Don't worry, I'm pretty sure it isn't true, it is like saying "dynamic brakes were illegal in 1880", that technology didn't exist at the time. You can search the regulations and not find the term regenerative braking, but you also won't find engine brakes mentioned either I believe, and those definitely aren't banned, you just cannot substitute them for working brakes on every wheel: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/s ... /subpart-C

WOW. My interpretation of what you wrote is that climate change Activision Is Bad... Perhaps I'm wrong.[/quote]

You are wrong.

[Big Snip]


. . . I don't live long enough to see gasoline and diesel outlawed, although that might happen sooner than later, given the vile and contemitable people who want to see that happen.
[/quote]

I'd like you to think about the folks who want be able to have their children to live without a five hundred year storm every two or three years.

I don't believe they are vile or contemptible.

Lots of folks are able to "do their own research" thanks to the Internet and find out just how much the fossil fuel industry has spent in cash dollars and PR Media buys and renting politicians. Seriously, did you not know that the fossil fuel industry predicted with Amazing Accuracy where we would be today back in the late 60's & early 70's?????

Sure perhaps an abused domestic spouse may go overboard in claiming vengeance, but can you blame them???? If I was smacked upside the head every time I entered my partner's room I would . . . (Explicitive Deleted)

I realize that your tribe may not allow empathy for folks that have a different point of view.

Brian[/quote]


Not really sure what you are talking about.

I did spell "contemptible" wrong. Sorry about that.

My empathy is for the folks who cannot afford to drive their cars to work or properly heat their homes thanks to the green/left. Carbon taxes here in Canada have helped drive all prices up, so much so that average working people are getting way behind. I see that from neighbours who are struggling. We are hearing horror stories about "heat or food" with people having to make stark choices in their dad-to-day living. I see that at the local Missions and food banks.
Choodude? Do you care for their kids now?
We see that people are dropping out.
It is the worst in U.S. cities with people barely existing and dying in the streets and many of your downtowns reduced to absolute disaster areas filled with crime, hunger, drug addiction, and hopelessness. I do not willingly go into Canadian cities. I certainly would not venture into any American city's downtown core.
Again, getting back to preservation, in rail or in the internal combustion engine hobbies, we should be fighting against the green/left, unless we are going to be happy having just static displays. Unless the governments can be changed soon, coal will be a dead duck. Gasoline will become a premium or specialty product, other than perhaps aviation gasoline. Kerosene (Jet) will still be available so the elite silver spoon leftists can freely travel.
Sure, fill your locomotive tender up with batteries and an air compressor, you will still get a sort of chuffing sound when you run your loco. Who will really care, because few people will be able to afford to come to your site anyway.
Reading through this thread, it seems many on here want to be rid of diesel fuel. Diesel and furnace oil are the same distillate, so will become another premium (read, high price) product. Some green/left jurisdictions want to eliminate natural gas appliances, for heavens sakes. The green/marxists smell blood in the water, and they will not give up until they have it all.
The point of my initial post about the forest fires, was that all of the misery the green/left is foisting upon is bound to achieve little. Nature is delivering a heavy blow that will have a long term impact. Nature has always done that. Nature will continue to do that. In their totality, the precious new technologies will only deliver modest savings, because of the input and disposal costs. We will have gained little, and lost plenty.

The reason why regulations preventing the full use of regenerative braking are simple. US DOT data has shown that with electric vehicles that rely heavily on regenerative brakes for stopping when they've required the usage of their normal brakes to stop in any emergency situation the brakes over 50 percent of the time are seized in placed and totally nonfunctional on the vehicles. Which has led to deaths and other issues. Now you're driving a commercial motor vehicle that weighs 40 tons on the highway. You're hauling say Chlorine or several other things that can cause massive environmental and devastating loss of life. The vehicle has been mostly stopping with regenerative brakes. Now all of a sudden you're needing more brakes than what those can give you. You press harder on the pedal and nothing happens. You crash and in the aftermath your dangerous load spills and kills 500 people downwind of your accident site. The reconstruction shows that your normal service brakes were inoperable due to the extreme amount of regenerative braking and moisture had destroyed the valves needed to operate the air brakes. Guess what would happen to your company the manufacturer of the truck in that case let alone the public outcry.

There in red is your problem right there LOL. The first rule of efficiency is conservation.

Imagine for entirely doomsday prepper reasons, and not "green/liberal" reasons at all, you decided to build a battery backup system to keep your fridge alive for 4 days. Now, do you use a ratty old fridge you have lying around that averages 300 watts? Or a brand new Energy Star fridge that averages 36 watts?

