There's a lot of discussion here, but I haven't seen anyone link this slide deck which (albeit a couple of years old) does a great job describing DSNY's efforts to electrify and some of their results with pilot programs: https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSN...
A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options.
NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.
> We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours
This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows.
The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, so probably needs more time" current level 3 chargers can kick out 350kW of power. Yet this report talks about putting in 50 and 150kw chargers.
The mac trucks they are referencing have 350kWh battery packs in them.
The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day.
NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.
What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks?
Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
> ambulances
Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
> tow trucks
Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle.
> power company trucks
Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and they are always working on electrical things.
> that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation.
Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
There are few places where EVs are bad fits. The main ones are airplanes and ships where getting power is hard and the power density needs to be high.
For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
- Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge.
- The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck.
- The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.
> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.
Are you serious?! If my town loses power for two weeks I want fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, and especially power company trucks to work! Civic infrastructure should anticipate tail events.
> How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And you need a giant generator to charge any large vehicle in a reasonable amount of time, not just a generator that can keep the electricity on in the building.
The fire apparatus I’ve worked on have a 120V inlet called a shoreline to keep equipment (MDT, radios, cardiac monitor, portable suction, and Lucas battery chargers, interior lighting, etc) operational at station without draining the battery.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
Okay, work out the size of a generator needed to power one truck vs the dispatch offices. Now tell us how many generators you need.
Ever heard of diesel-electric drive trains? The vehicles have electric motors at the wheels and a much smaller then usual internal combustion engine that is an onboard generator.
You can have both at once. This is what happens with some trains, frequently happens in mining, and happens in some large industries. It is what occurs with hybrid electric vehicles.
The latest round of electric vehicles are getting 80km (50 miles) off the battery. That sort of thing is find for most of the service vehicle types you listed, and meets the requirements for greening a fleet and having alternative power options.
> Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning.
Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is getting enough of it out to keep multiple trucks going.
Fuel in ground tanks can be pumped out by manually pumping enough to power a generator to power the regular pumps... which is pretty trivial to set up.
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
Yeah, so I don’t know much of anything about NYC, but I used to live in Chicago and did some volunteer work that put me in a fire station for a few hours every few months. Fire trucks are busy vehicles. They probably would indeed be excellent EVs, but they get used a lot (even if actual fires are rare). Also, firefighters are used to plugging them in! Modern fire stations maintain good internal air quality by having an exhaust system that connects a hose to the diesel exhaust of the fire truck when it comes into the station and detaches when it leaves.
On the other hand, an extended family member is the fire chief in a small western town. Those fire trucks would be terrible EVs, as they spend days or weeks at a time out in the field dealing with large scale wildfires.
Target response times for fire trucks are measured in minutes. Fire damage increases on an exponential curve, a couple minutes can make a huge difference when lives and homes are on the line.
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
> ambulances [are] Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
Because they are neither low mileage and the medical equipment behind needs power. You never want your battery to go flat in an ambulance and lose the mobility and life support at the same time. Also, they're used the way EVs hate most. Accelerate and decelerate constantly while trying to plow through traffic in city centers and rush hours.
> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage...
I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
> power company trucks [are] Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment
I don't know how yours operate but the power company trucks I see carry a whole workshop behind, and some of them carries enough spare parts to build a sizeable transformer from scratch. If we are talking about cranes, their hydraulics will consume enough energy to affect their mileage considerably.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.
You'd need a couple of 1.2MVA generators to charge these vehicles if you want to do it quickly, with redundancy. And these things are neither small, nor silent or can be deployed anywhere you like. We have a couple of them outside, and boy, they're literally shipping container sized things. This excludes the fuel tanks and other infrastructure they need to be able to generate electricity.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Uh, just pour fuel to the tanks or pump with a manual pump?
> I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
This.
My brother is a captain for a fire department. I visited the hall many times with him and found the station design odd. He told me it is built that way because there have been cases of fire trucks being too close to major fires, and the truck catching fire back at the station.
The station has "blast doors" that automatically close if the bay is on fire to protect the rest of the station. (sounds funny right.. fire halls catching fire??)
Not sure they would want a "flammable metals" fire in their bay.
And how do they deal with the tank of explosive fluids inside fire trucks today?
Precautions around keeping a fuel tank from catching fire work the same for batteries. Better, because lithium batteries have an ignition temperature at 2000F and gasoline's is 500F and diesel at 410F.
This is a shockingly high amount of FUD but little facts.
Lets start at the top shall we?
Diesel doesn't "burn" like gasoline does.
"If you toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel fuel, it'll go out."
You need to atomize it first, or heat it up a lot so it starts to "flash" or it wont "burn".
So, a firetruck with a large diesel tank is fairly safe because it takes a LOT to get it to start burning. At first all the heat is simply absorbed by the diesel slowing warming it up until it reaches its flash point.
Next, your temperatures are beyond MESSED UP.
Ignition temperature for a lithium battery is just 121 C
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
There is no "/s" so it is hard to tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Assuming you are not... EV's make TERRIBLE fire trucks.
How long does it take to fuel a fire truck? How long to recharge one?
You are blissfully unaware of how fire trucks work. Many are also diesel pumps, they arrive at fires and the truck itself is a massive water pump. Tell us, how many hours can a EV drive the water pump for? The diesel version can probably run for several days if needed.
My brother is a firefighter, they are AFRAID of electric vehicle fires because well.. Something about electricity + water?
If i call 911, i expect a fire truck to arrive, not some BS about how they had a power failure and their rechargeable truck isn't working.
PS - Stagnant fuel isn't a real thing. Fire trucks are generally very well maintained, they are expensive, they are essential life saving machines. They don't just sit somewhere forgotten and have their fuel go "bad".
They are driven almost daily because firefighters are expected to know their area and so they drive around to see where hydrants are, look at new subdivisions and sometimes simply to make sure it runs property.
They also have detailed logbooks and are inspected a LOT.
>Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
First.. Fire stations use batteries then generators.
Second, you point out they have generators.. wouldn't that be used to transfer fuel answering your own question?
What this basically does is (in a grid-down situation) is move the fuel usage from the truck's engine to the station's generator, greatly limiting the vehicles overall mobility precisely when they might be most needed.
There are many stations already, every few blocks. And the company running them, Citibike, already wants to connect them to the grid. Now you have a more tractable problem: when there's snow coming, some of the (many) unused bike racks can be dedicated to recharge truck batteries instead. I don't know what the hydraulics would look like and if that's something that can be installed seasonally or perhaps just a few days in advance.
There are many more bike stations than truck depots. You could conceivably swap batteries multiple times during a 12h shift without having to make detours. And if you know there's going to be a lot of plowing, you could place batteries throughout the city ahead of time. Heavy storms rarely show up without warning signs. Elsewhere I suggested stockpiling batteries from other non-essential vehicles, so you don't need excessive redundant capacity that sits idle 95% of the year. That's why repurposing bike stations could help: you're not stuck with a lot of infrastructure that is needed only 5% of the year.
Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?
I'm not even sure depreciation matters with these anyway! Idk how much of a resale market there is. You might just run it into the ground and then scrap it.
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
"The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest to recruit period of the year!"
"The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."
Sure, you can operate at a significantly higher cost base with more people and more equipment traveling more miles to achieve the same outcome with less emissions, but that's a bit weak.
Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues.
Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.
Does the garbage truck fleet cause massive emissions? I feel like this is a strawman argument. Global warming is real and as a society, we need to change our ways, but I'm not sure that things like municipal utility vehicles are going to be the difference between us making it as a society and not. And if we were to have to choose between which vehicles should be electric vs ICE, it's clear that there is a greater societal benefit to the municipal vehicles.
If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.
If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service.
Be an EV fanboi all you want. There are practical tasks that must be accomplished, and if one option achieves those tasks while another doesn't then the one that couldn't needs to either meet the competition or drop out.
While I agree waiting to electrify is the correct choice here (for so many reasons), this statement:
> If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service.
Is just false. The same logic would have prevented cars from displacing horses because cars aren't drop-in replacements for horses either. There are almost always tradeoffs for adopting new technologies, and demanding that EVs be strictly superior to ICE vehicles is absurd.
That's garbage. We have a lot of things that work worse now because of health or environmental concerns. Leaded fuel gives way better performance but makes you dumb. CFCs are better and cheaper than the refrigerants we use now but put a hole in the ozone layer. Aluminium in underarm deodorant may give you cancer but it is pretty good at stopping underarm stink.
Technology choice is full of tradeoffs. Now EVs might not be there yet for this use case, but it doesn't have to be a 100% replacement off the rip.
Service degradation is one thing, but a high profile failure can outright kill the adoption of something that would have been feasible with a bit more time in the techno-oven.
Its doesnt seem realistic to say this as if it must always be true.
As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
I had to re-read this twice to make sure i wasnt misreading something.
The "simple" solution is to redesign the entire system, buy more vehicles, hire more drivers, etc because you are "pro electric" and electric vehicles cant perform the job?
Here's an idea.. Diesel vehicles are built to run 24 hours a day, and this is why they have large fuel tanks and heavy duty engines. Perhaps EV should be built to run 12 hours a day as well?
if the EV cant compete, then don't use it for this use case.
why should they "stop trying to run your trucks 12 hours a day" when they have done this for DECADES?
you make it sound like this 12 hour day is the problem, it is not, it is the EV's failure to keep up that is the issue.
This is a good idea. I wonder what the carbon footprint of the additional trucks plus storage would be?
There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.
This sounds like basic math. The Tesla semi has allegedly 900 kW hour batteries and they needed to go three times longer than a 350 kwhr. So how about you get a Mack truck with a 900 kilowatt hour battery or bigger?
Tesla semi is almost triple that (around 900kWh) and charges to 70% in 30 minutes with their megawatt charger. So it should be able to easily handle that use case.
The 1 hour charge rate is a function of the battery chemistry ultimately. Whether the battery is 10kWh or 1000kWh, you can do the 0->70% in 30 minutes so long as you have enough power.
Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.
The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars).
And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.
Battery operated garbage trucks don't sound like a great idea, at least for all day use.
With the push for EV I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses. If we have a garbage truck that has the battery capacity for say 30 minutes, then it could be on the power line for the majority of the time.
This would limit battery waste as well. There could be some solid engineering reasons for this, but I suspect that coolness is a big factor.
Garbage trucks are probably one of the best places for it actually, because they stop so frequently. Unfortunately the article is about plow trucks instead which have a very different use case - New York just happens to use the same vehicles for both so they have a smaller fleet that's not as well suited to either task.
For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the trucks it's probably not a big deal to make sure they have adequate battery capacity.
Plow trucks have a completely different use model where they're run at speed for long periods and one day of plowing could have the same distance traveled as weeks of trash collection. Hybrids would likely be an improvement in efficiency but the same way they do for other trucks - batteries support high demand periods while the generator is fine for the lower sustained loads.
Edit: a drawback of the smaller fleet for snow management is that garbage trucks aren't as well suited for salt/sand/deicer distribution. Nobody designs their garbage trucks to spray. I hope.
Edit2: garbage trucks also have a lot of additional mechanical systems that are probably already electrical, so among other things the ICE versions likely have an oversized alternator to power that.
The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism.
Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.
Finally, they have to operate in all conditions, in both very low and very high temperatures. The logistics of this aren't as simple as it would be for a standard vehicle.
As an industrial EE dealing with hydraulics of much larger scales than those on a garbage truck, those other functions do not require significant power to operate when compared to actually accelerating the vehicle and cargo up to speed (and then slamming on the brakes/regen again for the next stop).
The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential can or a 1-ton dumpster through a few meters of motion is not noticeable to a 350 HP diesel, accelerating 30 tons of truck and trash in the same amount of time is why they're equipped with so much more engine power.
Nit: Hydraulics do require a great deal of power, but often delivered over a short time or distance, meaning the total energy demand is low. Which is what NYC's concerned with.
EV's are great at delivering high power on demand, for short periods. A selling point of Tesla since the Roadster days was the astounding acceleration. Peak torque at a dead start is a key characteristic of electric motors.
What's far more challenging is range, a problem Tesla has addressed quite capably for passenger vehicles, though which remains largely unmet for cargo and heavy-transport equipment (including snow ploughs).
Interestingly, there was a period where a non-electrical power network was fairly frequently encountered at neighbourhood or city scale: hydraulic power networks. These often operated high-power loads, though typically for short periods or efforts as my first paragraph describes. Hydraulic accumulators lifted weights or water and provided on-demand power for moving lock gates, cargo hoists, and other typically industrial tasks. These were developed in the early 19th century and many remained operational well into the 20th, with the Wikipedia article below listing several operating into the 1970s.
Smaller such networks exist in dentist's offices, auto repair shops, and in many Amish workshops, based on compressed air, and utilising similar principles.
Assuming a 100mm bore cylinder with a 1.5m stroke (~10L volume), operating at 150 bar, with a stroke time of 1 minute, the power required is:
Power in kW = Pressure in bar * Flow in liters per minute / 600
2.5 kW = 150 bar * 10 l/min / 600
or a little more than 3 horsepower. That gives you about 15 tons of force. Maybe the trucks use two cylinders, one on each side, so double it? Plus 10% for pump inefficiencies, and 5% for electric motor inefficiencies (200% for diesel-to-kinetic losses)?
Still negligible compared to accelerating a huge steel box plus dozens of tons of trash to roadway speeds 1000 times a day.
