I could imagine the trucking industry might even have different models with different ratios of battery to fuel cell to motor depending on the terrain of the places it's likely to drive.
I've been in the Smokey Mountains and crawling up a hill at under 20mph.
Tons of torque, of course, but getting up a grade is a function of total energy, not just torque.
Assume we had these stops every 500-400km (or miles..), and you could do 4-5 hours driving per pack, and the on-site replacement process takes like 2 minutes (excluding the detour and approach time, of course..)
Look at any ad for OTR jobs. Notice the emphasis on miles, the more the merrier. It's rare for an ad to specify less than 3k miles per week. High miles aren't only an incentive, but a requirement.
Now consider several things. Drivers are paid mostly by the mile. Federal regulations dictate 11 hours of driving time daily, with a mandatory 30 minute break after 8 hours ( or 6 not long ago). On duty hours are limited to 14. As things are now, pulling into a truckstop often takes about 30 minutes after waiting in the fuel line, fueling, etc. Weighing/scaling new loads also takes time and this is necessary often. Toward the end of a shift even with the assistance of apps, parking can take significant time to find too, especially on the east coast. If a driver follows regulations, a mid-trip stop will be made for a cursory vehicle inspection, especially of tires. Many companies govern speed between 62-65mph - and this causes myriad clusterfucks of ungoverned drivers trying to pass the governed drivers. Remember, miles are dollars, and many factors stand in the way. Driving through Atlanta, or any similar monstrosity is a regular one. Detention is another, and this is a really big one that has inspired me to quit on the spot.
I could bloviate about the all that sucks in the world of trucks, but I'm quite certain that the primary element that impells the 18 wheeled slave is money. Any thing that gets in the way of those miles is discouraging. The whole experience is discouraging for me.
Much improvement could come to the industry, but mostly in theory rather than practice. I suspect anything that makes it all even slightly worse won't be too warmly welcomed. Personally, I'd probably keep doing it if I could make a bit less and ruin myself a bit less in the process. I don't want to run 3700 miles every week, 4 weeks out and 3 days home. But when I start my day, I only stop for weigh stations, at 8 hours, and to hold my piss bottle still.
So, maybe, if it was 2 minutes.
When you are driving, you constantly are doing math. Miles (or Kilometers) converted into minutes until the next turn, and also final destination. Then you try to fit that into how much time you have left in your day.
A 2 minute battery change will always take longer then 2 minutes off of your driving time. Filling up with diesel takes ~10-15 minutes. Pulling into the truck stop, grabbing more coffee or tea for your thermos, going to the bathroom, all combine make you lose 30-45 minutes. It's not the individual item times. It's the accumulation. Accelerating, decelerating, traffic, etc.
The job of Driving a truck is almost impossible to make a living at in Canada if you do it legally. Now with all trucks having an onboard electronic log-book, I'd never even try.
The reason hybrids have less power mid way up a hill is that they use the combined output of two power sources: the engine and motor(s). When hybrids deplete their battery, the only power remaining is the output from the engine. This mode of operation is unique to hybrids. The state-of-charge management software in hybrids attempt to mitigate this, but their batteries are only so big.
Ah yes, the classic comparison of a real product versus something Tesla says on a website splash page.
How long will the battery last if you do that cycle twice per day every day though ?
Batteries look pretty good when you consider that you can charge them a few thousand times before they degrade to below 80% of their original capacity. Electricity is of course not free but can be sourced a lot cheaper than diesel. The savings on that probably create a pretty nice budget for replacing the entire truck. But it might be cheaper to replace the battery and drive it for another few hundred thousand miles.
The economics of this don't favor diesel engines. That's why electrical trucks and vans are so much in demand right now with companies operating fleets of these commercially.
From what I understand, battery electric trucks exist in pretty much every size and weight class right now ranging from huge dump trucks used in the mining industry, long range trucks to more medium and small size trucks. Hydrogen may have a role to play with some of these.
But the decision as to use hydrogen is more a cost consideration than it is a functional necessity. The reason there are not a whole lot on the road is that cost wise, it doesn't make that much sense to go for hydrogen. Hydrogen is expensive to source, difficult to handle, there hardly any fueling stations, you need complex systems on the truck, heavy tanks, etc. It adds up to a lot of cost and limitations for not a whole lot of benefit.
As for this particular truck, it does not look like it's particularly impressive in terms of torque, range, etc. 400km range is well below the 500 mile range that Tesla is advertising for the Tesla Semi (with a ~500kwh battery). That's 2x the range (and a bit). The normal range also has a better range with about half the battery.
What is interesting is that hydrogen fueling takes a bit of time. It's not like fueling a truck with diesel. You need to squeeze a lot of hydrogen through some heavy duty pipes at very high pressure. That takes time.
People always complain that charging batteries takes so long. Well, 20 minutes of fueling time for hydrogen is also substantial and at the lower end of the scale of what a lot of EVs can do in terms of 0 to 80% charging already. There are already chargers being designed that will charge trucks at over 1MW. So, if you have 500kwh of battery, you might get it charged in about 30-40 minutes. That's a lot of range depending at what rate you are cruise (typically nowhere near the maximum capacity of the motor).
Another interesting aspect is that these hydrogen trucks have a 72 kwh battery. That's because fuel cells are not that easy to throttle up and down. So, instead it's basically a battery electrical truck with a smallish battery and a complicated hydrogen generator. Swap it out for a diesel or petrol engine and you have a hybrid truck. Swap that out for a proper battery and you have a proper battery electric truck. Same engine, just a larger battery and lot less complexity.
The reason the battery is relatively large is because they are powering a 350kw motor with a 160kw hydrogen setup. It would not be able to operate that engine at its full power. And when you are driving up a mountain, you need a bit of a buffer since you are depleting faster than you can charge it so it needs to be able to sustain high power levels for a bit.