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

gothamist.com

141–150 of 579 posts

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

#141
post #104

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? 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 snowplo…

We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours.

Are there any non-garbage truck BEVs with snowplows that can do that?

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

#142
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#143
post #76

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 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 dr…

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.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> only a handful of days of snow in the year I know modern economy has gone full-JIT but I naively wish we could just stop in this case and.. wait. Then this question of truck fleet would be moot.

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.

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

#145

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…

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.

That doesn’t make sense, a lithium battery is heavier than an engine in the differentials we are talking about.

The volt pretty much already is a case study for the other points. It’s not really that much work.

The later point can be resolved with software that uses the gas on occasion.

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

#146

Small problems. They should have several battery rotation stations spread out everywhere. I wonder if their trucks can do 8 hours of driving without refueling?

So you think they should buy triple the number of battery packs they actually need, in order to support snow plowing 3 or 4 times a year?

Oh, and don't forget creating fully staffed battery depots scattered around the already very full city?

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

#147
post #104

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? 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 snowplo…

We have plow trucks but we don't have a lot of room to store a huge dedicated fleet.

Also, this being hacker news I'd expect praise for efficient use of available equipment.

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

#148

> “ 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 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...

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

#149
post #104

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? 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 snowplo…

Why have garbage trucks at all when you can have a series of tubes to transport garbage?

NYC technically already has this in Roosevelt Island.

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

#150
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow? You are sort of answering your own question here. > 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.

Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though? I'm pretty sure the garbage trucks where I live are all privately owned.

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.
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