First Mass-Produced Electric Truck Unveiled (nhk.or.jp) 123
AmiMoJo shares a report from NHK WORLD: Japan's Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus has unveiled what it says is the world's first mass-produced electric truck, as automakers around the world go all out to develop cars that run on battery power. The vehicle can carry about 3 tons of cargo and travel about 100 kilometers on a single charge. The truck, unveiled on Thursday, will be used by Japan's largest convenience store chain, Seven-Eleven. Seven-Eleven President Kazuki Furuya says some people complain about the noise delivery vehicles make, and says he is very impressed at how quiet the electric truck is.
An people will complain (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
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Every physical object produced has a mass, doesn't it?
Re:First? (Score:5, Informative)
Not even close to "first electric truck of the century". Some companies have been at this for ages. Smith Electric Vehicles, for example, started with electric delivery trucks in the 1920s, switched to milk floats, then in the modern era back to full-sized electric delivery trucks.
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Not even close to "first electric truck of the century". Some companies have been at this for ages. Smith Electric Vehicles, for example, started with electric delivery trucks in the 1920s, switched to milk floats, then in the modern era back to full-sized electric delivery trucks.
Indeed... I remember in the 1980's we still had an electric milk float that would come around our village delivering milk to all the doorstops.
Of course the blue tits (type of bird you pervs) would peck through the foil lids on the milk bottles to go after the milk.
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But the 1920s was last century. :-)
Milk floats (Score:5, Informative)
Electric trucks were in common use from about 1900 till about 1970:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbilt_Electric_Trucks
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Those don't count. Only Japanese things count. In a pinch, Chinese will do.
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Electric trucks were in common use from about 1900 till about 1970:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just think. 80 years from now some company in Japan might produce the first mass produced Internal Combustion Engine truck.
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It is possible to produce silicon based liquid fuels (don't find a good english link).
It is energy intensive to produce them, but it could be a solution for situations where you you are for a long time off grid.
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Yes, 10 mph/1 ton milk floats (i.e. only usable for use within cities) are totally the same thing as a 50 mph/5 ton general-purpose truck.
(rolleyes)
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No, Toyota Landcruiser (70/200), Land Rover Discovery, Jeep Grand Cherokee can tow 3.5 tons. Carry capacity is 1 ton or less.
In Europe, nobody uses large SUVs or pickups. Instead, they use vans (with up to 3.5 ton GVW). The next step up is a lorry in the class of the Canter, i.e. 3-5 ton load capacity and empty weight in the region of 3 tons. Both are more convenient than an SUV with a large trailer.
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It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
Just do what electric car manufacturers are already doing, put some speakers on the car and play a distinct whizzing noise when the vehicle is moving that intensifies when the driver steps on the accelerator. If pedestrians smartphone zombies become a major problem we can always take the pedestrian detection AI from self driving cars, install it in these trucks and have it play a very loud recording of a shrill female voice yelling in a cranky tone of voice (think Michelle Wolf) the words: "LOOOK OUT!!! ...
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So we're back at neighbours complaining about noisy delivery trucks :D.
Personally I'm all for pedestrians not having right of way and drivers being protected from liability when pedestrians show an IQ level just below ground coffee.
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Misogynist! (Score:1)
Don't you mean "She". Equal Opportunity for All!
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Many ICE cars are so quiet that they rival electric. The whole pedestrian thing is FUD. If anyone really wants to reduce pedestrian deaths then they need to support the police in writing more traffic tickets for the red light runners and other reckless drivers... and jay walkers.
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If pedestrians smartphone zombies become a major problem we can always take the pedestrian detection AI from self driving cars, install it in these trucks and have it play a very loud recording of a shrill female voice yelling in a cranky tone of voice (think Michelle Wolf) the words: "LOOOK OUT!!! ...you brainless smartphone zombie!" every time one of them seems likely to wander onto the road.
Make it the voice of Mallory Archer and you've got a deal.
