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Bahahaahhaa!
It's true that Aussie widths are less than some other countries.
But AFAICT these proposed rules are not limited to electric trucks. And don't think just semis. SUVs, pickups.
Get used to seeing diesel monster trucks rolling coal, and other emotional support vehicles become a lot more common.
RIP cyclists and small children
How about any SUV with huge towing mirrors permanently fitted and extended to their max?
Why aren't goods transported via train?
The operational overhead is often too time-intensive, among other issues.
You can either send a lad with a truck down the highway or you can send one to a train station somewhere, have him unload everything, wait for the train to leave, the train to get there (you'll be lucky if it's going straight where you need it to), have someone go to the destination station, unload it into another truck and finally deliver it.
It's might only be worth it for veery long trips, and the start and finish have got to be in good locations (harbors f.e.).
It makes sense to use trains, but as soon as you look into it, it becomes almost undoable.
This fact is also reflected in the tonnage statistics.
For non-bulk freight across the Nullarbor, rail has double the market share of Sea transport. Which then has double the market share of Road transport. It's not the case for Melbourne Sydney though.
Contrary to what the other comments are saying, there's no compelling reason why goods transport by train can't be done here when it can be done elsewhere. It was done in the past but then we started spending billions to subsidise trucks and passed a variety of laws to benefit road transport. Plus allowing the taxpayer to cover the cost of road wear caused by trucks which totals more billions per year.
So in the end it was a pure policy decision - in the 1950s various lobby groups pushed for the introduction of laws to favor road transport over rail transport and in 1957 the first laws were passed. The rest is history.
So I've been reading up on this topic a bit more and I came across this
Problem Australia’s interstate freight rail network comprises many long sections of single track. This restricts the number of train paths, reducing rail’s competitiveness with road, and hindering rail’s ability to meet growing freight movement demand. The interstate freight rail network needs to be enhanced to accommodate growth in the freight and passenger task, and improve efficiency and safety.
On the bright side it is a proposal to upgrade a lot of the rail corridors to support more freight than we have currently. Though it was added in 2016 and is still only in the 'potential investment options' phase
same reason as nuclear power - high startup, low maintainance. Even if the lifetime cost is lower, the initial cost and its associated risk makes these kinds of investments unattractive.
This problem is even worse for trains, because the last miles has to go onto trucks anyways
Seeing as how the majority of truck drivers here in Australia are complete aggro cunts, this should be marvellous as they’ll be able to destroy even more innocent drivers.
This is pretty bullshit mate. I spend so much time on the highway on my bike and truck drivers are usually the most law abiding, predictable drivers I come across.
Yeah there are some who are like you describe but truck drivers are massively overworked and exploited, leading to sleep deprivation and often drug use just to meet targets, so that's inevitable.
I'd share the road with a semi over a Falcodore or yank tank any day.
Semi drivers are generally good.
Dump truck drivers have Swiss cheese brains.
To be fair it's just most Australians are aggro cunts
The fuck you say?
If I had to work on the road full time, I'm sure my patience would also be limited. We're talking about an increase of 5cm to the width of the trucks. Nobody is going to notice.
I don't know about that. When I used to ride a bike to work near a busy truck route, I felt like the truck drivers were the most courteous and conscious of keeping a safe distance. Normal car drivers were a mixed bag: usually not a problem, but not reliable enough to trust. But bus drivers... it felt like bus drivers were actively pissed off by the existence of cyclists.
Shouldn't be a problem most places, though some roads and docks already feel tight enough at 2.5m.
An extra 5cm inside would be nice though - even that extra little bit of room would often make it easier to get a pair of pallets in.
Ah yes, the electrification of trucks. Where 1/3 of the cargo your hauling is your own batteries. Efficiency at its finest.
The thing is, electric motors are so efficient that even hauling the mass of the batteries they are still more efficient than old fashioned internal combustion engines.
Nah. Diesel engine's efficiency is ~40%, Electric Motor's ~75%. Since you're hauling batteries, you haul less cargo, which means you need more trucks, more trips, more drivers, more charging time, etc.
Truck drivers in Australia are banned from driving more than 5.5 hours at a time. There are already dedicated places to stop and park a large truck every 5 hours or so on every single highway.
A truck that can drive five hours on a charge doesn't need that big of a battery. Tesla's semi goes much much further than that on a charge and it would, as you point out, be more efficient if it had a smaller/lighter battery.
I expect where we'll end up is drivers will, when they stop for their mandatory rest, disconnect the trailer, hook the truck up to charging infrastructure, then connect the trailer to a fresh truck with a fully charged battery.
The charging infrastructure would likely be optimised for price, not speed. For example only charge the truck during the day when the grid is running on solar power.
Diesel trucks are not cheap by the way - maintenance plus the cost of the diesel works out to something like a hundred thousand dollars per year assuming you drive the truck all year.
There are too many questions to be answered to calculate how much money you'd save, since electric trucks don't exist at all yet, but my city has started deploying electric busses and they work out to a savings of a quarter million dollars per bus (over the life of the bus). Obviously with savings like that, they are going to stop buying diesel busses entirely as soon as they possibly can. It will be the same for trucks.
Well, you're listing all these things that will happen in the future, seemingly disregarding any other potential advancements in alternative fuels.
Infrastructure, dead batteries, overhauled shipping processes... It's a lot of change (read: money) for a rather small improvement.
So far, it seems that trucks and batteries simply do not mix. What will happen 'next year TM', we'll see. Right now I am skeptical.
I work for an engineering company… in IT, but I still hear about engineer news as a result. If what's been said around the office is true, hydrogen makes more sense for electric trucks, even though it doesn't make sense for cars. Sadly I forget the reasoning. Something about energy density vs the size of the vehicle. I'd be interested to know how it compares to diesel.
And before you bring it up, the problem with generating hydrogen was definitely brought up, particularly how inefficient that part currently is and the fact the energy from it often comes from fossil fuels. I know new, more efficient techniques are being trialed, but beyond that we need to invest more in green energy.