Looking up some existing PTOs and pumps on munciepower.com, it looks like typical refuse systems are provisioned with PTOs and pumps rated for on the order of 10-50 kW, and diesel "prime movers" of 200-400 kW.
In New York City, do the garbage trucks drive a long distance to unload their waste?
In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.
> Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.
Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home.
I may be biased by my experiences. At home the transfer station is about 4 miles away, and at my parents' place that I've been cleaning out it's probably 1.5-2 miles by road - or less than half a mile if I could go up a couple hundred yards of steep forested hillside.
Somewhere as densely populated as NY is surely best served by those rubbish bins that empty into a trash vacuum tunnel.
Massive upfront cost (infrastructure and NY seems to be a bit fraught) and also likely expensive to run, but with high population density it’s got to be better.
However this would then have a fleet of snow trucks that weren’t used 99% of the time, as the rubbish was mostly sorted.
"[A] bit fraught" is an understatement. Any excavation under the right of way in New York immediately runs into undocumented tunnels, steam conduits, sewers, and water pipelines from the past 400 years of development.
They're trying to map these things out but it will probably take more than a decade. Until that happens you can't even begin to budget for a new city-wide underground infrastructure project. Any project has to be point to point and focused.
Between the subways, underground rail lines, etc, you’d probably have to put them 100ft underground to get clearance. That’s 100ft through solid rock. Great for building skyscrapers, not fun for digging.
Ironically one of the largest vacuum trays system in the world IS in NYC… but it serves Roosevelt Island, not the “mainland”
Around here, a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant [1].
Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3].
[1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.)
[2] - The Maverick -does- do a decent job IMO of showing what's possible with a small purpose-built hybrid truck or truck-like thing; However manufacturers that make bigger EVs are likely reluctant to build a truly 'minimum viable product', as it will bite into fleet sales of larger EV/Hybrids introduced.
[3] - Recently, we had sustained sub 10F temps. My overall mileage went from 35-42MPG to 25-30MPG.
a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant
Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.
>EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most
Not necessarily. The heaviest snow falls just below freezing. Very low temperatures bring light, fluffy stuff — the kind skiers crave, and that a human can lift huge shovels of.
Seems like plug in hybrid is the best approach with current tech. Battery in the neighborhoods, and gas powered when you are hauling it back to the landfill.
Maybe. Others have talked about the problems with hybrids and they might not make as much sense as simply expanding either the fleet as a whole or the parts of the fleet used for plowing. Also worth considering the city's whole vehicle fleet - use the garbage trucks as appropriate for mass response, but also use dump trucks, etc from public works.
Eventually there may also be more options with battery swapping - that's a lot more feasible with a fleet within a relatively small geographic region.
I remember looking into this a little bit and the conclusion seemed to be that for most garbage truck uses the range was not the limiting factor. Pickup time was more important, and batteries are attractive given that most garbage pickup is stop-pickup-start-drive a short distance then stop again. In Seattle I believe I saw the longest route was less than 70 miles but I can't find a source. There was a purchase of battery garbage trucks with a range of 55 miles a few years ago. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/seattle-makes-history-w...
Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular.
Manhattan used to have hundreds of miles of street level trolley - but mostly powered by underground center third rail because overhead wires just didn't work with the density of lines and equipment. When the system needed to be cleared after snowfalls they used horses and later ICE trucks to plow. See any book on the Third Avenue Railway system for details
Ugly, expensive, maintenance headache. What's not to like... They are however more environmentally friendly than diesel engines and it works well if you only have a few well trafficked routes. But you can't do this for a whole city, and garbage trucks and snowplows need to go into every street, not just the main boulevards.
Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything (not a criticism - I have no idea myself).
However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.
> Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything
Because it's a complete fabrication -> every ton of conducting wire could replace 100 tons of battery in busses and trucks. It is also over 10 times cheaper per ton, so in material costs it is less than 1/1000th of the cost.
The only issue is that the city needs to pay for the wire, but it does not know how to charge a large array of private companies that might want to use the wires, there is lack of standardisation and metering.
Arnhem in NL and Riga in Latvia, both cities I spend a lot of time in still have them, but I wonder for how long. They're pretty iconic but every few years there is debate about whether or not it is still worth it. Another problem I forgot to mention is that these systems are not very flexible in dealing with mishaps, you can't overtake another trolley bus so if one has a problem the whole system grinds to a halt. An ICE bus just goes around the obstacle and continues.
The buses I’m familiar with that use overhead power lines don’t use them exclusively - they have batteries or diesel for when they venture off the powered lines.
Interesting, I've seen them stuck more than once, I'll have to check up on what the deal is there, I walk by the depot every couple of days and I'm sure they'll be happy to talk about it.
The only ones I have spent a lot of time looking at are in Seattle and at least they used to all be diesel and could hookup to the lines or lower them to run off the lines. For pure electric I assume they must tow them away but I don't know enough about the failure modes.
Trolley buses in Lausanne are(were?) equipped with small auxiliary ice engines that would take over in case of loss of power. In the hills with passengers it was just enough for the bus to go at walking speed but that was enough to move out of the way or overtake a stranded vehicle.
I agree about the trolleys on rails and obstacles, which I've seen for myself, but electric vehicles would likely have some battery and run on tires, allowing diversions from the route.
Anyway, I'm guessing it's been considered and I'd love to see the study.
Another thing is that battery-electric vehicles can be used as drop-in replacements on all existing routes. You don’t need to do environmental reviews or meet with NIMBY stakeholders or shut down local businesses while you install the overhead infrastructure, you just buy the trucks and go (can charge overnight using on-board charger and existing electrical infrastructure… can expand this to accommodate the increased load like you would for any other increased electrical load like the move to air conditioning… but you can get up and operating immediately).
I've been reading a bit more about it in the meantime: so, the trolley network in Arnhem is slowly diminishing in size, but it's still there and it will likely be there for quite a while to come. They are looking at ways to use a combination BEV / trolley system to allow the buses to recharge when they're on the line so they can depart from the route for longer stretches.
The maneuvering in case of trouble situation is covered by a tiny diesel engine that can move the bus around to the point where it can reconnect to a working segment of the network.
One problem with reducing the coverage is that it is relatively easy to take away the lines but the poles are in large chunks of concrete and not easy to remove at all.
I think that battery vehicles with substantial batteries (and so could be run on lines without ANY overhead infrastructure in a pinch) but that usually charge via overhead lines on a portion of the route is the ideal option. No charging time, no massive new infrastructure (the catenary only needed on a small fraction of total served lines) but also full flexibility. Actually better than fossil fuel variants which need usually to be refueled at the end of the shift at a depot or whatever.
Yes, it certainly looks like a very clever solution. I know they tried the same thing with a flywheel based bus but that ultimately did not work out. Let's see how this works in practice.
Yes, definitely, they are trialing this in Arnhem, I'll go have a look at it to see how it is all put together. By the looks of it they take a 'normal' trolley bus, remove diesel engine + tank + associated bits and pieces then put a battery in the spot where the tank used to be, and a bunch of electronics (regulator/inverter/charger) to create a voltage high enough to run the normal bus hardware of and to recharge the battery when the bus is connected to the overhead grid.
Here in Massachusetts we just removed our streetcar power lines (MBTA 71 and 73 trolleybus) because the wires needed to be removed during construction. This might be a logistical issue for NYC.
one of the worst decisions the MBTA has ever made. battery buses are inferior to trolleybuses in pretty much every scenario, but especially winter. the battery buses they're replacing the trolleybuses with have diesel heaters to keep the batteries warm.
Yeah having street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City, and I'm not surprised that cities that have them are slowly removing them.
Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geographic footprint, central planning and a lot of overhead space which is difficult to find in dense cities.
> street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City
They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be?
> require an enormous geographic footprint
What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?
I wonder is it is more of less efficient for land use as they don’t need fuelling and the associated land that uses, but do need a pair of lamp posts every 10m.
In many cities they just bolt these support wires into adjacent buildings when there isnt a convienent lamp post.
Electrifying core parts of the route (eg: the most heavily travelled bottlenecks these trucks travel) could fix this issue, enabling charging and heating the battery and cab while still en route or plowing snow.
So just to be clear they shouldn't cost anywhere near as much as a subway or even tram rails. With a decent bit of battery on the vehicle, you could even have < 100% coverage and have outage resiliency.
We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight).
Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that model with other non-outlier materials is crazy.
Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
The sad part of Elon being so successful is that all he does is see places where we used to do things well (we electrified the whole country very quickly, built an advanced space program in 2-3 decades, etc.), notices we lack the will to keep doing those things (even I understand the overhead wires thing is a moonshot), and comes up with the pragmatic "OK but not really great" solution.
Seriously, if you had said in 1960 "the richest man in 2020 will focus on cars, low-earth-orbit rockets, and tunnel boring machines" people would be extremely bummed by the lack of progress.
> and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
One thing I have often wondered is how often they'd need access to electricity if they had a small battery to cover for the times they're not connected.
i.e., do they need to be connected at /all/ points of their journey? Or just often enough that they can get enough of a charge to make it to the next point? e.g. if there was induction charging at stop signs or traffic lights, would that be enough for a majority of trips?
This seems like it should just be a bit of a game of statistical coverage of charging points, time spent at them, speed of charging, and so on.
> Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?
I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.
Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"
Roads with tram lines are short to drive on. There’s even a phenomenon called “tram lining” where the road is toomhumped in the middle and makes lane changes sketchy.
Tramlining is when the topography of the road causes cars to move differently than how they are steered (somewhat similarly to tram tracks) and has nothing to do with overhead electric or actual trams.
> So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?
Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?
We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.
The power lines that trolleybuses use don’t cover an entire city. They’re only installed on the routes the buses are scheduled to run on, and only for the parts of the streets buses will use. They’re like train tracks in that way, but hanging in the air instead of embedded in the ground.
Garbage truck fleets are expected to cover every street and every block in their service area which adds up to more of a city than bus services cover since they don’t stop on every block at every house and building. The lines also require maintenance and you also need to train operators to re-establish the connections not if they drop but when they drop. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, at least not for New York.
In 1875, Philadelphia had electric street car lines going through every numbered street in the city, and through every cross street in central Philly[1].
They've paved over the rails in the 90's, but a few bus routes are still powered by the overhead lines. I forget the numbers, but one of them starts at the Frankford transportation center.
NYC garbage trucks spend a very long time parked in front of the same building all night, crushing bags full of plastic coffee cups. Ask anyone who has ever tried to sleep in Manhattan. A completely reasonable solution that doesn't require a wholesale change in the way refuse is collected in that city would be to plug the truck in at the building where it is standing.
Roosevelt Island (which is a part of the Manhattan borough) actually has an underground, pneumatic trash collection system: https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan... . I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.
> I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.
It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this spot, so we can dig around them". So much of the infrastructure was installed before detailed record-keeping was standard practice.
As far as trash collection in NYC, the main thing that needs to happen is containerized trash collection. Right now, trash bags are just left on the sidewalks 3-5 times per week for 12 or more hours at a time, creating an absolute buffet for rodents.
[0] This actually applies to most of the city, but Manhattan is a combination of the oldest-built and most-densly-built infrastructure, so it's particularly expensive there.
Many cities face the same problem and this is how they fix it: they make a plan to rework every pipe and wire in their city in a finite amount of time. They go block by block and tear it all up at once. They bring a shitload of guys and equipment instead of two idiots with jackhammers, so the whole thing is ripped out and replaced in a week instead of in 5 years.
> never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage
The status quo is sanitary and efficient. All things considered, New York’s garbage problem is on par with its snow problem. Well managed enough to work, but annoying enough around the edges to be fun to bicker about.
If you live in low-density New York, your experience mirrors suburbia; high, and your trash disappears down a building chute. It’s only we who live in the middle density who have to haul garbage to the basement and hear the beeping trucks at night. Even then, it’s clean and works.
Are we talking about the same NYC? Visit Manhattan in mid July/August. Bags of garbage leaking juices and oil out onto the street into a huge greasy spot where the designated collection spot is near the curb. The whole city smells like a toaster oven roasted ballsack.
Then combine that with all the cumulative liters of urine per day from dogs and humans all throughout the city.
Cleaning up after horses (including, often, the horses themselves) is a large part of why and how NYC's municipal waste system evolved to its present state.
What do you think happens to the trash after it "disappears down the chute"?
You might not haul it to the curb yourself but the building as staff still has to unless you're in a building big enough to have a loading dock that can accommodate a truck to haul away a roll-on container. Most high rises don't even fall into that category. I live in a 20 story building with 157 units and the building staff has to drag the piles of trash out of the compactor room to the sidewalk on collection days.
They can sacrifice street parking spots systematically throughout the city for garbage dumpsters, as many others have suggested, but it's politically untenable to do so because americans love their cars, even in NYC.
Another politically untenable solution is to do what Taiwan does and force people to put out their garbage in very tight time windows and otherwise store it privately in their houses and businesses, but that is a unproductive use of human time on net.
The reality is that most other major cities have garbage collection figured out in a better way. For instance in my city, garbage is kept in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building, and on a scheduled day, it's picked up either right in the building or in the alley after the caretaker moves the dumpsters there. The fact that this is considered politically untenable in New York is frankly insane, glad I don't live there.
> NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area
Most buildings in NYC already have a dedicated garbage area. The issue is that there isn't a dedicated spot for pickup.
