this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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It’s not achievable yet. Trucks are, at minimum, the last mile for transport of everything from building materials to equipment to food to medicine. EV trucks and vans are in development but battery technology isn’t quite there yet.
It would also require banning large container and cruise ships from most major ports. The former world obliterate economies. The latter would obliterate tourism industries for many major cities around the world. We’re decades away from large ships being low emission. Maersk is trialing hydrogen vessels right now to poor results.
Spoiler: Most Europeans don't live near major ports. You can discuss a lot about cargo ships, but the cruise industry shouldn't be at all allowed to cruise into major ports and poison the population. It's totally possible to build clean ships. We don't have to accept this!
I suppose it depends what you mean by “near.” Around 41% of Europeans live in coastal regions. Most of them live in larger urban areas near ports. That’s hundreds of millions of people.
I’m also opposed to cruise ships, but entire cities rely on tourism for survival. The sheer human suffering which would result from a ban is incalculable.
cruise ships do little for local tourism. The people only spend a short time, maybe buy some souvenirs and have a meal. Meanwhile the pollution drives away land based tourists, that would actually spend time and money in the local economy.
Local tourism businesses disagree with your assessment. Every town which has banned or seeks to ban cruise ships has been almost universally rebuked by tourism businesses. It’s true that cruise tourists spend less than other tourists, but it’s income which would otherwise not enter the local economy.
This article provides an interesting case study on New Zealand and cruise spending. The economic benefits are clear and convincing. If this were to end, thousands of direct and supporting businesses would fail, and tens of thousands of people would be without work. It would create a large GDP and budget gap, too, meaning cut social services.
I guess people forget that ships originally where powered 100% by wind and manpower. Would love to see that coming back in some form, but seems like it's just not profitable enough (yet).
Given the mass of modern ships, wind doesn’t generate enough force to manoeuvre and thrust ships anywhere close to safety and efficiency. The math just doesn’t work. It would take a 5x5km kite (extremely rough estimate) with perfect wind conditions at all times. Maersk is trialing kite thrust augmentation right now, which is projected to reduce oil consumption, but not by a large margin.
It's obviously not as energy-efficient as burning fossil fuels, so it's a hard sell. Honestly, I just want it to come back for the looks (and obviously the environmental health benefits).
I wonder whether vertical wind turbines would be powerful enough to power a ship?
The vast majority of ships can be powered from shore, they're doing it all the time in wharfs. Ports actually having the infrastructure is another issue, especially when they're small and the ships large, but IIRC the EU is requiring things to be implemented by 2030.
And it's not exactly trivial: Powering a canal/river barge with a couple of electrical systems is no biggie, that's basically connecting up a house or even just camper, but ocean-going container ships need a couple of megawatts peak power, cruise ships over ten.
EV trucks are perfectly doable for the last mile with current battery tech. You dont need a big battery for that. Also it would be relatively cheap to build trucks using a tramlike wiring and a small battery. You could even piggyback on existing tram and bus infrastructure in many cities.
This is not accurate at all. For posterity (and forgive me if this sounds condescending) “last mile” doesn’t literally mean last mile. It refers to taking cargo from a backbone transport route (ports and railway depots). This last mile is often hundreds of miles.
Trucking margins are slim, and to stay in the black, trucks need to be on the road most of the time. The larger companies have their trucks in motion near 24x7, while the independent drivers stop when law dictates for sleep (but often skirt these laws). Trucks which require frequent charging would be much less efficient. They would be more expensive than ICE trucks. This is why we have so few EV trucks on the road. Because today, they are not yet viable for most last mile transport.
Trams have the same limitations of railways: high capex and inflexibility. Rails and trams can’t be economically built to every town and front door.
