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Could trains replace diesel trucks? Would require building and maintaining a large amount of railroad, but solves the energy supply issue. Though it would probably would not help for delivering goods to smaller cities which cannot justify their own railroad.
Lot of last mile stuff done by diesel trucks, so probably not.
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Good point. Natural gas engine would be a great practical step forward, especially since the big diesel engineering shops already develop and manufacture natural gas engines.
How is making a huge financial and CO2 investment into a tech that is still fossil fuel and has to be replaced again a step forward?
If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants.
If you look at UK emissions which have been declining steadily since the 1990s, this has been in no small part due to the move to natural gas.
While it would be great to move to carbon neutral immediately, we can't do that without driving up energy prices massively and causing widespread poverty and disruption, so there is definitely room for some middle ground compromises.
On the one hand, a ton of people have giant diesel trucks for no reason other than anatomy comparisons, on the other: diesels are more fuel efficient, and have greater torque than petrol. If you compare to EVs you have to consider the working scenario for a truck that does benefit from diesel: You have a fixed amount of time under load, after which you have significant charging downtime, in the order of hours if its…
You know people who own big rigs to show off? I haven't really seen people driving those as personal vehicles before, the closest I've seen are F550 based RVs since smaller truck chassis wouldn't be legal or able to carry that much weight.
I had assumed they were using "truck" in the US sense (e.g. a ute or pickup) rather than big rigs, because wtf would you want to force trucks to use bigger and less efficient engines, instead of oversized utes which are the bigger environmental hazard.