That's a solvable problem: put containerized trash receptacles on the street, so the superintendent can put them in the containers, instead of dropping them directly on the sidewalk (which is what they currently do).
People in row houses can't walk to the corner of the street? That's how it works in much of the Netherlands, underground bins spread over suburbia, which is like 90% row house. Works fine. I wish we had it here (still need to put my bin/bags out on the designated day).
The Netherlands has absolutely nowhere approaching the density of NYC. Even Queens has a density twice that of Amsterdam, and Manhattan 7x. If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.
Also contrary to movies, Manhattan has almost no alley ways either. There's no space for anything. Even when it snows in many areas they have to take the snow and dump it in the East River.
> If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.
Or, you know, a commercial-sized dumpster.
The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained.
That's 4-5 stories of ~4 apartments per floor, times however many of those buildings fit in the 900ft/247m length of a block. There's nowhere near enough space on the corner (here's the corner: https://goo.gl/maps/aszPHqrQVGftcqTCA) to collect that much garbage, much less to do it three times a week.
Yes they could build big underground containers. Yes they could reduce the amount of garbage generated. But both are massive projects far beyond "why can't they just".
This is also how they do it in Zürich. You walk your garbage down to the corner. Recycling is the same way. The only thing that gets picked up from houses is paper and cardboard.
In NYC, in very dense areas like of Manhattan, I would expect it would make sense to put a container in the bottom of every building, but in rowhouse areas it is reasonable to expect the occupants to walk down to the corner.
The main thing is like so many other aspects of American life we have no domestic examples of best practices. You have to visit foreign cities and pay attention, or invite their experts to come teach your city.
And neither of those things happen in the USA. We kicked England out like 250 years ago, and our general belief is that Europe hasn’t had a good idea since they chose to colonize the Americas. Reasonable people think this is stupid, but we have a lot of unreasonable people here.
If I'm to believe what I read online, especially here on HN, Europe has everything figured out and is so much better than the US. So yes, we do have a lot of unreasonable people here (on HN).
Infrastructure wise, central Europe + Scandinavia has things "figured out", which is what the topic is about.
Transport infrastructure in dense areas is "solved" by reducing individual means of transport and increasing shared means of transport. This doesn't align with hyper-individualistic people seeing car transport as their right.
A "fat government" helps building out shared infrastructure, America doesn't have that.
Some people like sharing and cooperating, some people like living under the false impression that they're independent of society.
In certain states there are still laws around water rights that cause unnecessary shortages that could be solved by cooperation, but the laws are there and the big consumers upstream lobby to keep them that way.
Not saying the US isn't great, you've been the economic powerhouse of the world for awhile now, you have accomplished many great things (research topping my list). I just think somewhere you forgot to invest back into shared infrastructure, and that "ours" is better (with exceptions both ways).
There's a bit of my reasoning, which if you wildly disagree with makes us both unreasonable to eachother, whoever is right is up to the future to decide independent of us two.
As someone from a dense city with generally smaller roads than NYC (Philly), I think that's untrue. If NYC wanted to do it, it could be done. In Philly, trucks make it down alleys where the roadway is half the size of the truck. Or they wheel the dumpsters down the alley to the corner. That doesn't mean every alley is suitable, but you can put the dumpster on the main road where you put the trash, or do as our European friends suggest.
Personally I have no idea what you're talking about...have visited the city many many times for work from bronx to manhattan, and come from a much "dirtier" city.
If you think there's garbage everywhere in NYC, I advise you to never visit most European capitals, and especially not the asian subcontinent. Which is not to shame these places, but more so to say that NYC is doing OK.
> It's not the parking spots - residents have zero interest in walking to the end of their block with garbage.
Nobody would have to do that. They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb. Unless they live in a multifamily building (which is most of the city), in which case the building superintendent would do that.
> Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
> They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb.
I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses, sometimes with the 1st and 2nd floor separate living areas. Not huge apartments - you can't put a dumpster in front of every house.
The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
> I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses
This is incorrect. That does not describe the majority of housing units in NYC.
> The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
I don't know why you're so confidently making this claim, because that's not what's being proposed or being done. There already is a pilot program for containerized trash collection, and - surprise - there's not just one container per block.
Except that it does sleep, and deeply... The bars close really early, cabs get very hard to find shortly after, the streets of Manhattan are deserted. The only thing that’s 24H is some rent a cop telling you not to sit on some park bench.
Garbage is absolutely not as big of a problem as it is in NYC though. You don't get to blame the fact garbage collection is awful on entropy when other cities very visibly do not have the same issues.
> Do you live there? It seems pretty effective IME.
I live in NYC, and I'll go on the record stating that NYC's trash collection system is an absolute disaster, because the city has long-refused to use containerized trash collection (the way every other city in the developed world does), and instead tells people to dump trash bags on the sidewalk 3-5 times per week, where they sit for 12 hours at a time before being picked up.
This is not an effective system at all. It exists only because elected officials have not wanted to give up a few free parking spaces every block in order to allow for containerized trash receptacles.
Thankfully, there's a pilot program on one block in midtown Manhattan to "trial" containerized trash collection. It began a few weeks ago, and is scheduled to last one year. Hopefully that will be followed by a wider rollout.
HN's take on NYC is very confusing. Everyone has "obvious" answers to problems that residents don't even consider problematic, and oh by the way, they've never left their town of 600 people.
I remember a debate here where people were claiming how lawless NYC was for allowing people and services to double-park to load/unload. They should park in a loading zone!
You must recognize the general GOP-led campaign that democratic-run places like NYC and CA are nightmares. It was Trump's theme for the 2020 GOP convention, but was overshadowed by Coronavirus. I think it spreads here too. NYC (and CA) need to take it on and remind people what makes them so fantastic.
For what it's worth, NYC has been designating some parking spots on city blocks in largely residential areas for local deliveries, so UPS/Amazon/FedEx trucks don't have to double park and hold up traffic. I'm sure it was due to the pandemic, where online ordering became a lifeline for many.
> don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk
Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)
New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.
This is exactly what I mean. You guys have no idea how silly you sound everywhere else.
I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.
The LA municipal boundary is a small sliver of what people broadly call "Los Angeles. Here's Manhattan projected over the LA metro: https://i.imgur.com/ff7Vs1k.jpeg
What does the size of the city have to do with it? When thinking about "greatest city", I don't think "solving problems at scale" is one of my criteria.
I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.
Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest. It’s a great city in a way no other city in America truly is. In a league with Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Paris or London. Density and cosmopolitanism bring a unique combination of economic and cultural gifts that set these cities apart, and have for similar cities across history. New Yorkers also tend to be well travelled to those cities, because that’s how cosmopolitan culture works.
> I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest.
My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.
You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.
A much bigger problem than the lines are the switches. Switching of trolley buses at intersections is not really all that well solved of a problem as is, and the solutions available right now (up to the most sophisticated based on radio signaling) are a primary failure point, maintenance intensive, and expensive and complex enough that the cost of a four-way intersection set up for four-way electric travel is going to be pretty formidable.
Further, electric lines exist mostly on shared poles. For safety reasons, shared poles require a buffer space between MV and distribution voltage power lines and communications lines. This means that the typically 600 VDC trolley bus power cannot be added at the level of communications lines (well, can be with some work, but in practice it is expensive and complex) without compromising this safety buffer, requiring deenergization when communications utility work is underway. In many cases they cannot be near communications cables even if communications work is prohibited when the system is energized, because of the risk of inadvertent contact putting 600VDC on coaxial or telephone lines which could create fatal situations. Additional expense is required to mitigate this problem.
Trolley lines also have more complex physical loading requirements than power lines because they must cope with the lateral forces of vehicles, so they usually need to be anchored to both sides of the street on crosswires, to poles that were engineered for that use. Most of the time attaching trolley lines to existing poles will not be feasible for these reasons and they will need to either go on dedicated supports, be attached to buildings (the engineering and real estate paperwork for this is complex), or have existing poles replaced with ones engineered to support trolley lines as well.
I'm not saying attach the overheads to the light poles, I'm saying we do things of similar scale/difficulty all the time (while we are very far from at-scale battery based transport).
Batteries are fun and all, but they are way harder to deal with vs. anything you described; they're just earlier in the development curve, so the problems seem more solvable.
> Switching of trolley buses at intersections is not really all that well solved of a problem as is
Like the parent comment said, it would be a hybrid able to use battery power when not on the line. With this type of system you could then just run parallel lines instead of criss-crossing lines.
All this can be mitigated with a small amount of battery in the vehicle. Essentially each streetcar is a BEV with battery only to go a few miles but is essentially recharged while on street power (with software to keep SoC in the 20-90% band).
> “ With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be,” Gragnani said.
We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.
Because they need both an ICE and battery powered engine it's a more complex & expensive solution than picking one or the other. Not only expensive in dollars but car weight, storage room, maintenance, and so on.
It's okay as an intermediate step but all electric is much better long term.
There are cases where hybrids remove complexity because they can be designed to operate either without transmissions, or with substantially more simple transmissions. Hybrids are cheaper than EVs since a good chunk of expensive batteries can be off-set by an ICE.
Hybrids are probably the end-game for any forms of transportation that require operation for a long period of time. A dump truck, for example, could have its 12L, 400hp diesel engine replaced with a 1L, 60hp engine that charges the batteries that drive the electric motors. Since the auxiliary engine only needs to be able to provide just enough juice for cruising, it can be made much smaller.
> There are cases where hybrids remove complexity because they can be designed to operate either without transmissions, or with substantially more simple transmissions.
This is how the LEVC taxis work in London; a 30kWh battery, charged by a 1.5L 3cyl petrol engine. Although in this case the kerb weight is about 200-300kg more than the previous (diesel) black cabs.
> It's okay as an intermediate step but all electric is much better long term.
Sure, but given the long term might be longer than the average consumer holds onto a new car, there's a lot of value in a good intermediate solution.
The average person drives less than 30 miles a day. Building a 360 mile EV battery just to handle long-tail events seems very wasteful.
Given that Lithium battery production is largely the bottleneck to full electrification, you could use the batteries from 1 Tesla and make 6 plug-in hybrids from them. And then get pretty close to 6x-ing the amount of carbon saved.
"it's a more complex & expensive solution than picking one or the other."
Not for NMC batteries, which continue to go up in price (so much for the downward EV battery price trend EV promoters promised would materialize with the economies of scale).
And LFP batteries don't have the necessary performance characteristics for high load applications.
I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety.
I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque would help considerably when accelerating. It doesn't need to go 0-60 in 20 seconds while carrying 80K lbs like the Tesla Semi claims, but certainly having extra power could be useful in some scenarios. Heck, just having regen braking would be a game changer when going down hills. No noise from a Jake Brake, and no worries about burning up brake pads.
This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight, has much lower battery capacity, and still sticks you with the maintenance work required for the ICE.
Plus gas is a very volatile mix that degrades; you must run the ICE regularly to ensure the tank gets cycled.
hybrid systems are complex but really not much more complex than traditional ICE when you consider that they no longer need starters or alternators, have transmissions with no shifting components, and can use electric A/C compressors to avoid accessory belts entirely.
They also have much longer maintenance intervals because the engine is only running ~2/3rds of the time.
Electric cars are of course simpler but have cost and range issues that are prohibitive for some use cases, not to mention will usually weigh much more than even an equivalent plugin hybrid.
Suffice to say there is a reason that the best taxi vehicle has been the Prius for more than a decade. efficient and rock solid reliable despite increased complexity.
Most importantly though, you can make 10 plugin hybrids with the battery from one BEV. As long as raw materials for batteries are a bottleneck then we should be seriously considering PHEVs as a stopgap if as we can make sure they are getting charged.
If you know ahead of time that the engine is going to run infrequently, there are lots of ways to mitigate this. The ICE is tantamount to a backup generator, and there are very reliable backup generators.
> This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight
I mean, US consumers already put up with this when it came to automatic transmissions. But the cost/maintenance problems were a fair trade-off for convenience.
And in the case of plug-in hybrids, they are VERY convenient. You almost never need to get gas, but you can still go on a road trip without any pre-planning.
A Toyota Synergy style hybrid has a more mechanically simple transmission than an ICE plus a traditional transmission. I haven't seen numbers, but I'd be surprised if ICE plus a fuel system weighs more than 300 miles worth of batteries, but you get 600 miles of range with the ICE. You could easily get more, but PHEVs seem to be stuck with a 12 gallon tank.
My PHEV has a two year maintenance cycle, and the ICE portion is changing the oil, mostly. Yes, at some point you'll need to do a timing chain/belt, and there's incidentals; you'll never need to replace emissions equipment on a BEV, and most of the unscheduled maintenance on my ICE equipped cars has been related to emissions: EGR valves, o2 sensors, EVAP canisters, etc.
The engine control system takes care of running the ICE regularly, it's not something you have to worry about. I'd expect it to push you to fill up the tank about twice a year if you're mostly driving electric. I drive my PHEV mostly gas, and not that often anyway, so I just fill up every 500 miles or so.
It doesn't have to double complexity. Look at the BMW i3 Rex - it used a basic range-extending generator and was ahead of its time. The weight savings of the Rex vs. a larger battery are significant. Most EVs carry around a battery that they'll only use 10% of on a typical day.
As to your last point, designers of range extenders are obviously aware of this and handle it automatically. It'll chose to kick on occasionally even if the batter is nearly full.
You want to run an engine once a month or so to keep all the internal parts protected from rust by a thin film of oil. It is best to let it heat up all the way to drive out as much moisture as possible.
Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough. The first thing to go are the cam shafts.
> It is best to let it heat up all the way to drive out as much moisture as possible.
> Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough.
I was always told to take the car for an actual drive (including a highway stretch) to achieve these ends, otherwise the moisture you're expelling accumulates in the exhaust system.
Looking around the neighborhood, I assume the people with the rusted-out mufflers are the ones that just let it idle.
Since I have yet to see any of these various claims having any impact on the maintainability or function of my car, I think I'll stick to my plan of not wasting the gas in my engine for months at a time.
It's unlikely to be a one time thing. But recurrently letting gas sit for extended periods of time could cause issues. This mostly only applies to ethanol containing fuels. This is why boats need to use 100% gas. You should do the same for a plugin hybrid if you don't cycle the tank at least every 2-3 weeks. That's all it takes to damage a boat if it sits. Cars will be better but the repeated exposure would certainly take a toll.
What does "take a toll" mean? Sorry to be difficult but people tell me a lot of things will damage my car in the long term, but I haven't been able to reproduce any of those problems yet. The only thing that damaged my car was putting too much oil in it, that caused it to fail nearly immediately, and was covered by the warranty so it was free to replace the whole engine.
Eh, your car will run a little shitty with the old gas, leaving an engine without running it for extended periods can cause somewhat faster corrosion depending on your environment, and old gas can increase things like various gunk getting deposited around your engine.
All in all, a mild shortening of the life of your engine and perhaps triggering some maintenance sooner than otherwise.
Realistically, not much. The people saying “bad for you” aren’t wrong but they also fail to mention the effect size. It’s not particularly relevant unless you want to own the same car for a few hundred thousand miles and absolutely minimize maintenance. (Small aircraft for example, you want to care a lot about these things because they’re very expensive, when the engine fails you’ll be thousands of feet above the ground, and a well maintained plane can last decades. Your daily driver probably doesn’t have any of these issues)
There are various preventative things you can do to minimize the effects anyway. It’s one of those internet things where yeah they’re not wrong exactly but they need to relax. Having too much beer and cheeseburgers last night long term probably wasn’t the best decision, but you know what I’ll probably be fine.
Leaking gas in a car for a long time is like eating too much fast food. Ok yeah not the greatest but are you the type of person who cares enough to never eat McDonald’s? Make your decisions according to your disposition and don’t take people telling you you’re wrong too seriously.
But seriously, change your oil more often. There’s some simple chemistry going on where the oil gets worse at being oil over time and you get extra engine wear, and if you’re not paying attention and burning oil your engine can get bricked in seconds.
I only change my oil every 10k miles (or really 6-8k most often) but in an engine and with an oil specifically rated for such. Your jiffylube 5w30 (if that’s what you’re doing, if you’ve actually got an oil rated for 10k you’re fine) isn’t going to do great. It’s maybe 50-50 whether bad oil change schedule will be the thing that kills your car.
I think 6K or 7.5K miles is the typical recommendation for modern cars that use synthetic oil. I know my BRZ's manual recommended 7.5K unless I'm taking it to the race track.
10K is probably fine with full synthetic oil if you're driving conservatively.
Ethanol is hygroscopic. As long as you burn the fuel in a reasonable amount of time it's not a problem, but when ethanol sits over time it collects water. Next time you run your engine, it pulls water into the engine.
Now, if the engine runs long enough to fully warm up, this isn't the end of the world. Any water will turn to steam and be pushed out through the exhaust. However, if the engine only runs for a short period of time, water can sit inside of it and cause corrosion. Realistically this is only a problem if you repeatedly allow ethanol-containing fuel to sit for a long time, and also repeatedly run an ICE for very short periods of time.
It is a bigger problem for boat motors, because they operate in a wet environment already. It is also a bigger problem for carbureted engines, where fuel sits in the carburetor bowl while the engine is not running. This allows hygroscopic fuels to corrode the inside of the carburetor while the engine sits.
Ignoring ethanol, it is also true that gasoline breaks down over time. However, it typically takes many months before gasoline breaks down enough to worry. There are also additives that help stabilize gasoline for longer storage.
TL;DR in a reasonably modern-ish car, it's probably fine. In small engines like lawn mowers, it is best to either use ethanol-free gasoline or to completely drain the fuel before storing the mower for the winter. In antique cars with carburetors, it is best to use ethanol-free gasoline.
My friends LOVE their i3 and it was like their gateway drug to EVs. I think if BMW had kept going on that concept, it would have create a true winner. They NEVER needed to refill their backup tank in the 2 or 3 years they leased. I think BMW did something special to make the gas tank keep the gasoline that long. In that span of time, battery mode satisfied all their needs and they loved driving it.
I don't recall specific models, but I have read some (many? most?) plug-in hybrids monitor how long since the tank was last filled and at a certain point will run the gas engine to work through the fuel before it goes bad.
I've always wondered why there aren't diesel hybrids on the market given the higher energy density of diesel plus its long term stability. It would seem to be the ideal use-case since the diesel engine could be run at the RPM needed to be to minimize emissions.
Most people would never plug it in. This would only be ideal if you could make using gas significantly more cost inefficient (i.e. astronomically higher gas prices), which will always be unpalatable in the US. Hopefully some states eventually have the guts to do it.
Oil is a finite resource. Eventually economics will force people to abandon gas (my bet is sooner than the 50 years the industry projects there are reserves for).
EV benefits to the climate are always congingent on getting rid of fossils.
If we don't ramp down fossils by regulation, all this EV business is worse than useless anyway (we'll just end up with the emissions from battery production in addition to burning up all the oil we can pump - maybe sold abroad if domestically there's a lot of renewables available, but still burned).
I live in an apartment. I drive a full EV and the 200+ miles range allows me to get away with charging at public chargers intermittently rather than having to plug in basically every night.
If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.
I think there is a sweet spot for city size and how many people are using EVs for apartment EV users now. Your city needs to be large enough to draw investment for this infrastructure, but it can't be so large that each and every charger in town has someone already parked there, which is what seemingly happens when I see the few dozen chargers installed around my neighborhood.
You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.
Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.
A decent L2 charger should be installable at scale for ~$1K per unit IMHO. I'm basing this on the fact that a singular L2 home charger can be installed for about that. Figure the industrial variant costs a little more, but you get savings from the mass scale of deployment. They probably cost more now, but competition will bring it down as we scale.
Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).
You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).
If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.
I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.
I'd be curious to see where the money ends up coming from long term. Hopefully it doesn't mean shifting money that could have gone towards mass transit into subsidizing private ownership of single occupant vehicles.
I’ve had a couple of apartments install ev chargers in every parking space in the last few years. That kind of thing is going to get progressively more common.
I think the "if I had a hybrid, it wouldn't get plugged in" part is what they were calling out: that is now a fossil fuel car even though they could quite comfortably plug it in.
Hybrid cars are, effectively, enablers. The not-even temptation to just top it up, in under a minute, at an entirely acceptable cost (given that you could afford a hybrid, you can afford gas) is the best way to prevent people from actually going electric.
Plus, from an industry perspective, hybrids are the perfect excuse for manufacturers to just keep spending on ICE improvements rather than EV improvements: as long as the total package seems to get more mileage every year, no one's paying attention to the fact that the EV parts don't get improved nearly as much as the ICE parts do. And because hybrids cut into EV sales, manufacturers have the perfect excuse to keep working on ICE tech because "the majority of people are still buying cars with an ICE or ICE component".
Hybrids would be great if people were rational. Instead, people are the exact opposite, and hybrids are the perfect "let's not move to full EV" excuse for consumers and manufacturers alike.
Why do we need chargers in every parking space? Is every space allotted? In our parking structure (five floors) we have about 50 EVs and only four chargers, there’s always at least one spot available. I guess there’s no real harm in it but seems like a waste of resources.
If everybody has an EV it becomes more of a problem and shuffling your car around to leave space for your neighbors is a time sink.
For a while I commuted 80 miles a day which would have meant daily charges were more or less necessary. Having to take the car out for a walk every night would have been irritating.
Generally not really any better or worse. The electric bits added in a PHEV is relatively ancient, simple and reliable tech - ~5 to 20kwh battery plus a small electric motor added to the end of the existing transmission in most cases. Electric motors in vehicles generally have little to no maintenance requirements and just last the lifespan of the vehicle - the stator/rotor never "touch" so there isn't anything that "wears" anything like as much as in a combustion engine and no complex lubrication challenges. The battery will wear over time, but again generally lasts most to all of the lifespan of the vehicle.
In some cases reliability actually improves, as the extremely reliable electric motor can replace things such as reverse gear and the starter motor, reducing complexity of the ICE system and transmission. The only parts being serviced that you pay for continue to be the gas bits exactly as before.
I'll play the devil's advocate here: its because hybrids are boring. Specifically, they accelerate slowly. We live in a world of instant gratification (tweets, tiktok, etc..) People want the same with their cars. Which is why TSLA was successful. Personally, when I think TSLA I think of a car that dominates the 0 to 60 charts for a fraction of a cost the ICE cars on the list.
The idea that hybrids accelerate slowly is probably a leftover stereotype from when the only hybrids for sale were econoboxes like the Prius. The instant torque from an electric motor actually helps with acceleration. These days many of the quickest supercars are hybrids. And there are a bunch of consumer cars where there the hybrid is quicker than the ICE version.
Plugin hybrids have the worst of both options as well as the best.
They have to carry with them an entire gas engine, plus large electric motors, plus a huge battery. That's a lot of mass. This makes them inefficient as gas vehicles, and less efficient as EVs.
Take a look at the Toyota Prius Prime, considered a great PHEV. It's got almost the same gas milage in combined city/highway driving as my 2012 Honda Civic (around 50 mpg). The Prius has got a slight edge. But that's combined, which presumes 45% highway and 55% city. You don't want to take that car on a road trip because once the battery is dead, you'll be needing to stop to refill the gas tank every 90 minutes. My Civic will drive 600km or more on highways, easily.
PHEVs are the best vehicle if you drive less than 60km per day, and mostly have stop-go city driving (so you can recharge on braking).
I'm a bit confused by your numbers, and I suspect we may be mixing multiple units of measure (maybe due to different definitions of gallon?).
The 2021 Prius Prime is rated at 53mpg highway. Let's assume that is optimistic and it gets 50mpg. Its fuel tank holds 11.4 gallons, but you don't want to run it dry - let's say 10 gallons are usable. That is a 500-mile (~800km) range after the battery is dead. At 75mph, that requires stopping to refill the gas tank every 6 hours and 40 minutes.
The most efficient 2012 Honda Civic is the hybrid, which is EPA rated at 44mpg highway. That is very efficient. However, 44mpg -> 53mpg is a 20% increase in distance per gallon of fuel. The Prius Prime is significantly more efficient. Since we're intentionally ignoring electric range in these numbers, I think the efficiency gains are mostly from the 9 years of R&D that passed between these two cars being built.
Interestingly, the non-plugin 2021 Prius Eco is also rated at 53mpg highway. I do think it's odd that the extra weight from a larger battery didn't have a bigger impact on fuel economy. It looks like that makes a small difference in town, where the Prius Eco gets 58mpg vs the Prius Prime's 55mpg.
The new Prius is probably larger & faster and meets more safety & emissions standards as well.
And it will get much better fuel economy than the Civic as soon as traffic gets bad or some city driving is required.
Picking highway MPG cherry picks the solution that makes the Hybrid or EV look the worst compared to the traditional ICE car.
Not that the Civic is/was a bad car. But all cars are a lot bigger and safer than they were, so it's almost always cherry picking to go back and take an example of an old fuel efficient car. A lot of those old cars could not pass modern emissions or safety testing, they got their good fuel economy by being a) Slow b) Light. A big part of light was not having extra mass for safety or emissions. On top of all that the mileage ratings for cars have also changed, so you can't even directly compare the ratings for an old civic with a new one.
To be fair, the EPA changed the way they calculate mileage ratings in 2006 (affecting window stickers in 2008), so the 2012 Civic is a valid-ish comparison. Also, I chose the most efficient Civic available, which was the hybrid model.
I do wholeheartedly agree with you, though. Even when cherry picking data (highway mpg's, ignoring miles driven in EV mode, choosing the most efficient Civic) and ignoring other factors (larger, safer, lower emissions), the Prius Prime is much more efficient. I think plugin hybrids have their place.
I'm gonna to be blunt: after reading more reviews, I picked a very poor car to use as my example of a bad PHEV. Prius prime actually sounds like a pretty solid vehicle.
The general complaint that I hear about other PHEVs is that car manufacturers publish the "combined highway/ city" rating, which is weighted heavily in favor of city driving- which is where a PHEV is incredible thanks to regenerative braking.
But if you're not using the brakes and just driving a long distance, your battery stops helping after 30-ish minutes and now you're just in a gas car with an undersized engine carrying a very heavy battery.
Better to go pure EV instead, which is what I'm on a damned long waiting list to do right now.
I really think you should test drive one. It doesn't have a huge battery and ice engine, it has a small battery and a small engine (at times frustratingly underpowered if out of battery). For short drives, the small battery saves you from hauling an extra 500 lbs of battery. For long drives a PHEV is still my preferred option over a BEV, because refueling every 300 miles is faster than recharging every 300 miles, and I'm not looking to have a spirited drive anyway.
