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

> 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.

This, This, This.

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.

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.

> so EVs eliminate idling.

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.

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.