Truck driver and innovator Chace Barber of Canada’s Edison Motors recently reeled off the perfect explanation of why expecting semi-trucks and other large vehicles to go all electric is a bad idea, and it’s a must-see clip.
Speaking at an event showing off his Edison Motors hybrid truck model, Barber was asked if he ever saw the trucking industry going fully electric instead of gas, diesel, and hybrid.
His answer about electric vehicles was illuminating.
When asked if the over-the-road trucking industry could go all EV, Barber’s initial answer was short and to the point. “No,” he said straight away.
This guy single handedly destroys the whole electric vehicle (EV) narrative in under 2 minutes, with an impressive recital of facts and common sense. https://t.co/cjE0osTEYc
— Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker ? (@Martyupnorth_2) October 30, 2023
He went on to explain, “If battery technology gets better, grid infrastructure gets better,” maybe, he added.
But it isn’t looking good so far.
“But like this truck,” he said pointing to his new hybrid logging truck, “like a logging truck uses about two and a half megawatts of power per day with extra capacity on the battery means you need a three-megawatt battery pack.”
“The biggest one is like a Tesla semi, which is like a one megawatt. So, you need three megawatts to run an electric truck,” he continued.
“That would mean you would have to pack 50,000 — 40,000, 50,000 — pounds of batteries just to do a full day,” he said.
This amount of weight added to a semi-truck would present all sorts of issues. Not only would it make it less safe on the road by increasing stopping power in an emergency, that amount of added weight also adds to the swift degradation of roads which would cause more potholes to appear faster and increase construction budgets for governments that are tasked with maintaining the road surfaces.
On top of that, insurance rates will skyrocket because EVs are not as impervious to accidents as regular vehicles. EVs are more easily damaged — causing insurers to more often rate them as “totaled” — and that causes EVs to have to be fully replaced by an insurer far, far more often than a gas-powered vehicle.
Then there is the huge problem with the power grid, Barber added.
“And then let’s say we can even get those batteries down to the same weight where it’s reasonable, the grid infrastructure — we haven’t invested in our electrical grid since the 1950s, 1960s, 70s, like you can give me an example, the logging truck in BC [British Columbia], that’s a niche industry. So, there’s 5,000 logging trucks that haul logs,” he explained.
“At two and a half megawatts of consumption per day, that’s twelve and a half gigawatts of power,” he said. “Site C dam has been under construction for the last, oh, I don’t know, the last 15 years at a cost of $20 billion, and that has a 1.1 gigawatt. So, a $20 billion dam that takes 15 years to build has a 1.1 gigawatt capacity, and logging trucks — just logging trucks alone — are using 12 and a half gigawatts. You would have to flood an area of land the size of Wales to produce that hydropower.”
“Look, we need a lot to make a fully electric feasible on the North American grid with batteries and all that,” he said of fully electric fleets of trucks.
But he did have a sensible solution.
“But if you can make it more efficient and you can make it a hybrid, and you can reduce your fuel consumption by 50 percent, and you can burn that as a generator, where it’s one R.P.M., running hot, burning cleaner,” he said.
“Well, isn’t a 50-60 percent reduction in emissions a lot better than investing everything into a fully electric technology that’s not really going to work for 90 percent of the applications, meaning that the other 100 percent are still burning 100 percent of the diesel?” Barber concluded.
The facts remain that large vehicles like buses, trucks, semis, or vehicles used for hauling and heavy-duty applications are simply not suited for electric technology as it stands today. And people just don’t want them.
The latter is also something that dealers are starting to realize as they are running out of the sort of EV early adopting customers who were excited about the technology. Dealers are now finding thousands of brand-new EVs sitting on their car lots going unsold to a country that really isn’t interested in them.
Sadly, Barber’s cautions certainly make too much sense for politicians who want to go all-in for EVs and want to force us all into them whether they are logical, feasible, or tech-ready or not.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
