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A comment on World's first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden. Parent comment

Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by stefan_ on Thursday April 12, 2018 @03:39PM (#16824211)
Let's just only have train tracks? We can still have electric trucks for the last mile, but then they won't need electrified roads.

Long-distance goods transport with trucks is such a ridiculous concept, it's really time we just face it: it only ever made sense because the state funds the roads and road repair from general taxation, we have ridiculous subsidies for the fossil fuels that make it run and trains had the misfortune to be invented such a long time ago that the government has suffocated the industry.

Rolling resistance is somewhat of a rounding error, by the way. The big killer is aerodynamics: the power needed to push air out of the way increases quadratically with speed. But there is a cheat code: if you make the vehicle longer or add something to the back, it can ride in the slipstream. Only you can't make trucks very long at all because they need to work on public roads. Trains on the other hand can be made ridiculously long, saving massively on energy - multiple miles of wagons if you so wish.

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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by seanmcdirmid on Thursday April 12, 2018 @03:45PM (#16824267)
Moving goods from the train to the truck is not a negligible cost. Also, you have to move lots of things in batch with the train, which makes product and supply chains unless nimble. Perishable agriculture products, for one thing, benefit greatly from truck transport.
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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by thaumasiotes on Friday April 13, 2018 @12:25AM (#16827125)
> Moving goods from the train to the truck is not a negligible cost.

Really? I was under the impression that this was one of the primary benefits of standard shipping containers.

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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by seanmcdirmid on Friday April 13, 2018 @01:06AM (#16827245)
That goods transfer costs would be negligible?
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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by andrewwharton on Friday April 13, 2018 @02:49AM (#16827644)
Between shipping modes, yes. Hence the name "Intermodal Container".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by thaumasiotes on Friday April 13, 2018 @03:59AM (#16827932)
Yes. Unloading stuff from a container is not a negligible cost, but transferring the whole thing from a train to a semitruck really should be. It is a very large part of their purpose.
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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by stefan_ on Thursday April 12, 2018 @03:56PM (#16824360)
A nimble supply chain, or "just in time" as they call it, is a hack large companies use to shift quantities from one column of their quarterly reports to another that the stock market looks more favourably upon. Analysts can't very well quantify the risk of a JIT supply chain but they know cash flow over finished goods.
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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by seanmcdirmid on Thursday April 12, 2018 @05:01PM (#16824907)
That isn't true. It means you need less storage space, and you need less capital tied up in parts you aren't using. It also means your cabbages don't rot.
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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by random4369 on Friday April 13, 2018 @03:36AM (#16827844)
> We can still have electric trucks for the last mile

I think you're grossly underestimating how spread out truck destinations are. You would have to have a very extensive rail network to get cargo anywhere near all the destinations where it's currently trucked. And if the rail network doesn't fall within X average distance of every destination, the value proposition of this idea rapidly becomes negative.

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Re:World's first electrified road for charging vehicles open... by peterwwillis on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:38PM (#16826762)
Tracks are a superior design in theory but fail to be flexible enough to work in varying weather conditions and complex dynamic routes. It's better to have invisible guidance rails and let vehicles maneuver easier.
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