You are going back to front. You assume that EV trucks would need to fit in the current infrastructure and the current market. But both need to change and there needs to be a regulatory framework that forces and incentivises this change. So with this logistics need to become more expensive at first, when the transformation needs to be financed. But they will become much more expensive otherwise, as trucks are very inefficent, in particular for labor. And we see less and less workers willing to to take the difficult work conditions for the relatively bad pay. In the UK alone after Brexit there is a driver shortage between 50k and 100k. In mainland Europe it is similiar and in the US it will soon look like this too, unless the US makes it much easier to migrate for work. But even then it is only temporary fixes to the underlying problem of an inefficent system.
In a new infrastructure, maximising the use of trains and rivers, combined with an end to absurd manifacturing supply lines, that only work because of the ruinous competition in logistics, we will have an environment where the last mile is really just a few miles.
I assume ceteris paribus because that is most likely in a democratic nation. It’s unlikely that the U.S. public would agree to hike their taxes by 10% to pay for a radical national transport restructure. Change usually takes place gradually. Economical EV trucks, which are probably less than a decade away, will negate the need to impoverish the nation. They will plug neatly into the existing infrastructure.
Still, the U.S. really does need rail improvements. These can and should happen either way.
The US is impoverishing itself by continueing on the truck based logistics. They help ramp up cliamte change, which is already fucking over the south of the US but will continue to get much much much worse. The US will be a nation of impoverished people unless massive social, political and infrastructural change will happen.
Then your railway infrastructure sucks. Also, the semantics of the terms (no matter how well-used they are in your country, in your industry, etc) are bonkers: Anything going depot to depot is, by sane definition, not last mile, even if one of those depots is only reachable via truck.
I agree that it’s not a literal translation, but many terms are not literal. I work in the shipping industry and the term is well used internationally. It’s taught in business schools and well documented. I think sometimes there are many terms for domain specific knowledge which aren’t clear at first for people who aren’t educated or involved in the field. I certainly don’t hold it against you. I am only offering my experienced perspective.
U.S. railway infrastructure is poor. Still, most towns don’t have sufficient populations to justify commercial railway lines. Europe’s railway infrastructure is often run at a loss. There is an argument to be made about imputed negative externalities, but this should be done with both eyes open. It would be very expensive to expand rail in the U.S., and even if hundreds of billions were permanently allocated, most towns would still not have rail access.
I’m not being a fatalist about this. EV trucks are on the way and will be viable eventually. I have faith in capitalism and the technological progress it provides. We’re just not there yet.
EV trucks are not in development, they are on sale and deployed. Especially last mile ones.
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/renewable-fuels/electric-trucks.html
https://www.dhl.com/se-en/home/press/press-archive/2021/dhl-freight-and-volvo-trucks-join-forces-to-speed-up-transition-to-fossil-free-road-transport-on-longer-distances.html
In Gothenburg, there are plenty of all electric trucks. Tbf, Gothenburg is Volvo's HQ but still. Volvo has sold more than 4300 electric trucks
https://www.volvogroup.com/en/news-and-media/news/2023/feb/news-4474482.html
Electric vehicles make the city much more livable. Less noise and pollution.
Speaking of DHL from 2014 to 2022 they were an automotive producer, building these things. They were making a loss on the whole operation and tried to halt production in 2020 but they needed so many trucks that they went on to produce regardless, 2022 the whole thing was sold off to a Luxembourgian consortium now calling themselves B-ON still producing street scooters.
That, btw, is what an actual last-mile truck looks like: It's a minivan. At least if you're a parcel delivery service. They should operate from depots, swarming out, making their tour of direct deliveries and returning on the same day, and those depots should not be serviced by trucks, but trains. Supermarkets can use full-size trucks for that purpose, easily shipping multiple pallets to a limited number of locations, but mostly when you're looking at electric full-sized trucks the reason they exist is shoddy rail infrastructure.
Oh and older, used/refurbished, DHL streetscooters sell like hotcakes. It's not easy to get that kind of vehicle as a small business so they sell at a premium, which makes it attractive to DHL to sell and buy a new one vs. continuing to maintain an old one. They're ridiculously utilitarian: Huge loading volume with very low loading floor with actual right angles, cargo accessible from back and side... and only one seat (but with room to install a second), utterly reliable.