Weight is not that important for highway driving especially, where the vast majority of resistance comes from air and not rolling resistance. It’s mostly bad for ICE stop and go, where you have to get the whole car moving again from a dead stop repeatedly.
> you'll be needing to stop to refill the gas tank every 90 minutes
This is just wrong. The Prius Prime has an 11.4 gal tank and is rated 53mpg on the highway [1]. If you drive 70mph you'll need to refill after 7+ hours of driving and 500+mi.
I have a Chevy Volt, with smaller gas tank size (9 gal) and highway fuel economy (40mpg highway real-world). I fill gas every 6 hours of highway driving after the battery dies.
> PHEVs are the best vehicle if you drive less than 60km per day, and mostly have stop-go city driving (so you can recharge on braking).
Nit: it's the low average speed of stop-go driving (less air resistance) that makes city driving more efficient for EVs. You'd get even better efficiency for the same average speed if it weren't stop-go driving.
Winter is still a problem for EV. My city (non US) tried to change all busses from diesel to electric. Diesel busses had an efficiency of about 98% (2% time spend in maintenance) while EV busses had about 94%. This ultimately resulted in transport companies to go diesel again in recent years. I think putting some public funds here would be very worth the gain.
Of course electric busses are vastly more convenient. They are almost silent compared to the heavy noise a diesel bus makes on acceleration. Their routes are predictable, so charging can be accounted for. Although a bus can also mount very large batteries to begin with.
But apart from the slight difference in maintenance quota, there also was a problem in winter. When it was cold outside many busses refused to work. They would need to stay within a depot in winter which increases costs again. Still electric busses seem to be an efficient way to curb in-city emissions and noise pollution to a large degree. And I think the problem with temperature can surely be solved somehow.
I do think perfect became the enemy of good here. But there are still valid economic reasons for the private companies that provide these vehicles. Ultimately they don't get paid for their vehicles to be more economical and less noisy.
I don't think it is worth to replace heavy machinery yet. There are just too few vehicles that the investment doesn't seem too reasonable yet as long as there are that many more efficient things to replace.
Yes! I love my plug-in hybrid (Toyota RAV4 Prime). It gets about 40 miles on battery and then switches to gas. I've managed to drive 9000 miles on 3 tanks of gas (with a much larger energy bill, of course!) and I always have the confidence I could go on a long drive without depending on either slow, busy, or rare charging stations. I now even drive more slowly to maximize my EV range.
I wanted a RAV4 Prime. But they are difficult to get, and without a credit they no longer make financial sense. The TCO is lower just buying the hybrid.
Same for my Chevy Volt. Works great in the city on electric for the vast majority of my driving and for the 10% of long trips filling up ~8gal is quick and effortless at any gas station. Most of my long trips aren't road trips, they're get to the destination trips. The vehicle also has over 100k miles and really has had no major maintenance requirements other than the usual which has been surprising.
That said, I really appreciate early adopters of EVs who are helping push the infrastructure.
The MTA actually went from using a lot of hybrid buses to fully diesel at one point[0], and now they're slow rolling out fully electric by...2040[1]. Just far out enough they can do basically nothing over the next couple years, and still claim they're on track.
> now they're slow rolling out fully electric by...2040
The MTA operates 5,800 buses [1]. At 525 kWh per bus [2], that’s 3 GwH of batteries fleetwide. Charging those daily is enough to keep a large power plant busy.
> At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.
Plugin hybrids cars are expensive, not at the least because they require both a traditional ICE drivetrain and a large battery and electric motor, and specialized power split transmissions to make those work together.
Therefore, most plugin hybrids are higher end (just like EVs) and marketed at wealthier people who want to drive electric most of the time but have range anxiety or don't want to deal with DC fast charging. Look for yourself:
That said, they can make a lot of sense if you need 1 car that can do everything, both short daily drives and long trips. The sleeper hit here is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The new ones have 38miles electric range and seat 7.
However, the falling price of batteries and growth of DC fast charging infrastructure means that they will PHEVs will be a bridge technology.
Many city buses however are starting to convert to some form of plugin hybrid, although even their
However, even city buses are moving towards full electrification since the maintenance and fuel costs tend to dominate the total cost of ownership for them, and those are much lower with full electric.
> I don't know anything about a "power split" transmission, but isn't that the sort of thing a differential gear set does very well at?
A planetary gear set is often a component of a power split transmission, but there are other components. The key thing is that it is able to blend power from multiple sources [1]
> The thought occurs to me to make the rear wheels powered by the ICE and the front wheels electric.
> Then no wacky transmissions.
The problem is you then have a car that switches the basic drive characteristics (FWD to RWD) depending on what fuel you are using. Everything from the chassis to the suspension in a car is designed according to where the power is coming from.
Mitsubishi addressed this problem in their Outlander PHEV by using 2 electric motors, 1 on each axle, with the front axle being supplemented by the ICE engine (via a 1 way clutch) when more power is needed than the small battery can output, or when the battery is depleted [2]. This doesn't completely solve the problem but makes it less noticeable, and eliminates the need for a mechanical driveshaft between the front and rear.
Also, this approach only switches the vehicle from FWD to AWD, not from FWD to RWD. It's the same with dual motor EVs, they switch from 1 axle drive to 2 axle drive - they don't switch from one axle completely to the other. Imagine your car suddenly becoming RWD when the battery was depleted. That would be weird, and potentially even dangerous.
In that case you would still need a transmission for the engine which would likely increase cost and complexity compared to the surprisingly simple and elegant planetary gear transmissions used in most modern hybrids e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive
By using two electric motors connected to a planetary gearset you can replace the starter and alternator, allow for electric drive and regenerative braking, and provide a continuously variable transmission for the gas engine all with a set of constantly meshed gears (i.e. no shifting components).
It's VERY hard to keep a vehicle run straight with non-mechanically-tied wheels, you'll almost never get a "perfect enough" balance ending up in an engine pushing/pulling against the other.
That's why for instance we do not have much multi-motors EVs without a mechanical coupling...
Or just to extend this a bit further, maybe we keep ICE for a few specific applications?
I want a full conversion just as much as anyone who lives on this planet does, but I can see some cases being allowed for as our technology catches up to the lingering problems.
I think this is exactly why carbon sequestration technology is so important.
During our lifetime there are certain ICE applications that we really have no good alternatives for. So finding a palatable cost for carbon removal we are collectively willing to pay buys us a lot of options.
thats what will happen. Think about farmers, people in more rural areas, homesteaders, etc... There is no high capacity supercharger network there and isn't likely to be. ICE machinery is incredibly important to them.
A total conversion to electric isn't feasible in a lot of places like that.
Some people will have niche cases for sure, but I've talked to a number of farmers who drive EVs both on the road and on their farm and are really happy with it. They do get electric service too, that's not just something only city dwellers get.
For a commuter car, a plug-in hybrid is great if its all-electric range fits within your commute distance. Otherwise it's just a more expensive hybrid.
For a snow plow that needs to run for hours at a time, I suspect that the additional cost of the batteries of a plug-in hybrid isn't worth it over a normal hybrid, or just a diesel-powered engine.
We don't need to electrify everything, and even if that will happen in the long run, we don't need to rush to do it now. What percentage of total NYC emissions come from these trucks? Probably a pretty small portion.
It's not politically correct for NYC to buy more diesel trucks, but it is probably what they should do.
Because their small batteries being too much stressed do not last longer and in the end you run on ICE with the extra weight of battery, inverters and powertrain...
Another tempted but so far not promising was the hybrid-series EVs (like ships, with electrical engine powered by a generator) so far Nissan have tempted again, but honestly sound to be a failure...
It's discussed elsewhere in the thread, but overehead wires seem appealing:
* They solve the power availability problem
* They reduce the need for batteries, reducing cost and waste from manufacturing and disposal.
* They could be used for electrifying other vehicles like buses
* Their ROI seems especially high in dense cities, especially NY: One overhead wire serves all the traffic on the road below. Plus, dense cities like NY already have infrastructure citywide, and experience servicing it.
* What if we could provide power to electric cars in NYC. That could be transformative. I don't know that electric wires would be the best form for that, or how it could be done (is there a safe way to embed something in the ground?).
* Some point out that the garbage trucks need to cover almost every street in the city. The power supply doesn't have to do that; it only has to be available enough to charge the vehicles sufficietly to plow/pickup on the side street and return to the main road.
Plows running on overhead lines makes for very bad failure cases. Power outages are common in heavy snow storms. Emergency services and repair crews usually need to reach areas without power urgently. With plows run by overhead lines, these would be the areas not plowed.
Even if you kept a percentage of plows gas, you'd be risking the scale of power outages not overcoming your back up capacity
They work for buses because buses follow set routes. There aren't overhead lines running through every single street. By comparison, garbage trucks do have to patrol essentially every street. Putting overhead lines through every street may be more expensive than batteries.
An additional problem, in addition to the major one that trash trucks don't spend any significant period of time on major streets or consolidated routes, is that there is no readily available product for dynamic rewiring of trolley poles. The operator would have to come to a complete stop, exit the vehicle, and align the poles each time they turned onto an electrified street. This would add considerable time to the route and create a traffic disruption and safety problem for the operators. This could probably be addressed with some robotics and machine vision, but that's a whole new technology to develop that would still require years to be ready for use at city scale.
Overhead charging systems with automatic connection for buses have been developed by a couple of vendors (e.g. OppCharge) but are only used while stationary and have not achieved wide deployment. Wireless charging via pavement-embedded coils is actually a much better established technology and is in reasonably wide use for electric buses, but also hasn't been demonstrated in motion and is even more expensive to install than overhead catenaries.
It's largely irrelevant. Having walked around Manhattan and seeing people leaving trash out, garbage trucks are going to be overwhelmingly active on side streets and not the major thoroughfares. The potential charging time gained from overhead lines will be minimal. Furthermore, most garbage trucks have mechanisms to load and unload garbage which would prevent them from mounting trolley poles.
The issue is that garbage trucks drive serve each street equally often, for the most part. There's no streets where garbage trucks drive more often. It's not the situation that 20% of streets generate 80% of garbage that needs to be picked up [1]. It's block after block of townhomes and mid-rise apartments that are leaving out trash bags. Overhead lines inherently lend themselves to consolidated routes, but garbage disposal is the polar opposite of that.
1. High rise apartments generate a lot more trash, but they already have bulk garbage disposal systems and thus aren't part of the problem of picking up garbage bags off the street.
> It's not the situation that 20% of streets generate 80% of garbage that needs to be picked up
Not that number exactly, but many streets or blocks have no trash - office buidings, the highrise apts you mention, parks, highways, etc. And it's time, not distance that matters - you can charge the trucks where they spend the most time. My point is that you don't need 100% coverage or likely near that.
A drawback is that garbage pickup needs probably don't align with bus, snow plowing, or other needs, so ROI is lower for those wires.
Sure, much of Midtown doesn't have street trash pickup because skyscrapers have alternative garbage disposal infrastructure. The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution. There's no stretches of road where garbage trucks are spending significantly more time than others.
The fact that it's time, not distance, that matters makes matters event worse: garbage trucks will spend a brief period of time on a major thoroughfare to get to their trash pickup zone, but then spend hours and and hours working through block and after block of residential and low density (for NYC) neighborhoods with no overlap between truck routes. There are no roads where you can deploy power lines that will charge garbage trucks for any significant stretch of time. The only place where garbage trucks do spend long stretches of time is the depot: and you just need normal EV charges there. The low-density, distributed nature of garbage pickup fundamentally is at odds with overhead lines.
> The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution.
What makes you say it's uniform? Skyscapers, businesses, and others not using public trash services aren't clustered on one street; you find them all over town. The number of stops per street can vary considerably.
Again, skyscrapers pretty much always use garbage chutes and consolidate their trash. It gets sent to the he dump multiple times per day, not part of the street trash pickup schedule. You seem to be under the impression that the trash distribution is like this sequence:
1, 1, 9, 1, 2, 0, 8, 1, 9
In reality it's like this:
1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1
There's a few gaps where there's little trash to pick up. But there's no hot spots where there's massive amounts of garbage bags to pick up off the street.
I agree about the eyesore. In one city I was in, I noticed that as I moved from the poor to the rich neighborhood, all the power line (not trolly lines) were on poles in the former and buried in the latter; the difference was remarkable.
I wonder if something can be embedded in the street. Obviously, a subway-style third rail would be a bad idea!
But a few dedicated snow machines would make the work go so much faster. They’re more effective also because they actually remove the snow (in concert with a heap of regular construction dump trucks) rather than just shoving it onto the gutter/sidewalk. Sure, in NYC it melts fairly quickly, but for main avenues it would be a huge improvement.
"A few" undersells the scale of DSNY's operation. They've already got a few hundred specialized salt/plow trucks on top of the thousands in the mixed garbage truck fleet, and a couple dozen snow melters, about 80 dump trucks, and a few hundred front-end loaders. They recently bought about 50 narrow plows just for bike lanes and bridge sidewalks.
After heavy snow are mostly plowed, its a very common sight on busy city blocks to see snow hauling/removal and melting happening overnight.
Its just that nothing related to their snow removal obligations is small stuff.
And this article makes it seem like a huge investment, but in reality these workers do other jobs most of the year, in construction, roadworks, gardening, waste management, etc.
It really seems like NY are wedded to their old ways -- something that was a sensible reuse of an asset (garbage trucks) has solidified into the only possible way to do it. It might be bureaucracy and unions, unimaginative leadership, or inability to allocate the cost due to politics, but it isn't technical.
