weight for most airliners (generally speaking, I think). It's probably not insurmountable, but it seems unclear how we fix this when takeoff weight == landing weight for electric planes.
Higher landing weight mostly just means you need stronger landing gear and wings (which adds weight, which reduces range...) It's an unfortunate cycle, but not insurmountable.
All commercial aircraft are capable of landing at takeoff weight (to deal with aborted takeoff, and other similar emergency scenarios). They just aren't certified to do so routinely, and doing so repeatedly may put a lot of stress on the landing gear and airframe.
And the breaks notably may melt besides the landing gear suffering irreparable damage (to where you need to replace the landing gear). That's planned for and to be handled by the required fire fighting truck coming out and hosing them down if they start any signs of starting a fire, even though that will shatter the brake discs that were still good. The certified landing weight is about what weight they can be and still take off with no maintenance needed and just a regular refueling and perhaps crew change due to shift limits. But nothing done to the plane besides refueling. And yeah, it's because the extra capacity is just for extra fuel for extra range, so it's not worth the spendings on landing it more than just safely once.
We might just replace aeroplanes altogether with ultra-high-speed maglev.
Although the cost calculation for this would be totally different—hundreds of billions up-front for world-crossing tunnels and infrastructure and rolling stock, but then nearly no running cost.
The Chuō Shinkansen will be an interesting small-scale experiment in proper high-speed maglev in regular, long-distance passenger service.
Unless we build giant bridges spanning the oceans, I think we'll sooner have electric jetliners than a global maglev network.
The thing we do technically know how to do just haven't yet because there are no economic incentives to even tackle the finer engineering aspects let alone the regulatory approval ones, is to put a large vacuum-insulated (like a thermos/dewar) liquid hydrogen tank in the middle of a jet or a more-spherical shape front and back of the wing; and then just adjusting the plumbing and combustion chambers and nozzles to work for hydrogen instead of regular diesel-like jet fuel. We have gas turbines running on hydrogen. They just work. We have tanks like it, just none tuned for the needs and wants of an airplane specifically. They are more range than a normal jet fuel tank, because hydrogen is just so much lighter per energy. The only issue is that the insulation needs and the sheer volume make it impractical to keep in regular jetliner wings. Thus the need for putting a more-spherical tank in the tube shaped fuselage body of the plane.
I think such a plane would be around 5x as expensive today to operate due to fuel costs, and have otherwise pretty comparable performance specs. There would probably be a separate front and rear cabin, though.
If you tax the CO2 enough you'd trigger such or similar to be put into production.
Some are testing viability
https://www.luftfartstilsynet.no/en/about-us/news/news-2025/...
Considering the sheer number of commercial flight routes and travel demand worldwide, that actually sounds pretty promising.
I live in China, and even I am surprised to see completely electric heavy trucks that are eerily quiet compared to diesel ones and carrying building materials, just cruising by on public roads. No idea how well or expensive they run, though.
Wow. So much for the 'electric road' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road); looks like batteries may have eaten its lunch by the time the bugs are worked out.
The Type C was tested in Germany; it's gone now that mercedes e-actros and similar ate it's lunch.
take both this article and my opinion with a large chunk of salt.
Industries like car manufacturing, textile, farming and so on are just too old, everybody can join without much difficulty, not fancy ones, just usable.
The competition is too intensive they just don't make much money and they are not the future. Investing too much in these industries are meaningless. Just use tariff walls to keep some local factories/farms open for strategic reasons(in case of war) and employment.
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Climate change and carbon emission is another story. For most people money for next bill is much more important.
The text in teeny font under the headline picture is "ChatGPT generated. Chinese electric truck production lines expanding rapidly in 2024 and 2025."
So, in other words, the leading image is a lie. When people say false things that purport to be true in text we call it lying or fraud. I don't understand why when they do it with an image it's not the same thing. Putting teeny, easily missed font that says "ChatGPT generated" doesn't make it OK. I might feel less strongly if the author put a disclaimer, in larger font, that said (more accurately IMO), "The above image is fake."
If your entire take away from this article is "the image is fake" when it declares it's GPT GENERATED then your on a low bar mission.
Go hunt stories which don't declare it's a GPT masthead and excoriate them.
It wouldn’t be any different if it said “made from imagination with photoshop”.
Using fake images is lame whether they are AI or not.
How about drawing by hand with a bamboo tablet?
Looks like a ChatGPT generated article to me. All paragraphs and sentences are the same size and format.