Tesla semi truck is finally here! Pepsi taking delivery of first trucks. Event & drive videos.

yep, just a little before the gas powered cars, but the bizarre thing is there were electric car (not practical) as early as 1850.

They increase the licensing fees. I pay more on my Prius than I pay on my pickups. My neighbor pays the equivalent of I think 15,000 miles in state gas tax as part of the registration of the car.

 

RANT ON:
There is no escaping the considerably DANGEROUS and DAMAGING EFFECTS TO ALL ENVIRONMENTS that "electric vehicle manufacturing alone has done and has yet to do to the world", just for a meager "improvement" from Infernal Combustion Engines.

What about the processing of the WORN OUT BATTERY COMPONENTS??
Just Remove very few usable parts and toss the rest of the detritus into an active Volcano??
Good Idea. Does absolutely NOTHING for the worsening Environment.
Successfully Continuous NEGATIVE Forward Progression.

Bicycles begin looking again like a Better Idea.
RANT OFF.

 

I’ll stipulate that the existing grid has problems meeting peak demand.

The other side of that is that the grid, on average, uses about 55% of its total generating capacity. So we built a grid to be basically twice as big as it needs to be, just to meet the demand on some hot afternoons in August in Texas and California, and on some cold nights in the Midwest.

Can we agree that building and maintaining something that is twice as big just to use it for a few hours (LITERALLY) a year, well, that’s like dispatching a 53’ semi for a load of 12 pallets of toilet paper. There’s a cheaper way to do it, surely?

The grid, as is, where is, has enough capacity to provide electricity for a little more than 50% of the vehicles in use today. It’s just a matter of using what we already have, and time-shifting that demand for vehicle charging.

As mentioned, most commercial chargers have battery systems that equalize the draw from the grid. Most vehicles, commercial and POV’s, charge at night, when people are sleeping, and grid demand is at it’s lowest. Charging time is easily managed with timers and simple grid management tools.

As a result, electric vehicles will increase the average utilization of the grid, and as always, better utilization of an asset reduces costs, instead of increasing it.

 

In that one video they showed one going up Donner 6% grade at total 82,000 pounds not only not slowing, but accelerating.

 

Reading all the negative post you can see how some people would not change their way of thinking or trying something new. Did anyone think they could land and reuse a solid rocket booster. Today it's almost normal, you could not do that with lots of negative ideas or saying can't be done. 500 miles even if it's not all uphill is a good start.

 

The whole point of landing the boosters was rapid reuse. As far as I'm aware they still don't reuse them without massive refitting. And they were landing rockets standing up decades ago. It's not particularly novel.

 

I want to see the video of them loading to 80,000 lbs. and doing the return trip from Reno to Sacramento, down Donner. With no jake.

If you're closing in behind that truck, bet you can smell it well before you can see it.

 

They addressed that in the video as well. Going down without a jake or even using the brakes.

 

You obviously haven't heard of regenerative braking. They'd do better without the jake since they basically have the power that climbed the hill at their disposal to slow them down. You turn the drive motors into generators and dump the power into the batteries or if they're full into a resistor.

 

Yeah but if I was that driver I’d be puckering coming into San Diego with 4 percent battery remaining.