The first step is informing citizens when their streets will be cleared. In dense, downtown neighborhoods, most people park on the street and their cars need to move. No parking signs get installed block by block and notifications go out through the city-maintained snow removal app, InfoNeige (equivalent to InfoSnow in English). Municipal lots are opened up with free parking, and as one final warning, tow trucks blare a siren before hauling away any outstanding vehicles.
For these industrial use cases I’m surprised hot swappable batteries aren’t being considered more.
Are these current trucks doing 12 hour shifts plowing snow and hauling garbage on a single tank of diesel, or are they refueling? I get that fast changing infrastructure is hard and waiting 15-90 minutes to charge a battery isn’t ideal.
But couldn’t they stop to swap out batteries or have another vehicle meet each truck with replacements?
Edit: Googling suggests that garbage trucks get 3mpg on average, with a 70-90 gallon tank and go 25k mi/yr on average (80mi/day 6-day week) so one tank would cover a whole day.
3mpg is awful though which does seem to support electrification being a good plan for this use case.
They start and stop a lot, with a really heavy load. That's brutal for fuel efficiency, but with regenerative braking, would surely be much less of a factor.
3MPG strikes me as pretty good for a garbage truck. Heavy diesel vehicles weigh a LOT more than passenger cars and 3-7MPG is pretty typical territory. Garbage trucks spend so much time idling and starting/stopping they're going to be about the worst case. They also run very heavy for their size.
The bases of garbage trucks seems to just be a truck platform. So I don’t think they are much different from other equivalent vehicles.
Given these trucks almost never get highway speeds, I would assume it’s even as good as 3mpg because heavy idling uses less fuel than highway speeds, but stop and go is much worse.
I assume EVs would have some of the same stop/go efficiency issues for stop/start but that would gain somewhat on idling and breaking.
It's more that the category of "equivalent vehicles" is somewhat narrow. Mack dominates for garbage trucks because platforms of that size (18'-ish WB) rated for the 32-ton-ish GVW class aren't that common. Garbage trucks and dump trucks are two major applications, because both handle material that is much denser than typical truck cargo (once compacted, in the case of garbage trucks). Dump trucks of course are typically conventional cab, with the step-up cabover being a lesser-used option. There are some interesting design constraints that result in garbage trucks, particularly with pressure to minimize engine volume since putting a step-up cab over a large diesel engine is always a difficult space use exercise (and one that is almost unique to garbage trucks). This ends up meaning that the cabover version needs a pretty distinct frame from the conventional cab version because of the engine placement, and there ends up being implications on the suspension design. Historically some garbage trucks have been step-through, which is convenient for the operator, but extremely difficult to implement on modern truck platforms because the engine ends up occupying most of the middle of the cab. You pretty much have to go to rear-engine, which is rare and not really done to my knowledge except by Oshkosh for their generally very interesting front-end cement mixers.
That was all sort of a tangent, the point is that most garbage trucks are built on a truck platform, the Mack LR, that is specifically a garbage truck platform. I believe I have seen cement mixers built on the LR platform too but Mack doesn't seem to advertise it for anything other than garbage trucks.
Lots of mine & industrial vehicles are electrified. In underground mining it's attractive because the vehicle is in a very confined space (easy to run cables to) and it's doubly attractive because of the emissions issue (venting underground). It can make sense for above ground too. But for aircraft and ships you're likely correct.
I was thinking more of the giant open-pit mining excavators and trucks. However, I see that people are attempting to bring EVs to this market:
The mining industry is in a full swing transition towards a low environmental impact mode of operation, and its key players are working to phase out diesel vehicles, which are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions and generate high operating costs. Currently, there are no electric-powered heavy-duty trucks on the market that meet the difficult operational and climate needs of open-pit mines. Faced with the industry’s new needs, IVI, Propulsion and the NRC brought together select partners to make the first-ever electric heavy-duty vehicle for the mining sector.
To ensure the success of this major project, Fournier et Fils, a recognized operator in the mining sector, will provide the project with a Western Star 6900XD truck with a 40-ton loading capacity, as well as its technical experts, who will assist the electrification experts in converting the truck to accommodate the new components. The motorization aspects will be developed by Dana TM4, a world leader in electric motors.
These guys seem to have a niche: hauling logs off of mountains. Regenerative braking on the way down when heavy; using a Diesel engine as a generator in the truck's engine bay.
https://www.edisonmotors.ca/trucks
> Because of the requirement that it fuel the entire fleet within an hour in the event of a snow emergency, natural gas hasn’t proved practical especially since CNG fueling stations require too much space in such a dense city, according to Commissioner Garcia. Right now the fleet is about to undertake initial testing with renewable diesel, which is not only better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but can be used as a complete replacement for diesel, not just as a 5 to 20% blend.
So they already forwent CNG (unlike most municipalities) because of this requirement.
This is a non-issue. Like any other technology, EVs will (do) get traction where they provide a significant advantage, and then as the tech matures they will eat away at the rest of the problem space.
One of the few business books worth reading, the Innovator's Dilemma, is all about this, and is supposedly beloved in the tech business. It's where "disruption" entered marketing discussion.
I'm ok with removing 98% of dead dinosaur burning but keeping a few use cases (I wouldn't want to be trapped in a city with the power grid downed from a snowstorm and the city being unable to charge its industrial vehicles)
I agree. The problem is the infrastructure to extract, refine, transport, and distribute oil. Does removing 98% of internal combustion engine vehicles on the road mean removing 98% of gas stations, 98% of oil platforms, 98% of drilling wells, 98% of tank trucks? I'm not sure that two or three gas stations for a city of two million people can survive in business, unless they charge premium prices for the 2% of use cases that will still use them. And it's not just gas stations, it's everything that becomes before, up to the drill that extracts oil from the ground. Can the oil business survive when scaled down to, like, 10% of what it is now? It could be an industry that can't survive below a critical threshold.
The "Elektromote", the world's first trolleybus,[6] in Berlin, Germany, 1882. Maybe New York is lacking the infrastructure, but the technology has existed for a long time. A trolleybus may be expensive to implement in rural areas but in the biggest city in the USA it should be quite cost effective.
I don’t think a street plowing operation would work best on overhead. When you’re plowing the trolley pole would likely dewire.
The answer to me is just living without being able to plow for 12 hours straight charge up in between, and buy some more trucks or battery packs to run shifts. Just ask if diesel plow trucks didn’t exist - what would you do?
That's a nice point for some aspects: we have (had) all over the world trolleybus of various kinds, those on rails have some co-existence with cars and asphalts issues (like slippery passages for bikes, complex ops when the asphalt need to be re-do etc) but beside that have worked HYPER well for decades. Those on tires have proven to be full of issues to a point most who have had them have given up.
I see so far no feasibility study about:
- converting highways to rails with dual-usage vehicles (all vehicles, cars and trucks banning bikes) so vehicles can run normally on road but for just the long range usage they run full electric form grid, converting them to wheels only for going out or maneuvering on a faulty vehicles;
- crafting a urban rail network again at least for some "important traversing roads".
Perhaps the result would be negative anyway, but at least a broad simulation with public discussion, some eventual experiment etc...
Trolley rails seem carefully designed to be deathtraps for bicycles, as if someone looked up bicycle wheel widths and depths, grip on varius surfaces, etc., then tested iteration to come up with the rails. Still, if it reduces carbon output, I'm all for it.
There is usually separation between tram tracks and cycling lanes. It really isn’t a problem unless you mix them -- the only place I’ve had a wheel caught is Amsterdam, where pedestrians/bike/trams share the space.
Garbage trucks make almost all their emissions in the city, with their staff working around them. They work at low speed and stop and start continually.
Other than this ploughing requirement, they seem a good early opportunity for conversion.
Not that it needs to go first. It's visible and it's possible for a small number of decision-makers to decide and have an impact over a larger swath of infrastructure. 1000 vehicles can be the result of 10 people deciding, not 1000 people deciding.
"Critical infrastructure" is critical because it has some job more important than being a billboard for a cause. If you can make it a billboard without compromising it's primary function, then great, but obviously EV garbage trucks isn't such a case.
EV snowplows isn't a case. I'd be interested if any discussion of electrifying included plowing.
One thing that's clear: until battery-powered EVs are able to handle real muscular work (snow removal, hauling, plowing, etc.), diesel engines will be purchased, maintained and fueled by all levels of authority. Exactly how will roads be maintained without graders, pavers, etc.?
First, the climate change models are imperfect. In the worst case we're already out of time, in the best case we have a lot. A lot of people stopped believing in Climage Change when Al Gore's chosen predictions did not come true on the timeline he suggested in "An Inconvenient Truth". Being overly alarmist can cost credibility, which leads to my next point: there is only so far people are willing to go voluntarily to fight climate change. At some point they will say the expenses are not justified, especially when aggressive predictions do not come true. "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" as Robert Oppenheimer said.
How much is the average American, let alone the average global citizen willing to spend, willing to lower their quality of life to protect the climate? This isn't a theoretical matter of eating a few less hamburgers, it's about spending weeks in a cold house in Winter instead of a toasty, comfy one. "I'll just put on a sweater", doesn't work for everyone. In fact there is a huge racial equity issue involved with telling people to turn down their thermostat: darker skinned people are genetically tuned for warmer climates. It's a lot more painful for a Somalian immigrant in Minneapolis to be forced to run their thermostat at 58 degrees Fahrenheit in the midst of a sub-zero Winter than, say, someone of Swedish heritage.
Once people reach their voluntary limits of sacrifice for the climate change cause, things get a lot more difficult. Do you simply force them to comply? How? What kind of force do you use? What sort of dystopian methods must be employed to force people to make sacrifices they don't want to make?
My point is this: a measured, careful, response to Climate Change will likely yield better long term results than a panic driven response based on the most aggressive climate models. Just as in a fire drill people are encouraged to act in an orderly manner to avoid the suboptimal outcome of mayhem, a measured, thoughtful response, that balances costs will lead to a better outcome. We only have one chance to do this, let's do it right.
Improving fleets has large ROI. The benefit is all the emissions from all those vehicles. The cost should be lowered per vehicle due to standardization, and due to professional managers, maintainers, and drivers who can handle much more complexity and deal with novel issues.
It's not a good headline, if you read the article it is mentioned that the tested vehicles could only operate for 4 hours before "conking out". Which I can only assume means they are running out of charge. I would expect the charging time for these niche vehicles is not state-of-the-art and the infrastructure is poor, so that makes sense.
Thanks, I should of read it more thoroughly. Skimmed it instead, did a second pass and noticed a paragraph regarding vehicle charge longevity and the lack of charging stations.
While the headline references "power," the issue is that these electric trucks do not have enough battery capacity to plow snow for a full day before recharging overnight.
I have always thought that municipal road services had great potential to be electrified via partial catenary: take power from (and charge batteries) where the roads are electrified, discharge battery where the roads are not electrified.
Stupid question so, why would you use a garbage truck to plow snow? Over here, cities, towns and musipalities use different vehicles for different jobs, suxh as garbage, snow plowing, street cleaning and so on...
They very rarely need to plow snow in New York city, but when they do there are hundreds of miles to plow, and it is much faster if they begin the plowing before even an inch accumulates.
It is much more efficient to press the thousands garbage trucks into this rapid snow plowing service a few days per year than to waste 20 acres storing snow plows for the 350 days per year when they are not needed.
This and also: NYC residential trash collection is curbside. Literally leave trash bags on the curb. Trash collection cannot occur when the curb is snowed in.
So, were there separate trucks for the two tasks, the trash trucks would sit idle until after the snow plow trucks had finished their rounds.
Given the infrequency and relatively small volume of snow NYC gets, plus the curbside trash collection, sharing trucks and drivers is reasonably efficient.
This is a guess but most cities have a road/right of way department that does snow removal. For whatever reason, in NYC this is apparently done by the sanitation department. I think this is a meatspace Conway's Law, unrelated to whether or not it is actually better to have separate trucks or not.
NYC does have a number of dedicated salt-spreader/plow trucks [1].
As for why they use garbage trucks to plow, I speculate that it's an issue of scale. Buying a special purpose plow truck to replace every garbage truck that currently does double duty would leave you with a pretty significant/expensive fleet of trucks that are sitting idle most of the time (not to mention taking up space, which is at a premium in NYC).
Garbage trucks have easy attachment of snow plows and allow existing infrastructure to be on double duty. In a place like NYC storage of this many vehicles is also a concern, so just doubling your fleet for winter (3, maybe 4 months) usage isn't ideal either.
They're optimizing for trained drivers who can drive safely in the snow rather than hire two.
For a dangerous job on snowy roads, I think the fewer people employed with better pay is better than more people with lower pay for the same skills.
That said, there are a lot of places which can buy EV garbage trucks before we get to the snow or ice.
Who's not buying them is not as relevant when we're supply capped on the production of decent trucks with batteries in them.
Sure, it affects the total-market calculations & how the development is funded, but might not change how many are sold per-year until the production scales.
It is one of those solutions that at first look might sound good. But with closer inspection there is more and more problems. Like for example is equipping the trucks sensible? And what happens to the garbage that should have been collected? And training people for both jobs. As driving snow truck does require some expertise.
This is one of those objections that sounds good at first. But upon closer inspection you find out that the practice of using one truck for two different sorts of jobs has been commonplace for decades and it works out fine.
