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NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

gothamist.com

61–70 of 579 posts

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#61

I'm surprised, I thought the electric engines would supply more torque. Thereby making it easier to plow snow.

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,"

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#62

I'm surprised, I thought the electric engines would supply more torque. Thereby making it easier to plow snow.

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#63

I'm surprised, I thought the electric engines would supply more torque. Thereby making it easier to plow snow.

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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.

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#66
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying this for years. 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 woul…

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).

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#68

I'm surprised, I thought the electric engines would supply more torque. Thereby making it easier to plow snow.

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...

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#69
post #12

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…

They say all of that, and more in the article.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#70
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.

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