Why do you think autonomous vehicles will arrive sooner than electric? I'm not very informed on the subject and it looks to me like both technologies are at about the same stage. There are already electric vehicles out there but no commercially available driverless cars yet. All they need for electric trucks is faster charging time and/or better battery life. Or maybe removable batteries that you can switch at truck stops. Is an improvement in these technologies soon less realistic than the driverless truck technology? I have no clue so any insight on the matter would be appreciated.
The strength of autonomous vehicles is in simple, repeatable, high-traffic areas in which little maneuvering is necessary. There's a lot less nuance in driving a truck, outside of navigating within a city, parking, etc. the strength of electric vehicles is in high efficiency, low-load, short distance applications in which nobody needs to go very far. People look at a Tesla and its 260 mile range and assume it's no big deal; it's a very big deal because the chemistry of batteries does not change easily. "Better battery life" is a flippant thing to say but a formidable task. Consider: A Tesla Model S is about the same car, performance-wise, as a BMW 3-series. The Tesla, however, costs three times as much, weighs 1000 lbs more and has half the range. People are willing to accept that because it's a luxury electric vehicle (and in California, electric vehicles get the carpool lane - no small perq). But extrapolate out to a big herkin' Peterbilt. The engine isn't a big deal; big stupid electric motors will produce torque and power just like we need for hauling 40 tons across state lines. But that Peterbilt will haul no-lie 300 gallons of diesel fuel. Compare and contrast with our BMW - it's got a 15-gallon capacity and it doubles the Tesla, whose most hard-fought attribute is range. Safe to assume all the batteries they could cram into the Tesla - probably 1500 lbs worth - gives it the range of 7 gallons of gas. Gas/Diesel isn't a comparison, but remember - we want our long-haul trucks to go for days and days and days without really stopping. Even if you could slap a battery pack that big in an 18-wheeler, you certainly couldn't recharge it as quickly as you can fill up a gas tank. Long-haul trucking will go electric as soon as there are rails in the road. Until then it's gonna be fossil-fuel powered. Trains are radically more efficient than trucks and they're diesel-electric and will be for quite some time to come.
Thanks :) Basically unless there's a major change in the way batteries are made, a good enough battery is unrealistic. I guess I can still hope someone invents some kind of car battery you can switch out easily kinda like on a cell phone or some extra efficient solar powered truck roofs that charge the battery while you roll. But eh, surely if that's the stuff I come up with after 5 mins thinking about the subject, either it's completely unrealistic at the moment or some's already working on a prototype. Or maybe these are acceptable solutions for cars but don't apply to trucks. Thanks for taking the time to spell it all out for me. It's a bit disappointing honestly, eco-friendly trucks would have been great :)
Here's what I can tell you. When I started college, I spent some time in a vehicle design program. In 1995, the golden rule was a thousand pounds of batteries had the energy density of a gallon of gasoline. This thing here has a 600cc Kawasaki motor, and a thousand pounds of Sonnenschein NiMH batteries that cost $80k. If you had told me energy density of batteries would be up by a factor of seven in less than 20 years I wouldn't have believed you. It hadn't gone up by more than 50% since WWII. But at the time, a Motorola StarTac was state-of-the-art. The Cell Phone revolution absolutely drove an improvement in battery design. You couldn't begin to run an iPhone on the battery in a StarTac - 230 minutes talk-time out of 500mAh. An iPhone 6 has an 1800mAh battery that gives it 14 hours of talk time and it's a much, much smaller phone. But here's the thing: in 1994 computers were profligate users of power. The original Dec Alpha chip dissipated enough heat to literally cook an egg (250W). Moore's Law was all about cramming cycles and energy in the smallest space possible... which flipped some time around 2003, 2004. People started caring a lot more about battery life than they did about horsepower because what we had in 2004 was pretty much good enough for most people. Ever since, the focus has been on more efficient chips as opposed to big skookum batteries. We've also kind of accepted the rise of the secondary battery pack; we carry outriggers for our phones now so that we can flatten the bejeesus out of them and still function. The radical improvement we've seen in batteries over the past 20 years could continue. Using rough math, we need about 40x the energy density we have now... which is a long ways off. And if we got there, we'd be in a position for electric aircraft, electric helicopters, electric pogo sticks, electric everything before we'd hit the sweet spot for electric long-haul trucks. It just takes a shit-ton of juice to haul 40 tons of mail. That is probably something you aren't considering: those giant trucks you sweep by on the freeway weigh 20 times as much as your car, and an electric car is already a marvel. It's easier with rail anyway. Lay down a cable and leave all the batteries back at the station... ;-)
And this would not have happened without lithium-based cells. We've now squeezed lithium technology nearly as far as it can go; we may well get vastly better batteries in the future, but if so, it will be (I predict) because we've found a new kind of battery - a revolutionary not evolutionary change.If you had told me energy density of batteries would be up by a factor of seven in less than 20 years I wouldn't have believed you. It hadn't gone up by more than 50% since WWII.
I was just reading an article about the state of batteries and innovation. While we've shot exponentially higher in almost all other areas of technology, the technology in batteries (a chemical reaction) has remained essentially unchanged. I believe this was the article I read, but there's a ton of knowledge out there on batteries and their relatively stagnant evolution. http://www.cnet.com/news/why-batteries-arent-getting-better/
To add to this: The magic factors everyone cares about for batteries are energy density and recharge time. The article touches on how batteries are basically layers of metal and dielectric; the more layers of metal, the higher your energy density. Electricity in batteries is a chemical process; the more reactive that chemistry the faster batteries can charge and discharge. So - the thinner and more reactive the battery design, the higher performance the battery. Which also means the higher performance your battery, the more sensitive it is to damage... and the more dramatic the results.