See, this is where most people go off the rails with alterna-tech. They expect it to a a simple "subsystem drop-in" with everything else staying the same. Of course not! No one would build a battery reefer with only 2” insulation or with an obsolete refrigeration unit tuned for unlimited power from a diesel engine. They'll start with a blank sheet design and more like 8” of insulation. Now the BTU demands drop like a stone.

I would still keep it at 26k BTU just for quick initial chill. But it would run at a very low duty cycle once it got chilled. Also, solar panels are cheap, 50 cents a watt, and would tend to extend range further. Put some on the sides.





Did you hit ABetterRoutePlanner.com and try some routes with EVs like I suggested? See where the EVs stop every 100-200 miles? Tesla presumes truckers dislike that, so they're adding tons of extra battery. They don't need to.



I'm all for good accommodation. And I think long-haul electrics absolutely can work, the only thing in the way is charging infrastructure. However, they are the worst choice of truck to electrify, because others are easier. Depot trucks that return to a depot a night are the best first choice. They have all night to charge so plain old level 2 charging will suffice @ 20kW or so, and they use transformer capacity in industrial parks that's not much used at night, and power plants that are otherwise idle.



Well truck energy consumption is only about 1/4 of *car* energy consumption, so trucks get to coattail on cars in that regard.

As far as cost, I've been guessing a 100kWH pack (using 80% of the pack's range) replaces about 10-20 gallons of fuel (based on the fuel a "diesel Tesla" would require to achieve the same range of an 80kWh car). So with 20% charge losses, replacing 80kWH will cost you $12-20 based on 12-20 cents a kWH. That replaces 10-20 gallons of fuel.

Of course current Superchargers charge a great deal more, but they're functional monopolies right now. Wait til you have Love's and Pilot across the road from each other advertising ¢/kWh in green lettering!

For truckers that sleep, imagine “fill in 8 hours” slow chargers at every parking spot.



You mean contracts? Can do the same thing with electricity. And part of your contract can be prioritization. Prioritization is a hot button topic for railroads, and I think they are going to force the government to guarantee them top priority on power, and trucks get to coattail. If anyone didn't think logistics is a nation's top priority, they do now after COVID, supply chain and especially the battle of Kyiv. Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.



Think: What will gas cars do? They’ll stop and get gas when they need gas, and due to their being released all in a slug, there’ll be queues at every gas station. Well, same thing at Superchargers. Now granted, EV charge stations are sparse/limited right now, but so are EVs so it’s a wash.

But I think you're into the fallacy that sitting in traffic takes a lot of energy. It does not. Think: if you had a car up on blocks in your backyard and you used it as an office, what would it take to cool it? The smallest 5000 BTU window A/C would *more than* suffice. Those are 500W these days. Heat it? A 1500W space heater would keep up, and a lot of EVs have heat pumps. So yeah, an EV *stopped* (not moving, different problem) is spending 300-2000 watts on climate. Four hours of that is nothing on a battery. The gas cars will be depleted, electrics not so much.

You're not used to that, because you spin a 250hp engine just for 1 horsepower of climate control. You also spin it on the off chance the light will turn green in the next second, or the car ahead will move a little. That's why non-hybrids get murdered in city fuel economy.



And that too. The 3-400 miles for the city truck will be much better on batteries for the above reasons, even if not for regen braking, which helps further.




Yeah, Tesla has been building out their network like their existence depends on it, meanwhile VW has been building out the Electrify America network like they were forced to after a consent decree following an diesel emissions-cheating scandal :) But VW has figured out this affects sales of their *own* EVs so they are making an effort now. Also, Tesla took notice of this, and decided to help, by opening their network.


That’s a myth. There is ONE charging standard (CCS) that everyone uses except Tesla (ChaDEmO is dead and nobody buys a Nissan Leaf for road trips anyway), and that’s not a big problem because Tesla just started supporting CCS at Superchargers and many 3rd party charge networks support Tesla already. Adapters are easy. The signals are the same so they’re just plastic and brass. It’s a solved problem..

That said, Tesla has tweaked their connector up to 1000V and 900+A, placed it *entirely* in the public domain, and is (NOW!!!????) making a full-court press to make its connector the North American Charging Standard. It's getting traction; Ford (2nd largest EV seller) was very fast to jump in. Starting in MY2025, cars will take both connectors until the market settles. DC fast-charge adapters sent to past Ford owners. So we may yet swing back to the elegant connector. DC fast chargers are trending toward supporting both. And your in-car navigation app will lead you to the right fast chargers. They even have live data that shows which chargers are working.