If you're a farmer delivering fresh cabbage directly to local greengrocers, or a baker driving things from the actual bakery to your 3-10 outlets this is just a perfect vehicle.
Dhl in Sweden(and elsewhere) also uses these electric bikes
https://www.velove.se/news/city-containers-new-pilot-dhl-express-frankfurt-utrecht
EV trucks currently comprise such a tiny proportion of last mile vehicles that I can’t even find industry statistics on them. This is because their range and tonnage is so poor relative to ICE that they’re not economically viable yet for almost all last mile transport. DHL (and other logistics companies) is currently trialing a handful of EV truck prototypes. None of them have deployed EV at scale for the reasons I outline.
The claim that EV trucks aren’t in development is clearly incorrect. Tesla trucks are hotly anticipated.
Tesla can do whatever they want, who cares. Just like the tesla truck, they get all the hype but there are already tons of available electric trucks, available and selling, like the f150 electric. To say that they are still on development because tesla hasnt released theirs is silly.
Of course they are still on development, everything is always on development. But they are also available for purchase and they are being purchased. Not to the numbers that their conventional fuel counterparts, the production rate hasnt reached those levels yet, but still.
The bottleneck is the production, not the demand or viability. For last mile, at least here in Gothenburg, there are plenty of electric cargo bikes like this
https://www.velove.se/news/city-containers-new-pilot-dhl-express-frankfurt-utrecht
I am pretty sure that by 2030, the majority of trucks will be electric(and almost all sales will be electric).
Perhaps I wasn't clear. It could be a regional nomenclature thing. When I refer to trucks I am referring to last mile transport. This isn't an F150. This is vehicles capable of transporting one or more cargo containers. These vehicles comprise the vast majority of the transport of food to grocery stores, for example.
There is currently little demand for existing last mile trucks because of their poor range and tonnage. However I believe that will be solved soon. Solid state batteries are coming along nicely.
The demand is there, the supply hasnt caught. As i mentioned, in Gothenburg(which is Volvo's HQ), there are tons of electric trucks and cargo bikes. Basically every day i see at least one truck like this one
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/news-stories/press-releases/2022/may/dhl-and-volvo-trucks-kick-off-new-zero-emission-cooperation-with-order-for-up-to-44-electric-trucks.html
Postnord, the swedish/danish mail provider, has tons of these electric "golf carts"
https://news.cision.com/postnord/i/electric-car-parcels,c2905777
Basically by 2030, most companies will have or purchase only electric vehicles. Scania is also making electric trucks like this
https://www.scania.com/group/en/home/products-and-services/trucks/battery-electric-truck.html
Postnord intents to replace its conventional trucks with these by 2030.
Just because the US is behind times, doesnt mean that the entire world is also like that. And if Volvo and Scania, 2 of the biggest truck manufacturers(and they are both swedish) have available electric trucks, then there are electric trucks. The only bottleneck is production. The demand is there but it takes time to scale up production of basically an entirely new vehicle. China is also going wild with electric vehicles, though i am not familiar with that market.
Honestly, i think we might start seeing bans on non electric vehicles for cities, at least in Europe. The noise and pollution reduction is significant and very perceivable.
Not really. Banning cruise ships would be bad for cruise ship companies. But for the port cities cruise ship tourists don't do much. They may actually cost more than they bring in. The problem is that the tourists from cruise ships have food and shelter onboard for free. So local businesses don't get much.
Also: You can simply ban the cruise ships from running their engines in the harbor. Many are capable of getting their electricity via cables from shore. They just opt to not do that because it's cheaper to use bunker oil. That doesn't solve all the issues, but a lot.
The article paints a grim picture of the loss of cruise tourism.
This is catastrophic.
That was due to tourism collapsing because of Covid. It wasn't about the cruise ships.
The reason that getting rid of cruise ships tends to be good for the economy of places on land is that tourists can arrive by other means as well. It economics you'd say that cruise ships and all inclusive hotels are substitutes. You can pretty much replace one with the other and for the economy on land hotels are better.