The bases of garbage trucks seems to just be a truck platform. So I don’t think they are much different from other equivalent vehicles.
Given these trucks almost never get highway speeds, I would assume it’s even as good as 3mpg because heavy idling uses less fuel than highway speeds, but stop and go is much worse.
I assume EVs would have some of the same stop/go efficiency issues for stop/start but that would gain somewhat on idling and breaking.
That's neat— I wonder if the gains are simply too small for it to make sense in a mass-market vehicle. Either way, seems like it would be a slam dunk for a delivery truck, city bus, garbage truck, basically any heavy vehicle with a stop-start workflow.
"There is one company that makes buses with wheel motors which quadruple the fuel efficiency of the current best diesel bus"
Given that buses are surpassed only by garbage trucks in the number of stop and starts they make in a given distance I suspect this has much more to do with scavenging energy during braking than it does with the fact the motors are in the wheels.
I don't believe the US trucks have more efficient engines (yet--this is changing due to new EPA standards.) They just haul more, which is a more efficient use of expensive drivers in addition to making the most of the engine's fuel consumption.
It’s because air resistance is a much bigger drag on efficiency for an EV, so stop and go traffic is a bit more closer to its ideal efficiency (which is going slow without stopping).
It's less efficient, but not by much. The most popular passenger vehicle that's not a truck is the toyota rav 4[1], which gets 30 mpg[2]. A ford transit connect gets 22[3]. Using those figures, an amazon van that delivers to at least 2 houses in a suburb probably spends less fuel than those two households driving directly to a store. Even if they make separate deliveries, it will probably be worth it.
I think this argument is more true for personal vehicles that sit idle for 99% of the time -- they don't consume gas when they don't move.
For commercial vehicle that spend most of their life on the road, energy savings from running a more efficient vehicle recoup the energy used in making that vehicle pretty quickly.
Heavy trucks are the exception, they are typically designed for an operating point of 65 MPH. However, there are huge losses above that speed. No reason for a heavy truck to be going 70 or 75 MPH.
We have curbside trash but no recycling and are about 15 miles (+3000 ft elevation change) to the recycling drop off center. I’ve wondered if cranking the engine on the pickup is worth it in fuel consumption.
Wouldn't a truck, carrying almost twice as much weight, use almost twice as much fuel? Also, I think that (given normal combustion engines), the more power you try to get out of them, the worse the efficiency of the engine, so any gains you can gain from the "almost twice as much fuel" would just be lost there anyway.
Given these trucks almost never get highway speeds, I would assume it’s even as good as 3mpg because heavy idling uses less fuel than highway speeds, but stop and go is much worse.
I assume EVs would have some of the same stop/go efficiency issues for stop/start but that would gain somewhat on idling and breaking.
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