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

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

#411

Post by sh1mmer »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #386
newsclues wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 3MPG really that bad, given the size and stop and go? I assume they are 10x the load of a pickup truck and F-150s don't get 30MPG city do they?

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.

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

#412

Post by russdill »

wolverine876 wrote: post #164

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 cit…

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

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

#413

Post by CPLX »

dizzystar wrote: post #399
cogman10 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, s…

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 drivers.

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.

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

#414

Post by [deleted] »

chitowneats wrote: post #290
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planni…

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.

[deleted]

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

#415

Post by mabbo »

unregistereddev wrote: post #176
mabbo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (ar…

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 r…

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.

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

#416

Post by simfree »

bee_rider wrote: post #356
lostlogin wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One point in favor of running these lines — city already has lots of lamp posts.

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.

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

#417

Post by sangnoir »

cogman10 wrote: post #382
sethhochberg wrote: post #336

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-dis…

> 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, s…

> Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows.

Probably because they have to use regular dollars to buy one or the other: cost-effectiveness cannot be ignored.

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

wolverine876 wrote: post #164

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 cit…

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by Dalewyn »

cogman10 wrote: post #382
sethhochberg wrote: post #336

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-dis…

> 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, s…

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.

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

#420

Post by andkenneth »

Dalewyn wrote: post #419
cogman10 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, s…

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.

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.

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