Electric garbage truck trialled in regional Australia drives 'like a limousine'
Electric garbage truck trialled in regional Australia drives 'like a limousine'
With the take-up of electric vehicles across Australia commercial market considered "pretty modest" so far, those supporting an EV garbage truck trial in Shepparton believe its important to start chipping away towards a transition.
Sounds a pretty good use case for an electric truck; low speeds with constant stop/start driving is well suited to electric vehicles and a known route means range is much less of an issue (just spec it with enough to cope with expected decline over its service life and you're set). The harder part will be making sure there's enough charging capacity in the depots to cope with a fleet of trucks, I would expect upgrades will be necessary for that.
At least with them charging overnight they'll get the benefits of low power rates. Probably wont even be worth shelling out for solar and batteries when its down in the single digit cents per kwh overnight.
Definitely a good move forward imo, but I do wonder about the fire risk. With all the garbage truck fires that have been popping up in the last few years (usually caused by batteries being thrown into curbside rubbish), would a fire in the back of an EV fire truck be better, worse, or about the same as a fire in a normal diesel rubbish truck?
Also, since EVs in general are so quiet, I'm also a little worried that they'd be a fair bit more dangerous. Not hearing a Tesla or similar EV is bad, but a 20 ton machine packed with however many tons of rubbish they hold would be considerably worse. I suppose they don't generally reverse, and they're a lot bigger so definitely easier to spot, but with really any conventional truck, they're easy to see and hear, you know when they're there even if you can't see them. With an EV truck, not so much.
An EV fire that isn't caused by the drive battery usually doesn't affect it. The drive battery is a very dense insulated block near the bottom of the vehicle, so it takes a surprising amount of external heat to get it to burn.
Attaching a noisemaker to a vehicle is a simple fix and they'd do that if the trucks actually turned out to be silent.
I vote the noise maker be Jimmy Carr's laugh on repeat, "ha, ha, ha, harrrr!!"
The brakes assuning they're pneumatic still would still make a lot of noise, I was thinking it's great because you won't hear the truck coming for 45 minutes before it gets to you.
The battery pack wouldn't be amongst the crushing section of the truck so the fires wouldn't be much worse then the 900 litres of diesel and 150 litres of hydraulic oil that could go up in a regular rubbish truck.
My only concern as with all things electric for a solution is are we just pushing the environmental impact up the road. Will all these batteries become a hazard, will the increased requirements to charge all these vehicles increase power plant emissions worsening the effects of coal over regular vehicle emissions?
Especially when we look at modern diesel engines with a DEF system pushing out mostly water and nitrogen out the exhaust with very little NOx
The advantage of EVs is they'll get cleaner over time. If you bought one of those Nissan Leafs in 2012, you would have charged it using quite a lot of coal generated electricity. That same car today would use probably half coal and half solar. As coal continues to exit the grid and we build out more solar, emissions from EVs already on the road will keep dropping.
If you buy a diesel today, it's still going to be burning diesel in 2040.
The battery pack wouldn't be amongst the crushing section of the truck so the fires wouldn't be much worse then the 900 litres of diesel and 150 litres of hydraulic oil that could go up in a regular rubbish truck.
The fire could actually be very much worse. A fuel/oil fire is Class B, which can be extinguished with CO2 or with foaming agents. You can add foam to a regular fire hose and lay down a layer of it to smother the fire. A battery is a Class D (metal) fire, which can't be extinguished with anything common.
Metal fires are some scary shit to be around. It's risky for firefighters to even use a fire hose to cool a burning electric vehicle because lithium releases hydrogen gas and heat on contact with water. Usually you have to just wait for a metal fire to burn itself out.
As long as the battery's undamaged it's not an issue, but a burning garbage truck?
The brakes assuning they’re pneumatic still would still make a lot of noise
They would surely be regenerative
I hear the garbage truck brakes way before I hear the engine.
Electric vehicles do put less load on the brakes thanks to regenerative charging. I bet the trucks will still be plenty loud in other ways as well. The lifting and compaction mechanisms alone can be heard a ways away.
@Aussiemandeus @Baku as a country that struggled to recycle glass how are we going to recycle batteries that are infinitely more toxic.
There is this push for all Aussie car owners to have electric, but we have no commitments to improve electrical infrastructure, why is it the individuals responsibility to make changes, where is the push for better public transport.
We model our society and cities after the US, with sprawling suburbs and car centric neighbourhoods, why not make it easier to choose a bus over car a train over gridlock traffic. Focus on a better society, better urban planning and people will make better choices around cars.