It's not a torque issue. from the article: "We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours,"
The author of the article doesn't know what they're talking about. The issue in question is concerned with energy density, not break power of the motors. Electric motors are capable of delivering far greater torque than a similarly sized (weight/volume) diesel engine. Electric batteries on the other hand have far less energy desnity compared to an equivalent volume/mass of diesel fuel.
It’s brake, not break. As in the amount of HP available at the brakes after all transmission/diff/etc losses are taken into account which doesn’t even really apply to electric vehicles.
They aren’t looking hard at all. If you just had a super capacitor bank to capture regen, all the energy from the stop and go could be retained and they could probably run the truck on the batteries that they are currently saying last only 4 hours.
Brake horsepower is the power at the output of the engine. It's called that because it is measured with a brake dynamometer. Wheel horsepower or wheel brake horsepower (same thing) is measured after mechanical losses (at the wheels).
But "they aren't looking, why don't they just.." really rubs me the wrong way. Surely these people are experts in their own field and know what's available. After all, they are ordering trucks from a vendor, not designing trucks to their own unique requirements. Plus these Mack trucks indeed already have regenerative braking.
Ha, yup, I used the wrong "brake". Silly me. The point is that power delivery and energy capacity of an energy conversion system are two different things and the author's incorrect usage of power to refer to energy is pretty egregious and is spreading an idea that is false - that electric motor vehicles deliver less power than combustion engine vehicles. That's my issue.
One only need look at the volumetric and mass energy density of diesel fuel and electric energy storage options to see that electric vehicles CURRENTLY store significantly less than diesel fuel tanks. That's well known and not a shock to anyone. Energy desnity of electric power storage (batteries, or even H2 fuel cells) will improve over time.
From the article, it doesn't seem to be about torque. Their issues are charge duration in the battery (in cold conditions it only lasting 4 vs 12 hours) and the fact that they have to use garbage trucks at all compared to other municipalities using smaller trucks or dump trucks/graders. Apparently the city has committed to using the garbage trucks.
Pushing snow is hard work. Harder than towing a large payload, so it makes sense to me that electric garbage trucks that might last a full day of garbage collection will fail to last as long while pushing around tons of snow. Just a simple matter of physics here.
* a brand-new battery chemistry based on cheap and readily-available elements that avoids the issues related to existing lithium-based cells for vehicle applications (e.g. cost, cold, low power density, towing, large vehicles, etc)
* a way to synthesize fuel via CO2 capture from the air, perhaps in a fluctuating demand way to soak up solar from solar-rich regions (to make it net neutral-ish for CO2 capture) or if we finally get it together and build a bunch of nuclear reactors, which become net negative for CO2 emissions (from building the plant) in a matter of weeks
I would love to not have to deal with tedious car maintenance. I wish my car was as reliable as my phone, which never needs any sort of ongoing maintenance other than charging!
To me, this is hard to understand. There used to be a saying “right tool for the right job” and I’m sure when Ford released the model T lots of people said “horses can do X while automobiles can not”
This is a step … where basically 9 months out of the year there is no emissions in the city and the trucks are effectively the same 1:1 replacement.
I also understand that this is a much harder article to write “the city got away with using the wrong tool for the job for years and now has to address the problem they created” (this cuts both ways). It probably seemed like a win win at the time but now a solution will need to be engineered to solve it… im also sure having a hybrid fleet (some ICE and some EV) will be great for times of increased demand and having backups when something breaks…
That's one of the smaller ones, which Glasgow City Council ordered up with a hydrogen-powered engine. Most are still diesel but there are some diesel/propane dual-fuel ones too.
They did an entirely reasonable linear optimisation on the cost benefit, and it didn't work out.
It's not a forever decision. They can review in the light of changes in power budget and recharge times, battery swap and fuel cost.
I have read elsewhere that PepsiCo who committed to the Tesla truck are sticking to their shorthaul routes as a problem solution at first. Also entirely reasonable, and also probably a well studied cost benefit decision.
Wouldn't Tesla's Semi truck fit the bill in terms of power? If so, could the motor and batteries used in the Semi theoretically power an EV garbage truck for long enough to plow snow for more than the 4 hours they state they're currently seeing?
So we'll wait until batteries improve to the point where they can be used. Not a big deal. In the mean time personal transportation can be fully electrified. The subway has been running on electricity for more than 100 years.
The future is not exclusively electric. The future will have a mix of technologies appropriate for different situations. We are still going to have horses and gas vehicles just as we do now, with EVs alongside them.
This smells to me at least a little bit like union pressure to slow the transition to electric vehicles, which is just a hop from fully autonomous city vehicles, putting them all out of work forever.
How is it just a hop from fully autonomous city vehicles? The sensor suite and software doesn't really care about the type of engine. Waymo's Chrysler Pacificas are hybrids in fact.
> union pressure to slow the transition to electric vehicles, which is just a hop from fully autonomous city vehicles
Wouldn’t this incentivise earlier fleet turnover to electric? If you’ve just bought an electric fleet, it’s tougher to justify turning it over again for autonomous only.
I'd have to think any fully electric car is a better target for autonomous retrofitting, because the drivetrain is already completely fly-by-wire?
Using a random estimate, a $100,000/vehicle autonomous retrofit probably pays for itself in like a year. The initial outlay of let's say a half billion to replace the city's fleet with EVs is a much bigger hurdle.
Well, a union rep is quoted in the article, which was weird. His statement was also a little weird. The conclusions and the math involved don't really add up for me. They laid the groundwork for a fight against _any_ conversion to electric vehicles by warning the city council about the possibly prohibitive cost of installing a charger network...
I'm not sure it's too outlandish to postulate that the union would act in their own interest here. I think any plan to convert to autonomous vehicles should include a plan for these workers. But I don't think you get to be Sanitation Commissioner in NYC without union support.
Perhaps the union organizers think this but it doesnt really make much sense given that the trains (subway) in NYC are the first thing I would automate and apparently still have drivers. Automating trash pick-up in NYC is probably harder than L5 autonomous driving.
It's hard now, but this is a 20 year plan to replace the fleet. Already a budget item for the city, and, possibly, the frontline for union concerns about automation.
Canada doesn't like the snowplow-garbagetruck hybrid, either.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/snow-plow-garbage-truc...
"Garbage truck turned snow plow gets mixed review from city staff; Snow plow-garbage truck hybrid did not perform as well as dedicated snow removal machines"
I believe snow could be moved with far less energy.
Today's snow ploughs use a lot of force.
But perhaps with better engineering, new ways to move snow could be invented - for example conveyor systems that move and compact the snow.
Theoretically you can generate power by compacting snow, since the stuff at the top has gravitational potential energy and gives it up when compacted down. Find a way to collect that, and your snowploughs won't need any recharging.
I don't think the article's comparison with Denver is particularly fair. Looking at Denver's municipal website shows that they have a main fleet of 70 large plowers, and a smaller fleet of 26 4x4 plows which are used to create paths for residential streets as a smaller plow isn't really suitable for clearing large avenues and highways. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the type of snow that falls in Denver. As a high altitude, inland location, Denver's snow is mostly dry and fluffy, while an East Coast city like New York is often on the edge of some rain/snow border and wet and/or slushy snow is far more common (and far, far, far heavier).
EVs in a place as dense as NYC seems like a risk. Battery fires can burn for hours and entire blocks might need to be closed off and evacuated due to the risk of battery explosions.
It gets even more complicated when EV fires happen in places like garages under buildings, because that makes it hard for fire fighters to dump the 40,000+ gallons of water needed to keep battery fires cool enough that they don't explode.
EV fires are just an artifact of the first generation battery chemistry. Within a few years EVs will largely have switched to LFP and nobody will worry about it any more. I mean, car fires still happen, ICE vehicles are much more prone to fire than EVs for example, but LFP has a much less flammable electrolyte.
Entirely impractical. The Back To The Future car-mounted fusion plant isn't going to be a thing, sorry.
You might be able to capture methane produced at a dump and use it to drive generators, but that's effectively waiting for large scale decomposition to happen.
Yes and, unfortunately, conversation around these issues always falls into the Communism vs. Capatalism line of debate rather than ossification of systems consolidation of power - the far more impactful topic.
I understand "ossification of systems consolidation of power" as centralized planning, which is socialism, as opposed to laissez-faire capitalism. But, I'm guessing you mean something else. What do you mean?
Essentially, yes—they're both examples of centralized planning, where the conceit of politicians drives complex economic systems arbitrarily, resulting in chaos.
Significant GHG reductions could be made by simply converting the engines to natural gas. This would allow existing vehicle assets to reach the end of their useful lifetime and allow for battery electric tech to catch up.
As long as these part of the fleet are seen as a justifiable exemption, they can still deploy EV wherever possible. It's not a defeat in itself, just that the current technology still needs to figure out some shortfalls.
It is not just for snow plowing. It is also for garbage collection. At snow plow time, other city fleets of trucks are not moving. So that supplies the other battery packs.
Or swapping for an aux battery pack. I'm not sure the plow weight is a big issue, compared to the wet snow. Also I'm assuming they're not picking up garbage at the same time.
Heated driveways (and heated sidewalks) are a real thing for wealthy homeowners who do not want to clear snow. It is a neat idea, but I also find it an appalling waste of resources.
I dunno, "we've made things worse but someone will come along and make it better" is not exactly confidence inspiring. Especially given the amount of wasted money/resources you will generate along the way.
Not great framing because nobody made electric vehicles worse, they started off at a certain level of performance and then they'll just improve from there.
Now you could say well we made snow plowing worse, and of course in this specific example you'd be right, but you'd be ignoring longer time horizons and not really comparing or accounting for the impact of negative externalities.
An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window. You wouldn't say "things are worse now!", you'd recognize that you're making a change which is better over the long term.
> An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window.
A more apt analogy would be if the new window was not even invented yet.
Yeah, I don't understand this pattern of comment-making on the internet. For whatever reason, your comment was downvoted slightly so then you got targeted by people over and over again, even in subsequent replies, with the least generous interpretation of every comment made. I suspect your initial comment also triggered a reaction in saying "it's not a big deal", to which a bunch of people thought, "Oh yeah, well it's a real big deal actually!" despite this being a single article about a very specific situation in NYC, something HN readers will forget about in less than two weeks.
I do not see the point in downvotes on this site. It seems like any slightly political article/discussion results in this sort of behavior.
HN's guidelines are to downvote if something doesn't add to the discussion.
I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".
In that case, I'm not sure your comment added much to the discussion either. But the OP generically asked what the solution was, and the generic solution as far as I can tell is the long march of progressively better technology. It's very clear that the tech will continue to improve and is only in its infancy. Had the OP asked something like "what specific improvements can we expect to see in battery weight reduction and charging speeds so that this won't be an issue in the future" I probably wouldn't have replied because I don't know the specifics.
It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.
That's not a good analogy because in this case the snow plows still plow so some snow is still removed. To use your analogy then they would have sold existing plow-capable trucks and not had any to plow, but that wasn't the case.
The concern here is that the stopgap measure (the tarp/electric trucks) are implemented too early. The superior replacement window does not yet exist. There is no need to remove the older window and deal with a hole in the side of your house for half a year while you wait for new windows to hit the market.
As an EV owner. I can use my car in about 95% cases: that’s plenty! Way cheaper than gas, no maintenance required, super comfortable, etc. The remaining 5% is when I need to drive somewhere rough or when it’s very cold outside and I have concerns about getting stuck.
There is no way I will give up the convenience of EV for those 5%.
All of the above. Must Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric.
>ust Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric.
That's just high tech engineer fantasy though.
Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day. Electrical is great for cyclical but batteries just don't support the energy density to do it all day. You can theoretically bridge the gap real well with a hybrid system but it's only theoretical because in the real world other people's money is not actually an unlimited resource and you're not getting a turbine into anything cheaply. There's a reason you only see them in vehicles that are already fantastically expensive (tanks) and benefit greatly from some of the specific performance attributes. It would be really cool though...
Right now the trucks can do 1/3 of what they need with the batteries they have. Commercial vehicles like this are very much constrained by weight. The "nearly free" and shovel ready solution is to just raise the weight limit for the vehicles in question so they can pack on the other 2/3 of the batteries they need and let them roll around at 120k+ all day like concrete trucks. Sure you'll get a little more wear and tear on stuff but this solution doesn't require an unforeseen technology (battery) or economic (turbines) breakthrough.
> Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day.
Right. This would certainly apply to the mechanically coupled turbine truck prototypes from the 70's.
But if its driving a generator then you can let batteries or capacitors handle the cyclic loads of acceleration and have a computer throttle the turbine according to the overall demand.
This technology has been talked about lately in the context of Abrams tanks which could potentially be used in Ukraine. Doesn't it burn a lot more fuel?
Yes! But that might be a penalty you’re willing to make versus long turnaround times, especially if you’re in NYC vs a harsh military theater and fueling infra is solved.
The truck doesn’t care if the battery slab is pulled and replaced with another battery or a hybrid powertrain, it just cares it has enough power to accelerate and decelerate.
Swappable batteries is how some countries are migrating to ev for motorcycle/scooter taxis, just swap batteries and keep moving passengers. The cost savings seems to be worth it, read that its about 75% savings against fuel costs.
The easy solutions will go first, working its way up with better tech and design.
I think car/fleet size batteries isn't really feasible with swapping batteries. Small scooter batteries seems like a no brainer.
