Hydrogen retro fit and semi retro fit diesel motors

[windtrader]

truckers are not going to like giving up 4 to 5 tons of paying freight to go green

This about money, not trucker jobs. From a capital investement standpoint robot trucks benefit from higher utilization and lower operating costs. If an robot truck needs to run to cover the lowered freight weight, it seems they are still money ahead. I'd bet the lowered operating costs and better ROI on EV trucks wins out. EV truck prices will also drop over time. Look at the significant lowered prices on Tesla. Plust the $25k model is just around the corner.

[luvrbus]

I think we will see EV trucks in local deliveries. It will be a long time before we see driverless EV trucks on long freight runs,LOL that would be dangerous driverless EV trucks and Swift drivers on the same interstate.

[buswarrior]

Trucking capital utilization is seriously limited by hours of service regulations. Remove the human, and the autonomous truck utilization more than doubles.

Round down to 2:1 and the math is easy, and so is the hunger to accomplish it.

Your Walmart toaster's transportation  costs are going down even further...

Advance the tech, further job losses,  more McJobs workers, advance the reliance and demand on cheaper foreign goods, slip beneath the waves...

Happy coaching!
Buswarrior

[luvrbus]

I have been in Walmart and Amazon distributions centers several times over the years the technology is amazing it can pull the orders print the shippng lables put the orders on a belt lol then humans package the shipments and tape the boxes and off it goes again

[Jim Blackwood]

Word to the wise, avoid driving within the reach of autonomous vehicles like the plague. Not only will there be unexpected problems with them, some of which will cause fatalities but with corporations involved you can be certain they will not prioritize your safety until they are forced to do so. Even then it will be a cost/benefit evaluation that you have a strong chance of coming out on the wrong end of if a choice has to be made. Add to this the ease with which AI can be confused about identifying humans and other similar issues and it's easy to read between the lines and see that this technology is being pushed out way ahead of the development curve. This means people will die so try to make sure it isn't you. Humans make mistakes but they are exceptional at identifying other humans. AI? Not so much but really good at making lots of mistakes at blinding speed. The technology really isn't ready yet. Too many problem areas have been identified and proven difficult to solve. The front runners are banking on getting out ahead in the marketplace and then paying off the cost of failures with settlements. Sort of like Ford's business plan with the Pinto gas tanks if you remember those. Best to keep your distance until those get sorted out and let some other sucker pay for the failures.

Jim

[luvrbus]

I read where 70% of the trucks on the road today are owner operated.Those guys are not going to jump on the EV driverless trucks,Can you visualize a DOT officer at a weight scale red tagging a EV driverless truck telling it where to park, some of those don't have a sense of humor.

[windtrader]

@jim - not sure where you live but where I am, the roads are truely lawless. Nobody stops for signs and red light running is common as well as three lane changes, text typing and tik-tok videos have drivers needing a honk to get off the line. Again out here, FSD has idiots beat anyday. Musk has stated the need to only release FSD once it is clearly superior to human driving but is is already in limited commercial service so it won't be long more more beta rollouts

[lvmci]

With all the trucks going off the road with ice and black ice around Flagstaff, AZ, if drivers can't see the difference how can Ai?

[windtrader]

With all the trucks going off the road with ice and black ice around Flagstaff, AZ, if drivers can't see the difference how can Ai?

Good question. I dunno. It's all way over my head. Here is a video showing some of the processing going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRnSmw1i_DQThere are far better ones that show the amount of detail that is being captured.

I'd think autopilot would be smart enough to know it is not safe to drive and pull over and wait for better conditions. When you see the idiots flying down the unsafe roads, it's a safe bet the machine has enough smarts to get off the road.

And there is no argument, autopilot is real and getting better, it is only a question about time before rollout bigtime

[buswarrior]

Driver's aren't paying attention...

I would expect a collection of road/weather sensors in the automated truck, a simple brake application to a single wheel, with the already well established ABS sensor will tell it all it needs to know.

The roads supervisor trucks up here have had them for years, for making brine or salting decisions.

It's all science now, and pretty simple.

Happy coaching!
Buswarrior

[Jim Blackwood]

Lvmci has a clue. Much more to go with it. I'm no expert on this stuff but my son who is a software professional studies it. Apparently things like a color change or small shape change is enough to confuse AI about identification, and if it has trouble telling a garbage can from a person it might decide the liability from hitting the item is less than the damage caused by bouncing off an errant idiot in a car. You can see where this could be a problem, and that's only a half assed example that I came up with off the cuff. In the real world, which contains the aforementioned idiots you can multiply that exponentially. What I've heard is that we're maybe 10 years away from them being good enough for prime time.