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Actually not a bad idea to make the noise user-customizable, otherwise jaywalkers will simply learn to tune out this new warning noise.
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If it ends up working anything like cell phone ringtones, I expect that to be the case.
The loud, obnoxious case.
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Our hybrid Outlander makes a sort of whirring noise at low speeds so you can hear it coming. It's not one of the components making that noise - it's actually made deliberately and turned off once you're moving a bit quicker (when normal road noise is enough). It doesn't seem like lack of noise is a hard problem to solve.
As for headphones... I turn mine up a notch or two when I'm walking along main roads and down again when I get onto quieter roads. Again, seems like a solved problem.
What's not solved though
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>
What's not solved though is the dirt produced by ICE engines in trucks and buses. Electric's a nice step forward in that regard.
Not really, you're just moving the 'dirt' from your backyard to someone else's. But it's still being produced and thrown into the global ecosystem.
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It's still far better to rely on electricity for small-scale transportation wherever we can. Some areas have green power. In my state, for instance, most of our power is generated from hydro. For other areas, we're transitioning over time to cleaner energy generation, so we'll see bigger improvements as more of our power is generated pollution-free.
I'd also argue that even if power is generated from dirtier sources like coal, I think it's arguably better to have fewer of those dirty sources to deal with,
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And even if an electric car is powered 100% by coal, its emissions will be about the same as a Prius today. Any improvements over time will only make that better.
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Ah, see, there's the breakdown - I include the environmental cost of manufacturing, not just run-time emissions.
Cheap solar panel and lithium battery production are absolute hell on Mother Earth.
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Cheap solar panel and lithium battery production are absolute hell on Mother Earth.
Says who? The oil companies?
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How about IEEE? [ieee.org]
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That article points out a lot of the problem is with lax environmental regulations in China. You don't say... Chinese factories taking a dump on mother earth to turn a greater profit? Color me shocked. We went through the same sort of idiocy, and passed stricter laws to prevent that sort of thing in the US and in most first-world countries. If "green" products are actually important to us, we'll eventually demand reasonably high standards from anyone we buy from, probably enforced by trade laws.
Everythi
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That article points out a lot of the problem is with lax environmental regulations in China. You don't say... Chinese factories taking a dump on mother earth to turn a greater profit? Color me shocked.
Right, but that's non-sequitur to the point - "green" isn't actually "green," it's NIMBY.
We went through the same sort of idiocy, and passed stricter laws to prevent that sort of thing in the US and in most first-world countries.
Citation? I honestly don't know what industry you're referring to.
If "green" products are actually important to us, we'll eventually demand reasonably high standards from anyone we buy from, probably enforced by trade laws.
No, it's if "green" products are more important to the majority of consumers than cost-efficiency.
Which it's not, and I wager, probably never will be. At least, not until we go full Star Trek and abolish money (so, sticking with "probably never").
Everything we do at an industrial scale will have some environmental cost. There's no getting around that. Windmills or solar collectors slaughter birds. Dams block fishing runs and disrupt natural aquatic environments. Nuclear is potentially dangerous and produces toxic by-products. But I think it's important not to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Oh, I don't disagree. My issue is with the pie-in-the-sky thinking about our current state of renewable energy
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And, why is the stupidity of others my concern?
Short Answer?
Lawsuits.
It's ridiculously easy to sue someone else for your own stupid mistakes.
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If those trucks can hit roads then surely they can hit pedestrians too.
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It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
Natural selection will fix that within a couple of generations.
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Presumably it has some kind of warning noise at low speed. The Nissan Leaf, for example, makes a whooshing sound from a speaker in the wheel well when it's going under 30 kph.
Last I heard the EU was considering making it mandatory for electric vehicles, and I imagine other countries will do likewise. Interestingly the UK model of the Leaf has a button to turn it off, as required by laws mainly intended for noisy ice cream vans and the like.
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What do you mean "how can"? The quietness of these sleek trucks does not inhibit pedestrians from being absorbed in their smartphones. (Not necessarily absorbed listening to music.)