Because to retain look and feel consistency for the drivers, regen on a large truck will go BRAP BRAP BRAP BRAP BRAP BRAP at 150 decibels :) :) :)

A simple solution to that is to program the on board computer to alternate between regenerative and friction braking on every other routine application. No need to throw that free energy baby out with the bathwater.

Irrelevant concern. Regenerative brakes only work down to about 5 km/h, so any vehicle, train or road, still uses the physical brakes to stop and hold a position. I believe this is standard on all electric vehicles, with one brake pedal.

I love some of this. 8-ton traction batteries 'no biggie'. Solution to 2" insulation inadequacy being 8". Regenerative braking illegal because Jake braking is illegal, and your spring brakes will not apply because something is wrong with the mechanism. (There were others, but I got tired catching up on the thread).

The easiest solution to the reefer issue, now over a decade old, is the use of modern nanoinsulation panels and sealing. The thermal mass of a frozen load is enormous, the atmosphere in a sealed trailer or container can be kept still (and atmospheric gases kept still have remarkably good insulating value); there are relatively cost-effective ways to reduce thermal gain and increase re-emissivity on dry vans (and some of them would work on domestic containers, with some work).

For years, articulated container equipment can be, and has been, wired with umbilicals for electric reffers, fed from a powerplant that can be placed in a well or twistlocked in the absence of more trainlined power. PSR intermodal operations ought to allow concentration of long-distance reefer traffic (whether trailer or container) in specific trains with specific equipment to minimize required capital and servicing expense, etc.

I don't expect that 'electric trucks' will receive any break from states on overweight-consist restrictions. In a world where drivers routinely pump limited quantities of diesel to 'make the weight' at checkpoints close to the service facility, a large obligate traction-battery mass has a very great wall to climb... unless other carrots and sticks make a mandate cost-effective by comparison.

Some of the current battery chemistries are a bit more tolerant of fast charging outside the 'traditional' 20-80 limits that were characteristic of lead-acid batteries. But the losses with voltage-to-voltage transversion to keep performance up at low states of charge, and the requirements to sustain fast charging above about 80% may still apply to cost-effective batttery structure (there is some evidence lithium iron phosphate will survive up to 100% of nominal design charge if properly cooled, for example) are going to mean -- just as with electric cars -- that the usable range between stops may be considerably lower than the rated or calculated full-charge capacity "as marketed".

I confess I'm still trying to figure out that comment about fast-charging a class 8 truck at a Hyundai dealer's fast-charge point. Or reasoning by analogy that even current-practice BEV automobile charging will easily scale to what an electrified trucking industry would require.

Charging points at the dock, ready to top you off? In a world where minimum-wage lumpers on the same dock may not be available? In fully operating condition with compatible plugs?

And yeah, I really see high-voltage high-amperage charging points at every spot in a typical truck-parking facility, with drivers having to spot within reach without knocking over a bollard or fouling something with trailer swing. Or electrifying the exit and entrance ramps that so many truckers have to use when their logs run out... now complicated by shorter effective operating range. Europeans have been experimenting with double-catenary systems for OTR trucks -- which I heartily hope succeeds if for no other purpose than assisted heavy-grade negotiation for truck lanes -- but I have my doubts how you provide this in a current American interstate-highway context. Legitimate technical suggestions or alternatives welcome.

How about a GG1 running on batteries?

Even the Federal Government's Department of Energy forgot to tell us:
https://www.energy.gov/femp/electric-ve ... y-overview

Try again.
The power output of MY car is 124hp at 6000 rpm (which I never let it reach). I can feel the drop in output if I turn the AC on. And I know of several roads in my area that have signs saying "TURN OFF AC TO AVOID OVERHEATING Next XX Miles." Sure, you save on potential regenerative going down that hill, but that doesn't feel so good if you're watching your range drop as you run uphill around the tractor-trailers crawling at 30 mph.

Also, the gas station dilemma?
I can pull in, top off the car in 1-3 minutes, and any other time is just waiting for an open pump, paying for it in cash if I don't use my credit card, etc. So, 3-8 minutes.

Now, how long will it take to charge up an EV battery adequately? And how many other cars will queue up behind me waiting for the slot to sit there for the same 15-45 minutes? THAT'S my point.

"[N]on-hybrids get murdered in city fuel economy" because cities are full of mis-timed traffic lights, lower speed limits, pedestrian crossings, other cars in the way, and worse. The way people drive is a minimal factor in the overall picture. My Saturn's average gas mileage went up about 30% just by moving out of Baltimore.