I don't know about this. I don't think battery swapping scales up very well.
Firstly, I know someone who works on Daimler's electric trucks and he assures me that their electric powertrains are EXTREMELY dangerous just from the amount of power represented. Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.
Secondly, the economics - the battery pack on a Tesla already represents over half of the materials and manufacturing cost. And it's the only scarce thing about EVs. If you are a fleet operator and have to maintain a bank of batteries to charge, you may as well just buy the bodies to go with.
So I would guess that in an EV fleet future where the cost of batteries has dropped significantly, you will probably see the size of the fleets increase as operating costs drop.
> Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.
To be fair, union operators express negative interest in anybody outside their union doing anything that might be construed as otherwise the union's work.
Well, in this case, someone was really badly electrocuted when trying to connect the power leads between the truck battery and motor. So customers apparently "noped" out of wanting them self-serviceable.
> you will probably see the size of the fleets increase
This is already happening with municipal bus and school bus fleets. The bus count is over-provisioned to allow for the longer electric 'refueling' times.
As fleet managers understand, when a vehicle is being refueled it is out of service.
Citibike wants to connect to the city grid so they don't need to send technicians to every station to swap dead batteries. It's not too much of a stretch to think that, perhaps, the stations could recharge truck batteries, too, at some point. Many fewer residents bike during the winter, let alone during a snow storm, so you could, conceivably, sacrifice a bike space or two or five in December-February (or just when you know snow is coming). Stations are ubiquitous by now: especially in the denser areas, there's one every few blocks.
That's assuming you can deal with safety, theft and other related issues.
The other point I forgot to make is that, during a storm, you could ground a lot of other non-essential electric vehicles, e.g. buses, and place their batteries strategically throughout the city (at a bike station, or empty parking spots). Once the emergency is over, you're not stuck with a lot of excess inventory. That, again, assumes a lot: common batteries, etc.
Its already being used at the scooter level, scales fine there for small applications where batteries are as easy to replace as filling the tank of gas.
Solid state batteries show promise. But honestly for a set or requirements like this, just using traditional fuel + paying for carbon sequestration would probably be a cheaper option.
It's ultimately heating the atmosphere above them. I heard this planed had some trouble with thermal balance recently, things were getting too hot.
In seriousness, heating streets with abundant solar energy harvested nearby would be reasonable. But sunshine in winter months is not as intense, and you'd have to build, as usual, a huge battery to keep the energy for the night. (When this is solved, more problems would get solved along the way than just de-snowing streets.)
Looks, I get that I'm biased being in Canada, but do they understand that you can buy dedicated vehicles for plowing snow? They're called... snowplows. They're pretty fantastic.
You need garbage trucks every day, all year. Electrify those. You need snowplows on a handful of days per year- and that number is falling thanks to climate change. So buy purpose-built snowplows for those days that use fuels instead of batteries.
But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.
NYC has 30,000 streets and only a handful of days of snow in the year. By having garbage trucks that can deal with a few inches of snow, you avoid the need of buying dozens of dedicated vehicles that will rot 360 days a year.
You said a separate fleet is better “for the folks and the budget” of New York, and added a parenthetical clarifying that it isn’t the answer. I’m agreeing with the second sentence, that a separate fleet isn’t the answer. I’m also refuting the first point, that it’s better than the status quo.
Not a separate fleet, just electrifying the trucks somehow would be beneficial (depending on how that's done, of course - not with coal-fired charging stations on every block).
I'm just trying to include the factor of climate change, which does and will cost a ton.
Might the better option be a hybrid truck, which runs on electricity 90% of the time but has the capacity to use fossil fuels in situations such as these? (snow is but one example, I can imagine other exceptional circumstances where such a vehicle might need an extra boost).
To balance your suggestion, the environmental cost of constructing, shipping, and maintaining a fleet of single-purpose snow plows is not close to zero.
Along the same line, can we modularize these trucks? Like the specific parts useful for snowplowing, can we take them off the rest of the year (less gas wasted) and add them back on only when needed
Or can you show the conversion saves resources even when you have to buy and maintain dozens of extra vehicles?
This seems to me like you’re making a negative decision just because you find it emotionally satisfying, without any reasonable basis to believe that it improves things.
I was gonna suggest that they could simply share the snow plow vehicles for the rest of the year with other countries (like how we share firefighters with Australia) but then I realized the part of the world that would most likely need them when NYC doesn't is the opposite hemisphere and those vehicles are not easy to ship lol
I don't think it snows enough in big Australian cities :D And there aren't (yet) electric super-jumbo cargo planes to ship these mechanical monstrosities.
First: I don't go out in snow beyond a couple of blocks, things can wait. But that's me.
Second: Just because the snow stops falling doesn't mean the problem goes away. The snow can take a couple of weeks to melt (essentially until the next rain, or a hot enough day), so stopping and waiting for nature to resolve the situation on its own would shut down the city for a month or so every year.
I wonder how much it would cost to heat the roads rather than plow them, and how that would compare to the current solution, long-term. NYC already has an extensive underground infrastructure ...
There's a lot to be said that we should rethink logistics and emergency services to use other modes if it's more resilient to severe weather, supply chain shortages (fuel) - or everyday things like traffic and construction
You really don’t want that. I mean, if you’re sure things are going to stay below -10°C for the forseeable future, by all means leave the snow on the roads, and I wish more places in Northern Europe would do that. (Winter days become much more tolerable when what little light you have is reflected back by snow.)
But if they are not and especially if they are going back and forth, then you’re getting slush, half-frozen slush, frozen slush packed into ice, or half-frozen slush on top of frozen slush packed into ice, and not only do you not want to drive on that, it’s also a pain to remove even from pedestrian paths, because you need power tools to break it up and then you have a crapton of inch-thick sheets of ice you have to transport and dump to melt somewhere. They take a couple of weeks to melt naturally on the road, or a couple of months under the spring sun if you pile them up on the side of the road (which also happens to look hideous).
With that luxury, sure. Emergencies happen. The garbage needs to be picked up.
Total the costs of icy sidewalk slip and falls, lost economic activity, and excess deaths (QALY) over 10 years. Spend 1/4 of that on a series of underground passageways (un)like MIT.
What you are describing is overspeccing (thus over paying upfront and for maintenance) of the large fleet in order to avoid having a small fleet.
Alternatively, the large fleet could be appropriately specced and the small fleet can be “mothballed” the rest of the year, thus preserving its longevity.
> large fleet I order to avoid having a small fleet
The large fleet is “2,230 general collection trucks, 275 specialized collection trucks, 450 street sweepers, 365 snowplows, 298 front end loaders, and 2,360 support vehicles” [1]. Those general collection trucks, together with the plows, constitute a circa 2,300-plow snow fleet [2].
Dedicated fleet means buying 2,000 more snowplows. There is no small fleet option.
> snowplows a few days per year that you need them
NYC has 6,300 miles miles of streets. Maintaining an entirely separate fleet of plow vehicles large enough to clear the streets quickly would have its own additional costs.
Because NYC is entirely different than where you live, most likely.
City gov subsidizes trash pick up instead of allowing private companies to bid, because any private company would lose money.
And if no city subsidized trash pick up, New York will be New Delhi.
I don't understand how NYC couldn't make money for a private trash company. The trash company I use makes money, and our population density isn't anywhere near what it is in NYC. I have to imagine the largest cost is fuel, and it stands to reason that it takes much more fuel to get all of the trash where I live.
I don't understand what you're saying, I guess. I don't understand how a city being large can just automatically lead to a loss for trash companies.
There are complicating factors in NYC, as well as the fact that the average resident doesn’t pay what it actually costs for trash pickup, so moving to a private model would cost significantly more for each household. (Obviously TINSTAAFL, and this cost is just hidden in other ways. Eg taxes)
The mob ran waste hauling for businesses who did (and still do) have to contract with private companies to take away their waste- the big trial that is supposed to have got rid of most of the mob control of this business was in the mid-90s.
Residential trash in NYC is hauled away by city employees at the Department of Sanitation, and has been since the late 19th century.
Both, though, expect trash (whether from a business or from an apartment building) to be simply piled up in bags on the sidewalk.
Most of NYC does not have the physical space for dumpsters or the roadway access for dumpster lifting garbage trucks.
There are some large buildings where it would be practical, but much of the residential housing consists of buildings with <10 apartments and no alleyways (let alone driveways).
Public services can be cheaper, more reliable, and you have more control than if you pay someone else to maximize their profit. NYC government has tons of experience and expertise in managing something like this.
Just like private services need to generate shareholder profits. that doesn't mean cheaper either.
Would I rather pay garbage through taxes and fees or would I rather pay garbage and private profits through fees? In general, public services treat employees better, are more accountable to elected officials (good and bad) and aren't obligated to skim an extra little bit off the top to pay someone else. There are countless examples of privatization making services less efficient in the long run, it's not an automatic win.
Sod off with this, I've seen someone literally hospitalised because of an army of private sector contractors we've had to deal with finding ingenious efficiency savings, powered by ideologues like you. Now our costs have tripled.
Oh, and guess f*king what; now several other suppliers are bankrupt, taking their already mostly-worthless support contracts with them, because they never invested a cent in resilience, and, get this, are blaming us for giving them that power. The same power they were so adamant, just like you, that they were so good at wielding. Their only efficiency ever was stripping all resilience, not inefficency - deliberate resilience.
The private sector is made of goddamn children at times,
First of all we have both. Second of all we are a democracy, and I have never once in my entire life living here heard for anyone call for privatizing the Department of Sanitation. If anything I've heard for calls to take over private sanitation because it way more dangerous to pedestrians and workers
> Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though?
We have both: “New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY)…serves residential buildings, government agencies, and many nonprofit facilities. The private system is regulated by the City’s Business Integrity Commission (BIC) and consists of more than 250 waste hauling firms licensed to remove non-construction and non-industrial waste. The private haulers serve businesses ranging from small pizza parlors to large office buildings” [1]. The public system guarantees minimum service to the population.
Perhaps because it's easy to add a connector plate and a bit of hydraulic in front of a truck and they already have them for garbage, they regularly run the on roads and their driver knowing where garbage containers are avoid some classic (at least here in UE) where the snowplowers push/launch snow everywhere not caring about anything else then keep the road clear... In a city handling snow it's even harder than in the countryside...
> But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.
Keeping up two fleet is not that cheap either: trucks/wheeled vehicles need to run regularly to keep their wheel well round and balanced, ICEs need to run regularly to keep the engine well lubed, starter and service batteries need to be kept charged, vehicles need to be parked somewhere (two fleets, twice the place), for ICEs you need to keep the fuel infra ready, and the amount of fuel it's not so little and so on.
IMVHO as an EV owner I doubt ALL trucks can be electric so far, simply range, charge time, battery weight are still below a practical usability levels...
They should buy and maintain a separate fleet of trucks for those few days per year? This is NYC; that's going to be a lot of trucks. Even parking them - for 3xx days per year - would be a problem.
They already have a fleet; it seems like a creative, effective solution - the kind of creativity that cynics say government lacks - to repurpose them for snow removal.
Actually hold on, we can also put people on these trucks. They can also serve as busses! And wait, attach a trailer and they can also replace semi trucks! Just use one truck to do all city related things, how neat is that? /s
You can just go on, making it less and less efficient each step.
Thankfully the physical requirements to turn a garbage trunk into a snow plow are minimal. And it's more inefficient to have an idle fleet for huge parts of the year than to use slightly awkward plows.
You literally just described a pickup truck, the highest selling car/truck in America. They're used as busses, all kinds of repair trucks, they can go in railroad tracks, etc.
Point is, a truck that plows snow and a truck that is a trash truck are mostly the same thing. You take a diesel cab truck chassis, and add either a plow or a trash compactor to it. It's also easy to add both.
It's not as if the trash trucks in cities that don't use them to plow are some highly specialized thing. They're the same trucks as new york has, just no plow. A plow bolts on.
Nit: They don't do both at the same time. The trucks are either plowing snow or they're picking up trash. That's why the trash piles up until the snow is cleared. After big storms you can end up with pretty epic piles of garbage collecting on sidewalks.
Agree, but I would argue that 'climate change' is not making it fall necessary across the board for all use cases; what I notice here in Colorado is that we might get fewer snow days, but when we do get snow now, wow, it's crazy how much dumps.
Another way of looking at this is, I used to get by with a ~$250 dollar electric snowblower; that thing died just last week when I asked too much of it trying to rid 10+ inches of very heavy, wet snow off our long driveway.
I'll be replacing it with nice Toro gas powered snow blower (~$1000-1500) because I expect the same / worse going forward. Fewer snow days, but when it does snow, it's a lot more than we used to get.
Well for one the tubes are not something you just dump something on, and if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your garbage in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
The weirdness of climate change is that warm air holds more water. So you'll get stronger storms, but some areas will see drought as the atmosphere holds more water and is less likely to give it up as rain/snow.
So, less days on average, but more "once in an X" storms.
Fewer vehicles to acquire, maintain, store, etc. That seems self evident.
Further, the scheme works fine. The issue isn't whether plowing snow and collecting garbage with the same vehicle is a workable idea. The issue is that there isn't an electric replacement available yet.
The title of the post is not the same as the title of the article, and it's wrong. The problem isn't that the plows aren't powerful enough; it's that they can only plow for four hours before running out of battery life, and the city wants plows to last twelve hours.
A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options.
NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.