Thank you for sharing this - it reminds of the film adaption of "The Peasants" novel which uses a painted animation technique made up of thousands and thousands of paintings. Quite literally, nearly "Every Frame [is] a Painting".
Ah, memories flood back of LAN or dial-up sessions with friends on custom maps like de_747 [1]
1: https://gamebanana.com/mods/82979
I still contend it is one of the most atmospheric custom maps ever made - how else do you get to role play as Gary Oldman or Harrison Ford!
The TL;DR of that great video goes against Betteridge's Law: yes it makes sense ("no fatal flaw found"), with the known information at the time Jason made the video. The charging infrastructure is likely not trivial, though; in the comments it was pointed out the infrastructure likely makes heavy use of batteries to avoid stressing out local substations and avoid abusing grid peaking.
Right, and that throws off calculations I've seen so far on Semi's ROI because I haven't been able to find out what that charging infrastructure costs per truck in a single truck scenario, two truck scenario, five truck scenario, and so on. MWh of batteries and the accompanying high-voltage installs do not come cheap, and there is maintenance and capex replacements associated with all that.
As much as all that costs and as much electricity it gulps down, you might as well arrange with the utility providers to put in the marginal additional equipment to secure a discount for always consuming out of nuclear or similar baseload during low utilization periods, and only rarely charging batteries outside those periods, trying as much as possible to avoid tapping peaking plants' output.
The lifetime TCO calculations for the charging infrastructure for full battery replacement included is going to be interesting to peek into. On a simplistic basis, that TCO plus the electricity costs would be put up against the cost of diesel, Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF), Diesel Oxidation Catalyst (DOC) catalytic converter, maintenance on the DEF and DOC subsystems, and so on.
With my investor hat on, I still don't have the numbers I'd like to see to evaluate whether the truck is a slam-dunk ROI on short-haul routes.
Most industrial facilities already have 3-phase 240 or 480 power and tend to be fed by higher capacity feeders than you see in residential areas. They also tend to be closer to high voltage feeders because everyone hates HV lines running through residential areas.
People are way over-estimating how much work will be needed and how difficult it will be. In many cases the utility will either swap out or drop another 3-phase transformer in place with CT-based metering. The customer will run some conduit. The more power you anticipate purchasing from the utility the bigger the discount they'll give you on the work. In some cases the existing medium voltage lines will be at capacity so they'll pull a new one from a substation but they aren't going to charge $1m for it. This isn't exactly rocket science... everyone who builds a new factory goes through the same process. Utilities do this work every single day.
EV truck fleets will be rolled out over time. The grid and charging infrastructure will adapt. Everything will be fine.
An important question for me was how do you defeat massive energy density of desal. This is a great video to answer that. TLDR; Semi will need at least 4 tons of batteries. But this works out because it is still probably around just 10% of weight of the fully loaded truck. It occurs to me that economy degrades if you have to haul big but less heavy loads. Cost wise you still make profit as long as truck is loaded and electricity remains cheap. Overall, this would be good solution for short haul heavy load.
The risk with this is everytime your earnings go up, your expenditure follows suit. If your motivation to earn more is because you spend too much - that underlying reason isn't going away once you get that big pay rise unless you really look at how and what on you are spending your income on.
One of the most relavatory phrases that really got me thinking (and changing) is "live under your means".
Miles per litre would be fine, even km per litre, but the metric way of measuring flips it over so bigger is worse rather than better, so it doesn’t catch on
The numbers don’t work out too, “litres per 100km”. Why not millilitres per km (or litres per gigametre)
I drive X miles (or X km), I then fill up with Y litres (or Y gallons)
If I put 40 litres in my car and do 16 km per litre that’s 640km of range, simple calculation of 40x16
If I need to travel 260km at 20km/litre I need to but 260/20 litres or about 13 litres.
If I put 40 litres in my 3.6 litre per 100 km my range is 40/3.6 = 11 x 100 = 1100km.
If I need to do 260km at 3.6l/100km I need to do 260/100 = 2.6, times 3.6 = 9 litres.
With the “metric” way you need to do two calculations.
if you insist on using volume per length, I’d personally prefer 36ml/km, then I know I need 36x260 ml of fuel to go 260km, or my 40,000ml tank will take me 40000/36 = 1100km.
> The numbers don’t work out too, “litres per 100km”. Why not millilitres per km (or litres per gigametre)
> I drive X miles (or X km), I then fill up with Y litres (or Y gallons)
This isn't what most use the liters per 100km for though. People just fill up whenever the light on the car tells them to. Mainly the number is used to compare cars when buying a new one. Some keep track of the actual consumption to notice if something is wrong with their car (just write down the current number on the odometer and how many liters you put in on some paper/app/whatever. you can do the actual calculations later)
At least this has been my experience here in Finland.
> If I need to travel 260km at 20km/litre I need to but 260/20 litres or about 13 litres.
> With the “metric” way you need to do two calculations.
That's really an absurd way of looking at it, because one of those calculations is a division or multiplication by 100, and 100km happens to be a typical distance someone might be interested into finding fuel efficiency.
So the answer to me is an immediate mental computation, 2.6 x 5l = 13, you never ever need to compute consumption per km, express things in ml etc.
Your own "easy" examples look to me very intuitive and convoluted, so I guess the systems are 100% comparable, the only difference is the power of habit.
Indeed. I suspect the driving and oil lobbies are keen to keep it that way, to help obscure the cost per unit distance and thus keep us all driving as far and burning as much gas/petrol/diesel as possible.
Not only totally unprofessional, it is also bad Project Managing as a typo is a common mistake. So rather than making childish comments, I'd be asking how we could improve the debugging process!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasants_(2023_film)#Produ...
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