Trucking companies do not park semi-trucks in their yards with tractors and trailers connected the way they are parked in truck stops. Even if a driver is preparing to depart in a few hours they stay disconnected until departure. Every trucking company I have worked for, and I have worked for a lot, separates the trailers from the tractors upon arrival in the yard and parks the tractors by backing them in, usually against a fence. The reason for that is that most yards have hostlers moving around with yard goats and trailers, which is chaotic, and one needs to be able to see what is going on before entering a lane. The last place I worked had squares marked off in the gravel in front of the fence with something that looked like bungee cords but was stiff, but most had pavement with stripes. A fly by night company I worked for a few years back didn't even allow trailers in the yard where they stored the trucks, they were stored separately. Another that delivered auto parts for a big three auto company to dealers (I was a shuttle driver from the Portland-area warehouse to the California border with a load, brought back an empty) made us move our tractor from truck parking next to the warehouse to outside of the gate and wait until the hostler brought our trailer out. So there is no reason to be all the way over into tractor parking with a trailer, and therefore it is unlikely anyone is going to knock a charger over with the swing of a trailer all the way against the fence. Long haul and independents will be different, but they will be the ones who need to adapt.

[quote="Great Western",] . . I don't live long enough to see gasoline and diesel outlawed, although that might happen sooner than later, given the vile and contemitable people who want to see that happen.
[/quote]


[Again a Big Snip]

You have already outed yourself in your fear of the "Big Cities" that certain media has pontificated as being burnt to the ground,or totally unlivable because of unlimited criminal violence.

Personally, I grew up in one of those "War Zones" and have immediate family members still living there. They laugh every time I forward one of those claims.

-----------------------

Edit

My relatives roll their eyes and snort because those claims are totally BS. Sure there are parts of any geographic area that are less good than others, but. . . . .

---------------------------

Please. There's problems that will take centralized & institutional mental health mental professionals to solve, but is considered not viable by a certain political spectrum.

Silly Naive Me though that tens of millions of folks going outside and having their eyes water up from the weird reddish air would lead them to think that perhaps it's not a good idea to keep ignoring the obvious.

So. What Exactly would You Propose? All I've heard is NO!!!?? What is a YES from you?


Brian

Some of this thread is under the impression that regeneratve braking in a highway vehicle goes bang-bang-bang like an M2 machine gun and is illegal.

That is not correct. The brake that goes bang-bang-bang like an M2 machine gun is a Jacobs Engine Brake "Jake Brake" that reverses the action of a diesel and uses the momentum of the vehicle to generate compression in the cylinders of the diesel, then releases it to the atmosphere without a muffler.

Regenerative braking uses the momentum of the vehicle to generate electric power. When the electric power is sent to resistors to be dissipated as heat it's called dynamic brakes. The noise is the gear sounds and any cooling blowers for the motors or resistance grids.

When the electric power is returned to the source such as a battery it recharges the battery; when it is returned to a wire it goes to the other users on the grid; it may be used by the vehicle to power lights, A/C, air compressor, HEP generator etc.

It does not go bang-bang-bang like an M2 machine gun.

Hybrid autos and light trucks have regenerative brakes; many light rail cars have regenerative brakes; hybrid transit buses have regenerative brakes. Amtrak and SEPTA ACS-64's have regenerative brakes.

Regenerative brakes don't work well to a final stop: as the speed approaches zero, the available braking effort approaches zero, so you need friction brakes to stop and hold the vehicle.

For these reasons, regenerative brakes are legal and are in daily use carrying fare-paying passengers.

Phil Mulligan

The reason why there's only 2 inches of foam installed comes down to cargo capacity. If you pot your dream of 8 inches of foam into a trailer instead of being able to carry 30 pallets in a 53 foot trailer your going to be down to 24 or the same capacity as a 48 for trailer. Your nanotechnology insulation would make the cost of a new reefer trailer which BTW for a 53 foot model without the unit is already in the 60k range with the unit in the 140k or so range currently to around 500 to 600 grand for the trailer alone. You feel like paying 30 bucks a pound for hamburger or 100 bucks a pound for ribeye at Wal-Mart that's what the cost for the average person would be to buy those trailers as there's no way in hell that that cost isn't going to be passed onto the customer. Also no OTR driver is going to stop more than once maybe twice a day maximum their not going to stop every 200 miles to top off the charge to 80 percent. Most drivers are paid per mile driven. If those wheels aren't moving their not earning a penny. A good driver maximizes his drive time and being able to go 1200 miles without needing to refuel makes a huge difference in today's HOS regulations. Why simply there's a clock that starts the second they start their day and it doesn't stop and can't be stopped except by hitting the sleeping berth for 10 hours solid. So if their losing 2 hours a day having to recharge the battery pack and under current regulations that is considered work as your adding fuel aka battery life to the truck and especially if hauling hazmat then these driver's will never be able to do anything.