As for listening to music with headphones and being unable to hear traffic. Either turn down, or turn off the music, or become a nominee for the prestigious
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Maybe they can put a playing card in the tire spokes. Worked when I was a kid.
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It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
It's possibly a valid complaint, e.g. for people with impaired vision who rely on audio cues to know when traffic is clear.
It's also easy to address -- just add a speaker to the front of the vehicle that emits some sort of noise when appropriate.
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It's also easy to address -- just add a speaker to the front of the vehicle that emits some sort of noise when appropriate.
When I was a wee lad the haunted house at The Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, CA was wacky and weird. These days it is a completely formula trip through a haunted house, but back then it was a lot of blackness, and random stuff coming out of the blackness. The most scary of those things in my book (having successfully been taught to stay out of the street from a young age) was a pretty decent outline of a GM New Look bus [wikipedia.org] (which made up the main part of the SCMTD fleet at the time) and a good surround sound bus hor
Too bad you didn't link to any HTML (Score:5, Funny)
When I clicked the link, all I got was a page that made it clear that it was a Javascript site, not a HTML site.
Here are three links which are higher quality than the garbage you linked to this story: one [truckinginfo.com] two [bloomberg.com] three [ccjdigital.com]. Is this site news for nerds, or dick-jerking for people who don't care if the web goes to shit? Clearly, the latter.
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You could at least give direct links to the Disney princesses pages.
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http://disneyprincess.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Disney_Princesses
I had to search long and hard for that link. It totally was not in my bookmarks or anywhere else on my computer. It took me ages to find it. Yeah. Ages and ages.
You're welcome.
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Giggity.
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But there is the StreetScooter GmbH [streetscooter.eu], which has already manufactured about 3000 of their light delivery trucks.
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I'm pretty sure unibody construction is patented by Apple. At least that's the impression I got when I watched the brainwas- I mean keynotes.
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For a van, the SteetScooter would have to be an unibody construction.
Vans mostly aren't unibody, except minivans. Some vehicles are in the middle, like the Sprinter or the Astro, but real vans are full-frame.
Trucks are defined by law, and that definition varies from location to location.
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Almost all vans are unibody and have been for decades. I don't think I have ever seen one that isn't.
You certainly have, because the Sprinter is only a half-unibody. It has a front subframe. The full-size Dodge and Ford vans which didn't change for basically forever are full-frame; they absolutely dominate number of units sold.
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Ford vans are much less common than VW, Fiat and Renault vans and I have never even seen a Dodge van (or any Dodge for that matter), so I highly doubt that what you claim is true.
Overseas Ford sold a zillion different things as the Transit van, meaning no one of them was sold in massive numbers. But over here, Ford sold the same thing as the Econoline from the seventies until very very recently, with Chevy and Dodge each selling their own very similar vehicle for almost the same period. They kept the same body and almost the same frame for decades.
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Over here in Ye Olde Worlde, van models also have very long lifespans, although they are replaced every 10-15 years or so. Vans are expected to be utilitarian and proven mechanicals are more important than handling or fashionable designs, so technology and designs don't age so much and margins are razor-thin, so investing in new models isn't very interesting.
That's exactly why we stuck with our vans for so very, very long. All they changed were things like door handles, headlights, grilles and so on, and of course interiors. We did the same with pickup trucks; Ford ran the same body style from 1980 to 1997! They put three different sets of hood, fenders, and headlight/grill package on it. From '80-86 is the Bullnose, '87-91 is Bricknose, and '92-96 F150 and & '92-97 F250/350 are called OBS, or Old Body Style. But really, they're all one body style, with two
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It's remarkable that Ford never sold the Transit in their home market for the first 48 years, despite the succes in the UK (especially).
Insert obvious comment about fuel prices and the sizes of roads (and Americans) here. Most Americans reject minivans.
Europeans tend to use vans, trucks or trailers for the type of thing where a pickup bed would be useful.
