This Bud’s Comin’ At You in an Electric Truck
More good news about electrifying large vehicles. Anheuser-Busch, the beer company behind popular brands like Budweiser and Stella Artois, is launching the largest fleet of Class 8 electric trucks in North America.
2GreenEnergy supporter Rafael Quezada quips: Now, if they can just improve their factory beer…
Nice try, Rafael, but no, the beer stays terrible; that’s part of the brand. “This Bud’s for you” translates to “This can of really really bad beer is for working-class Americans whom we have successfully programmed to believe that IPAs are for sissies.”
Craig,
Boy, you really hate all those “working-class Americans” don’t you?
In 2017, A-B announced it had ordered 40 electric Tesla semi-trucks.
In 2018, A-B ordered 800 hydrogen Nikola Motor Company semis.
In 2019, A-B says it is adding 21 battery-electric BYD semis to its distribution fleet.
The BYD trucks came at quite a staggering price, 5 times the price of conventional vehicles. Still, that’s not a problem since the taxpayer is footing the bill for a vehicle with a 100 mile range and 3 hour refueling time.
The advertised speed of 65mph, is more like 40 in real driving conditions.
While I was clear in my praise for the electric buses, this is the opposite case: One of the avenues of lowest net gain for the environment.
Buses are exciting because the transportation is endless start/stop. Because of the number of stops, using recuperative braking offers tremendous efficiency advantages.
But for long-haul trucking, the opposite is true. Highway driving affords very few reasons to stop, so this is just a straight comparison between an efficient diesel engine and a natural gas peaker with line losses and battery charging losses.
So long as the diesel has a good exhaust system that purges most of the VOC’s and black carbon from the emissions, there is essentially no gain whatsoever for the environment by switching to the electric truck.
This will start saving money for Anheuser Busch once self-driving trucks are legal, because these trucks only require a software upgrade in order to switch to self-driving… But there is not an environmental benefit here that I can see.
(I am still quite excited about the electric buses though).