Comment by mschuster91

A very well written article! I'd add a few things though.

> Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight.

That is only relevant when hauling bulk loads, think ore, soil and the likes, or you're carrying a trailer full of IBC liquid containers. I worked in stage lighting stuff, our trailers were at least 3/4 foam by volume, they didn't even come close to maxing out their weight.

> A battery pack storing equivalent energy would weigh on the order of 16 tonnes at current lithium-ion energy densities.

You don't need to haul a fully equivalent battery. Drivers have to have their mandatory rest breaks of 30+15 minutes here in Germany - that's enough to charge 300-400km of range. Additionally, they can be charged at loading docks, provided the freight base or the customer have chargers set up.

> For a driver paid by the mile, or on a delivery schedule measured in minutes, that overtake is rational.

Payment by mileage is illegal in Germany, as a trucker you need to be paid by the hour and you need to be paid under German minimum wage law as long as you're physically on German roads. Trucker companies from Eastern Europe are infamous for evading that, but as our customs enforcement (who also do the road inspections for rest breaks and minimum wage) ramps up, it's getting better.

The remaining problem are the dispatchers, quite a few of them hand out routes to their drivers that are barely achievable when operating legally (i.e. trucks with working speed governors, drivers taking their rest breaks). Competition is fierce, there used to be talks about passing laws to force dispatchers to not give barely-legal orders but I'm not sure where these went following our government's collapse last year.

> An electric drivetrain achieves around 90%, so you only need roughly 1,600 kWh of battery capacity for equivalent range.

Yup, and most importantly, you mentioned regenerative braking cutting down on brake wear - but it's not just cutting down there, the truck can actually save a fair amount of energy as well, at least outside of highways where the truck is mostly just coasting along.

Trucks, given the right infrastructure, are also viable for running them electrically in the mid-range nowadays as a result.