Yea just better tech. It’s not a big deal. And it’s all in progress. News just likes to make headlines about anything new so you get scared about it.

I dunno, "we've made things worse but someone will come along and make it better" is not exactly confidence inspiring. Especially given the amount of wasted money/resources you will generate along the way.

Not great framing because nobody made electric vehicles worse, they started off at a certain level of performance and then they'll just improve from there.

Now you could say well we made snow plowing worse, and of course in this specific example you'd be right, but you'd be ignoring longer time horizons and not really comparing or accounting for the impact of negative externalities.

An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window. You wouldn't say "things are worse now!", you'd recognize that you're making a change which is better over the long term.

> An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window.

A more apt analogy would be if the new window was not even invented yet.

Ok we'll use gas trucks forever and never change or improve or invent anything new.

????

Or we can just electrify applications that currently make sense and work from there as the technology improves.

Instead of just being argumentative you should read my original post and the post I responded to.

Yeah, I don't understand this pattern of comment-making on the internet. For whatever reason, your comment was downvoted slightly so then you got targeted by people over and over again, even in subsequent replies, with the least generous interpretation of every comment made. I suspect your initial comment also triggered a reaction in saying "it's not a big deal", to which a bunch of people thought, "Oh yeah, well it's a real big deal actually!" despite this being a single article about a very specific situation in NYC, something HN readers will forget about in less than two weeks.

I do not see the point in downvotes on this site. It seems like any slightly political article/discussion results in this sort of behavior.

Sorry for the meta comment.

HN's guidelines are to downvote if something doesn't add to the discussion.

I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".

In that case, I'm not sure your comment added much to the discussion either. But the OP generically asked what the solution was, and the generic solution as far as I can tell is the long march of progressively better technology. It's very clear that the tech will continue to improve and is only in its infancy. Had the OP asked something like "what specific improvements can we expect to see in battery weight reduction and charging speeds so that this won't be an issue in the future" I probably wouldn't have replied because I don't know the specifics.

It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.

A more apt analogy would be if you removed the existing window without having ordered a new one or found a contractor to install it.

That's not a good analogy because in this case the snow plows still plow so some snow is still removed. To use your analogy then they would have sold existing plow-capable trucks and not had any to plow, but that wasn't the case.

The tarp is partially effective, just like the electric trucks.

Yes, partially effective until the new energy efficient window is installed. Stop gap measure. Transition period. Etc.

I apologize if that wasn't extremely obvious from what I already wrote.

No need to apologize.

The concern here is that the stopgap measure (the tarp/electric trucks) are implemented too early. The superior replacement window does not yet exist. There is no need to remove the older window and deal with a hole in the side of your house for half a year while you wait for new windows to hit the market.

All of the above. Must Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/06/07/mack-t...

This technology has been talked about lately in the context of Abrams tanks which could potentially be used in Ukraine. Doesn't it burn a lot more fuel?

Yes! But that might be a penalty you’re willing to make versus long turnaround times, especially if you’re in NYC vs a harsh military theater and fueling infra is solved.

The truck doesn’t care if the battery slab is pulled and replaced with another battery or a hybrid powertrain, it just cares it has enough power to accelerate and decelerate.

https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/r40x15/why_are_...

>ust Run trucks should probably be gas turbine hybrids, that can burn anything for fuel (diesel, biodiesel, Jet A, etc), versus full electric.

That's just high tech engineer fantasy though.

Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day. Electrical is great for cyclical but batteries just don't support the energy density to do it all day. You can theoretically bridge the gap real well with a hybrid system but it's only theoretical because in the real world other people's money is not actually an unlimited resource and you're not getting a turbine into anything cheaply. There's a reason you only see them in vehicles that are already fantastically expensive (tanks) and benefit greatly from some of the specific performance attributes. It would be really cool though...

Right now the trucks can do 1/3 of what they need with the batteries they have. Commercial vehicles like this are very much constrained by weight. The "nearly free" and shovel ready solution is to just raise the weight limit for the vehicles in question so they can pack on the other 2/3 of the batteries they need and let them roll around at 120k+ all day like concrete trucks. Sure you'll get a little more wear and tear on stuff but this solution doesn't require an unforeseen technology (battery) or economic (turbines) breakthrough.

Rather than running excess weight on roads, they could also deploy the shovel ready solution of liquid fuel and internal combustion engines.

> Turbine is great for steady loads and terrible for cyclical loads which is what a garbage truck does all day.

Right. This would certainly apply to the mechanically coupled turbine truck prototypes from the 70's.

But if its driving a generator then you can let batteries or capacitors handle the cyclic loads of acceleration and have a computer throttle the turbine according to the overall demand.

Swappable batteries is how some countries are migrating to ev for motorcycle/scooter taxis, just swap batteries and keep moving passengers. The cost savings seems to be worth it, read that its about 75% savings against fuel costs.

The easy solutions will go first, working its way up with better tech and design.

I think car/fleet size batteries isn't really feasible with swapping batteries. Small scooter batteries seems like a no brainer.

I don't know about this. I don't think battery swapping scales up very well.

Firstly, I know someone who works on Daimler's electric trucks and he assures me that their electric powertrains are EXTREMELY dangerous just from the amount of power represented. Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.

Secondly, the economics - the battery pack on a Tesla already represents over half of the materials and manufacturing cost. And it's the only scarce thing about EVs. If you are a fleet operator and have to maintain a bank of batteries to charge, you may as well just buy the bodies to go with.

So I would guess that in an EV fleet future where the cost of batteries has dropped significantly, you will probably see the size of the fleets increase as operating costs drop.

Its already being used at the scooter level, scales fine there for small applications where batteries are as easy to replace as filling the tank of gas.

It scales well there because you can hold a scooter battery with your hand.

> you will probably see the size of the fleets increase

This is already happening with municipal bus and school bus fleets. The bus count is over-provisioned to allow for the longer electric 'refueling' times.

As fleet managers understand, when a vehicle is being refueled it is out of service.

In this case, I think NYC is an edge-case where they don't have a lot of room to store additional fleet resources.

> Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory.

To be fair, union operators express negative interest in anybody outside their union doing anything that might be construed as otherwise the union's work.

Well, in this case, someone was really badly electrocuted when trying to connect the power leads between the truck battery and motor. So customers apparently "noped" out of wanting them self-serviceable.

Citibike wants to connect to the city grid so they don't need to send technicians to every station to swap dead batteries. It's not too much of a stretch to think that, perhaps, the stations could recharge truck batteries, too, at some point. Many fewer residents bike during the winter, let alone during a snow storm, so you could, conceivably, sacrifice a bike space or two or five in December-February (or just when you know snow is coming). Stations are ubiquitous by now: especially in the denser areas, there's one every few blocks.

That's assuming you can deal with safety, theft and other related issues.

The other point I forgot to make is that, during a storm, you could ground a lot of other non-essential electric vehicles, e.g. buses, and place their batteries strategically throughout the city (at a bike station, or empty parking spots). Once the emergency is over, you're not stuck with a lot of excess inventory. That, again, assumes a lot: common batteries, etc.

Solid state batteries show promise. But honestly for a set or requirements like this, just using traditional fuel + paying for carbon sequestration would probably be a cheaper option.

Heated streets?

It's ultimately heating the atmosphere above them. I heard this planed had some trouble with thermal balance recently, things were getting too hot.

In seriousness, heating streets with abundant solar energy harvested nearby would be reasonable. But sunshine in winter months is not as intense, and you'd have to build, as usual, a huge battery to keep the energy for the night. (When this is solved, more problems would get solved along the way than just de-snowing streets.)