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Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

techcrunch.com

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Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#171

Post by dzhiurgis »

cloudwalking wrote: post #129
leesec wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've seen this, it also looks like a submarine commercial to me. What I'm more interested in is it's specs. Can it really charge as fast as they say? Does it really have that range and acceleration? I've seen the shell of one in person, but it just seems to me if you actually could make an electric truck go 0-60 in 3 seconds and last 400 miles you would just make a video of it doing that instead of making a mark…

EV acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull out of the battery pack, which is directly proportional to the number of battery cells, which is directly proportional to overall range... On paper, yes those numbers are feasible.

Wrong. Acceleration is driven by voltage, current dictates top speed.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#172

Post by SEJeff »

sandworm101 wrote: post #131
sleepydog wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't oil used medicinally for a while after its discovery? Not ingested, but rubbed on your skin to ease joint pain?

More than for "a while". Oil was discovered hundreds, thousands, of years ago. It used to seep out of the ground in many places (See the opening sequence of The Beverly Hillbillies). Only once we started pumping it did all the surface seeps dry up.

Fun fact, it still does, in 2019, seep out of the ground in downtown Los Angeles. Literally on the miracle mile sits the La brea Tarpits. You can see the pond with oil bubbling out of the water. If you're ever in Los Angeles, it is a very memorable thing to visit.

https://tarpits.org/

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#173

Post by m463 »

dbcurtis wrote: post #130

Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I have had the experience of being out the back-country where cell phones don't work, miles from a highway, changing a truck tire by myself. If I had to spend 1 or 2 hours unloading the truck…

I don't know if this is a factor, but trucks and SUVs with externally accessible tires are at risk of theft.

Additionally, heavily loaded vehicles should really have both special care and special jacks to change the tire with a load intact.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#174

Post by riantogo »

larrywright wrote: post #84
notdonspaulding wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Normalite here, you still in the area? Would love to talk shop with a local Hacker Newser. Email in my profile if you're interested.

Wow, I would not have expected to find so many Normalites here.

Hey there. Graduated from ISU and Fat Jacks.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#175

Post by evo_9 »

leesec wrote: post #103

Honestly this is a good move, I just have a quick question: Does anyone anywhere have video footage of a Rivian actually being driven? Like, not in a commercial, someone genuinely driving it. I just want to know if they are anywhere close to having a production vehicle. If they have a single production vehicle that does what they say, then OK they "just" have to figure out scaling up the manufacturing. If they don't…

They are wintering testing in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Looks pretty legit to me.

https://electrek.co/2019/08/31/rivian-r1t-winter-testing-tie...

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#177

Post by Dylan16807 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #171
cloudwalking wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EV acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull out of the battery pack, which is directly proportional to the number of battery cells, which is directly proportional to overall range... On paper, yes those numbers are feasible.

Wrong. Acceleration is driven by voltage, current dictates top speed.

They're a little wrong, mostly by conflating current (amps) and power (watts) because of standardized cells, all with the same voltage.

This post is worse. It's easy to get any voltage you want out of a big battery pack. And it's pretty easy to convert between voltages. The hard part is sustaining whatever max voltage your motor can accept, which is a matter of power. If your motor is big enough, and your electronics are at least competent, the limiting factor is the power your battery can supply.

Edit: Like, a Model S battery supplies about 330 volts and rearranging the battery cells in a simple way would make it supply 4000 volts at lower current. You could replace the coils in the motors to accept that newer voltage and get very similar performance but with significantly higher chance of electric shock.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#178

Post by ineedasername »

choppaface wrote: post #154

And remember when Uber “ordered” 100,000 Mercedes S-Classes? https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-or... Bezos is probably trying to pressure UPS (or has some other business motive) versus target Amazon’s carbon footprint. Amazon will undoubtably grow its own delivery fleet over time, but this splashy press release is probably not entirely about climate change.

Amazon already has a delivery fleet, something like 7000 trucks along with a few dozen planes. And they're pushing very aggressively to expand their Prime 2 day shipping to 1 day, which requires even more. They also sell/lease trucks to contractors, and many of these may be earmarked for that program as well. I don't doubt at all that this is a legitimate order, even if their reason for going electric isn't all sunshine and rainbows and environmental friendliness.

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#179

Post by samb1729 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #171
cloudwalking wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EV acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull out of the battery pack, which is directly proportional to the number of battery cells, which is directly proportional to overall range... On paper, yes those numbers are feasible.

Wrong. Acceleration is driven by voltage, current dictates top speed.

For constant resistance, voltage is proportional to current so "acceleration is directly proportional to how much current you can pull" is equivalent to "acceleration is directly proportional to how much voltage you can pull". I don't think it's particularly helpful to bluntly tell someone they're wrong like this.

(Disclaimer: not an expert)

Re: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian

#180

Post by dao- »

csours wrote: post #50
jt2190 wrote: post #6

Amazon led a USD 700 000 000 investment round in Rivian last February. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/electric-truck-startup-... (Edit: change amount from thousands to millions)

So 700 000 000/100 000 would be 7 000 - So an initial investment of 7 000 per vehicle they want to buy. Now if they buy 100 000 vehicles at a rate of $100 000 each (pretty reasonable for industrial vehicles), that is 10 000 000 000 (10 Billion dollars). If it's $50k each, that will be $5B. $5-10 Billion in sales ain't too shabby.

> Now if they buy 100 000 vehicles at a rate of $100 000 each (pretty reasonable for industrial vehicles),

Ahem, electric delivery trucks built by a DHL subsidiary (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter) are selling for much less.

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