Holy yuan, Batman!

The rust free coating is a big advantage for EVs which can have severe problems with rusted brake discs. Infrequent use of friction brakes due to superior regenerative braking often leads to rust on legacy brake discs.

If reports elsewhere are true (https://electrek.co/2017/11/16/tesla-semi-live-blog/) that the cost will be $200k to $250k, then the payback time versus diesel looks like at least 4 years at 100,000 miles per year (which is on the high side of average applications, which are under 70k miles per year). There are maybe other reasons to buy it, so missing the magic 3 year payback will not be fatal. No mention of whether this is a day cab or a sleeper configuration, though it looks like the latter. No mention of energy on board. Assuming 1000 kWh, they must have efficiency down to 2 kWh per mile, which is better than the usual 2.5 kWh per mile for diesel. I assume this is best case, good road conditions are moderate temperatures. That would put charging rates north of 1 MW. That will be "fun". One plug or two? Or four? North of 1000 V? Time will tell... OK, so not much technical detail but clearly this is going to take some time. That is to be expected. With Proterra already putting 0.66 MWh on a transit bus, this should not be so surprising. Two years away seems reasonable. They have lots of work to do in the meantime. The vibration profile is going to be a challenge. The sonically welded fuse wires on the small cells might not survive vibration, so the battery tech might be drastically different compared to passenger cars.

Go go GSO!

It does not sound like this should take long to commercialize, but not a word about that?

Looks like Workhorse is getting some competition, although there is no range extender mentioned here. Chanje appears to be California based with some backing from Hong Kong? Nice to see things heat up in medium duty EV trucking, it is about time.

The discount for E15 is only 5 cents in my area.

Half a MWh, perhaps Tesla will offer 1 MWh? We will know soon. I was expecting 400 hp continuous from Tesla Heavy and 800 hp peak, we will see. Still, a good start from Cummins, it will sell.

Peter, if this is the same Westport HPDI technology (except that the reliability problems have been fixed?) then it is typical diesel SCR/DPF after treatment. But I don't know that, just guessing.

If I read between the lines, I am guessing this means that Westport and their suppliers finally got the HPDI technology working? Either that or Volvo Trucks is looking at spark ignited NG engines for heavy duty, which would be difficult to imagine. But what do I know..

SJC, if I read this correctly, the application is a bit different than what AC Propulsion did. Instead of driving the traction motor, the inverter mode is for operating loads in the body, perhaps such as air conditioning which can be substantial in a bus. But this is much smaller than what AC Propulsion did. Still, a good development. Renault is doing the larger scale bidirectional approach in the Zoe.

Drayage operations in the ports of LA and Long Beach have been reduced to about 7000 trucks, according to recent conversations I had there. They did it with pooling. Keep in mind that the ports already require many cargo ships to "cold iron" (turn off their onboard diesel generators) while docked and power the ships from shore power. So they do have huge amounts of power available already. Tractors do not necessarily stay connected to their trailers during loading and unloading. It is more common to drop the trailer at a loading dock and move on to the next trailer that needs to be moved. So charging may well happen elsewhere.

And not a word about regenerative braking.

People buy EVs because they are COOL. Most American's could not calculate total cost of ownership if you gave them a calculator and the equations. They care about fun and comfort or looking this way or that. Burning stuff to move your sorry backside around is no longer cool, and it never will be again Get over it. And prices? Who knows, those are almost as rigged as USA elections. ;)

I was just at the port recently. While everyone says it is much better than it used to be, it is still a very sooty place. Maybe that is mostly due to the refinery these days. CARB is doing a great job but there is a long long way to go.

And who paid for that obviously bogus study? (No I did not read it, I only read good books.)

Are we talking about light duty only? Or also medium duty and heavy duty?

mahonj, I suspect they are using 48 V, do you think not?

Many 48 V strat-stop applications appear to be moving to Lithium Ion, I suppose these guys think they can slow that trend...

Stormy weather in Shortville, as Elon Tweeted. Stormy indeed.

Not a word about all-electric range, battery size, nor piston count? Maybe the vehicle specs are not final and this is just a facility announcement...

"a typical truck on the road ... gets around 5.8 mpg" but post 2010 tractors might get >7 mpg more often (can anyone help me out here? I don't drive them). And the test track numbers are usually more optimistic than real-world numbers. Still we are seeing good progress in long-haul configurations, and the trailer skirts are becoming ubiquitous in some markets so the most cost-effective techniques are making it through to the fleet quickly. Personally, I am more interested in short-haul, where regenerative braking can dramatically improve efficiency and reduce brake dust. Urban transit buses are seeing some market penetration of EVs, but we need short-term incentives for big-payback applications like urban EV refuse trucks. The market volumes are small compared to passenger cars, making it difficult to make big engineering changes without external "encouragement".

Workhorse is already building triple digit quantities of UPS delivery vans with a similar drivetrain, except two wheel drive if I recall.

For long haul, it is all about the hills. This would help in the Alps, not so much in Nebraska.

There is almost no useful information there at all. Anode variant? We will see when SAE finally publishes it. This is just an abstract.