More than once the Top Gear crew has remarked that you couldn't use a pickup in the UK because as soon as you stopped, whatever you were carting would get nicked out the back. I guess we really do have less petty crime here in the USA, because I've often driven to multiple errands and put lots of stuff in the back of my pickup, and it's all made it home. And I live in a relatively high-crime
The Follies of Public Transportation (Score:2)
I am curious: do you have to pay anything to ride them?
(In the US) one aspect of public transportation that has always mystified me is, why don't they let you ride it for free?
The two major justifications for public transportation is usually something like the following:
1) it will reduce traffic congestion from private cars, and-
2) it will benefit low-income people.
By my thinking it fails on both counts.
1) public munic
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Public transportation is supposed to serve the general public, it may not serve everyone. It would be nice to see it offered for "free" but we're not there yet as a society. However, self-driving vans may get us closer than buses have done.
Buses are, in a word, crap. They are heavy, which means they have to spend a lot of energy speeding up and slowing down; even with regeneration, it's still a real issue. It also means they do massively more road damage than do cars or vans. And they put you in a box with
Far from the first. (Score:2)
There have been electric delivery trucks for decades.
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I don't know about the rest of the EU, but in the UK we don't really use the term "truck" for heavy goods vehicles, they are called "lorries". Truck tends to be used for smaller or specialised vehicles, e.g. "pickup truck", "pallet truck", "forklift truck"
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In Germany we had that, too. :D - no idea.
Probably we still have
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We have that in California, too. Any pickup over a certain pretty pathetic size, I think all 1/2 ton trucks but definitely all 3/4 ton trucks, is registered as a commercial vehicle so as to produce more revenue. This is completely regardless of whether it's being used for business or not. This jacks the registration fee for my F240 from around $100 to around $250. It only weighs 5500lb, American cars used to weigh around that much.
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I was watching on YouTube a video from the UK of a truck looking very much like the one in this story. Similar shape and size. And it was a film promoting electric delivery vehicles from the early 1980s.
excellent (Score:1)
These are definitely exciting times to be living in. Traditionally diesel trucks were horrific for the environment, the addition of DEF was an overall improvement but is realistically a band aid over a hemorrhaging wound when it comes to emissions.
I used to be a truck driver, however have now switched to coding. Seeing my old profession finally grow up and get their collective stuff together is fantastic.
I recall heavy hauling steel being most challenging because traditional diesel engines do not really p
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Sony is crap.
BOSE may not have the best-sounding headphones on the market, but they do have the best noise-cancelling technology. Of course, earplugs are still better.
Any of these are pointless anyway as I'm pretty sure it's illegal to use them while driving.
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My friend, you sure brought back some memories by mentioning those long, lazy hill/valleys around Toronto. I never paid the least attention to them until one time I was driving a five-speed manual with a slipping clutch. I did exactly what you did, but with a little Elantra full of passengers rather than a huge rig full of steel.
Lots of jokes at my expense, and a fairly cheap repair job at the end of the trip.
100Km? That's it? (Score:1)
Wow, it will go 62 miles on a charge and take a couple of hours to charge (presumably).
Yea, this is a game changer... Now you will need to keep all delivery routes under 60 miles, limit them to 2 per 8 hour day per truck, you will need to plan for extended recharging times when you are done (or simply buy multiple trucks for each driver) AND you will need to install and power a fleet of fast chargers at each loading dock you use. This is going to cost a lot of profit...
I could be wrong but I just don't s
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Seems pretty useful for getting stuff around town. I'm not sure how far they come from, but the trucks pulling up to the supermarket across the street where I used to live seemed to be coming pretty much constantly. They wouldn't stop for 2 hours, I'll grant you (probably less than an hour), but they'd still get some charge in that time. Stopping even 50% of those trucks spewing out diesel fumes would probably make a noticeable difference to air quality in the area.
Sure, the ones that do 200 miles to get wh
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Seems pretty useful for getting stuff around town. I'm not sure how far they come from, but the trucks pulling up to the supermarket across the street ...
