Yet EPA officials said the rule will not mandate the adoption of a particular zero-emission technology. Rather, it will require manufacturers to reduce emissions by choosing from several cleaner technologies, including electric trucks, hybrid trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

For comparison, The New York Times coverage

  • admiralteal@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    Man if only we could take most of the major truck routes and turn them into low-emission, low-congestion corridors using comparably minimal labor. Hell, we could make it so they don’t need to carry any power onboard at all, whether fossil or battery, by just making it so they could be directly connected to a wire on these corridors. We could chain up dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of trucks into giant mega-trucks that only took a handful of people to operate if we really thought hard about how to do it.

    • Onihikage@beehaw.org
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      7 months ago

      Trucks and trains serve different purposes. If you want to get a mountain of stuff from the shipyard to distribution centers, trains are a great way to do that. If you want to get stuff from the distribution center to individual stores within a 200-mile radius, now you’re talking trucks, and a lot of their destinations will be much closer than 200 miles, meaning even plug-in hybrid trucks would often be able to make trips without using any fuel.

      • admiralteal@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        Agreed, trucks and trains serve different purposes.

        And in the US, most of those train purposes are served by trucks.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      7 months ago

      I mean, that sounds like it would be really hard to keep them all properly aligned - perhaps we could somehow modify the roads to keep them centered mechanically

  • Onihikage@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    Edison Motors has already proven hybrid retrofit trucks can be inexpensive, less complicated, and far more fuel-efficient than traditional diesel trucks while burning cleaner and offering a huge amount of all-speed torque to the wheels and even more energy efficiency from regenerative braking, so truckers really don’t have a leg to stand on here if they’re against moving the industry forward. If any of the naysayers actually used a hybrid truck and saw the relatively low cost to retrofit compared to a new truck, and the lower total cost of ownership, they wouldn’t want to go back.