You realize that those trucks are probably long-haul OTR, not local traffic, right? So they need be able to travel hundreds of miles and refuel quickly.
Hell, an average route for FedEx is 160mi/day. In town. I just don't see how a lorry that can go less than half that distance before shutting down for the workday is in any way feasible.
Full disclosure, I am an American who lives in the Midwest, which is a different environment than Japan. You could fit the whole island chain in Missouri with plenty of room
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I think this might be a good fit for a company like 7-11. Each store is getting fairly small deliveries, that all likely come from a central distribution point near/in the city. The cost to install a quick charger isn't that much for a business, I think around $1000. If at each stop, the truck is plugged in for the 15-20 minutes it takes to unload, it should make it through the day.
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In a small Japanese prefecture, sure.
I just doubt that it would necessarily scale effectively in a nation that takes up a much larger geographic footprint than Japan. As I pointed out, the average daily drive for a single FedEx driver is around 160 miles per diem (and can go from empty to full in minutes); this electric box truck maxes out at around 60 miles before needing to park for 8 hours.
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They've got a flat surface on top that will hold about 30m^2 solar panel, and they spend a large amount of their time parked for loading/unloading. I wouldn't consider it for charging, but would work as a "range extender".
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The truck is not for cross-country deliveries, but for city deliveries, where the distances are short and the need to reduce pollution is the greatest. It's a perfect fit. And if it wasn't for the fact it was designed and built by dirty foreigners and that they literally BEAT YOU TO IT, you'd be singing praises I think.
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It's actually a Daimler brand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation is owned by Daimler. So it's German AND Japanese.
Also, these very same trucks were presented in US as well, about a month ago. [caranddriver.com]
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Grand-dad is not happy about that union.
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Grand-dad is not happy about that union.
Just tell him that the Mitsubishi Zero was made out of Alcoa aluminum, and see how that goes over.
Is Daimler the world's biggest truck manufacturer or what? Mercedes, Freightliner, Mitsubishi Fuso...
I guess UPS built theirs by hand then for years (Score:4, Informative)
from a couple of years ago..
'UPS Deploys 18 New Zero Emission Electric Trucks In Texas '
https://pressroom.ups.com/pres... [ups.com]
In Amsterdam (Netherlands) they have been using electric trucks for at least 5 years.
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In my town about half of the UPS trucks are electric.
The german Post announced a few weeks ago to form its own electric truck building company
http://www.dpdhl.com/en/media_... [dpdhl.com]
Electruck? (Score:2, Funny)
The first electric truck, and they didn't call it the "Electruck"?
Exciting new excuses (Score:2)
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"Um, use that one over there. We're a big company. We have more than one truck."
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Summary's not even right (Score:2)
From the OP: "The vehicle can carry about 3 tons of cargo..." ... 9,380-pound payload capacity."
Nope: "The Class 4 truck has a
" and travel about 100 kilometers on a single charge. "
Nope. ""The Class 4 truck has a 100-mile range..."
Importantly:
"The batteries can be quick-charged within an hour at a DC charging station or over the course of eight hours using a 230-volt outlet. The vehicle will also have flexible battery options to allow customers that need less range than 100 miles to opt for fewer batteries
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I'd be curious to see how that degrades with the stop-start driving of a city delivery truck - I truly don't know how/if that impairs an electric?
It does not impair EVs. however if you have multiple stops in short order, regenerative breaking probably is not as effective (as you have low speed, and likely just let the car roll out more or less)
Well, I guess recharging while the car is packed with new stuff to deliver solves most charging problems.
But ... (Score:2)
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Nurburgring
No Unicode support yet. Thanks, åssholes.
Noisy unloading (Score:1)
I'll tell China they don't exist (Score:1)
Internal Chinese market also has electric trucks, and they're way more mass produced. They're just not for export.
Did they miss the StreetScooter? (Score:2)
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