Now, if you kept all the idiots off the road they would probably be fine, until something happened that they are not programmed to deal with. But you can also guarantee that is not going to happen. The issue is not that the AI can't drive the truck. The issue is that it is nowhere near being as good at dealing with unexpected occurrences as a human operator, even one with diminished capacity. Nowhere near as good at object identification. And there are other categories of issues as well that I don't even know about, but having worked in electronics I do at least know better than to just mindlessly trust them.

Jim

[lvmci]

Conversions from diesel to hydrogen trucks are drawing interest
April 8, 2023 0 By JOHN MAX Hydrogen Fuel News

• Retrofitting existing vehicles to run on H2 allows fleet owners to reduce emissions and maintain current assets, saving money and reducing waste.
• Researchers from the University of New South Wales have developed a system that converts up to 90% of diesel operations, with an efficiency boost of 26%.
• This system does not require high-purity hydrogen fuel, as it uses a stratification technique to form pockets of higher and lower H2 concentrations, reducing nitrous oxide emissions.

Retrofitting systems allow vehicles and fleet owners to run existing engines on H2.

As good as it might sound to replace an entire fleet of diesel vehicles with hydrogen trucks in order to dramatically reduce a carbon footprint, most companies simply wouldn't be able to afford that kind of investment all at once. This is particularly true when they already have vehicles that are still running just fine.

Conversions allow existing vehicles to run mainly on H2 instead of polluting diesel fuel.

That said, just because a company isn't ready to replace its entire fleet, it doesn't mean that hydrogen trucks are out of the question.  Existing large fleets can continue to be used – not only saving money, but also reducing unnecessary waste – while drastically shrinking their greenhouse gas emissions by using conversions from diesel to H2.

In this way, companies can hold onto their existing assets and still decarbonize in order to join the fight against the climate crisis and keep compliant with newly adopted emissions regulations as they happen.

Researchers have been developing several types of retrofit systems for converting diesel to hydrogen trucks.

For instance, researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have prototyped and tested a retrofit system capable of converting diesel engines to run on 90 percent H2. This greatly reduces both the carbon dioxide and the nitrous oxide emissions from the vehicle's operations while simultaneously providing a 26 percent efficiency boost.

This conversion does mean that the vehicle will need to continue to use diesel fuel for 10 percent of its operation. Therefore, it isn't a fully green conversion.  Still, what it provides is a way for businesses to slash the majority of their greenhouse gas emissions without trashing assets that can still remain useful for a long time. In this sense, the reduced waste offsets a considerable amount of the remaining emissions from the vehicle's operations.

No Fuel Cells Needed

This system, like most retrofits converting diesel to hydrogen trucks and cars, does not involve the use of fuel cells, but is instead adds H2 injection directly into the cylinder. It also adds independent injection timing control for both the H2 and diesel systems. In the case of the system developed by the UNSW team, it also doesn't require the hydrogen fuel to be high purity due to a stratification technique that forms pockets of higher and lower concentrations of H2. In this way, the nitrous oxide emissions are substantially reduced when compared to the operation of a diesel vehicle...

[Jim Blackwood]

Give 'em another decade or two and they are as likely as not to decide that the planet is cooling off and we need to switch back to carbon based fuels to improve heat retention in the atmosphere. Of course this will be a major crisis aimed at warding off the next ice age, which we seem to be overdue for.

Politics as usual...

Jim

[windtrader]

@jim - With all due respect, FSD is not ten years away. It is here today, running commercial service in some cities. At the pace of advancements, it's more like a year or two at most away before blowing up.
https://waymo.com/faq/

Waymo One is our public, fully autonomous ride-hailing service. Riders can use the Waymo One app to hail one of our autonomously driven vehicles (with no human driver in the front seat!) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Our Waymo One ride-hailing service operates in Metro Phoenix, San Francisco, and is ramping up in Los Angeles County. We look forward to expanding further. Our Metro Phoenix territory currently includes Downtown Phoenix and parts of Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert.
Riders in San Francisco can ride throughout the city, and we look forward to sharing our Los Angeles territory!
For more information, visit waymo.com/whereyoucango.

[luvrbus]

@jim - With all due respect, FSD is not ten years away. It is here today, running commercial service in some cities. At the pace of advancements, it's more like a year or two at most away before blowing up.
https://waymo.com/faq/

Don, Waymo is mostly for entertainment in the East Valley you cannot get in one and say take me to Phoenix Sky Harbor  from Mesa, their routes are very limited and not very long,In Gilbert it runs restaurant row they call it. Waymo has no service  except the East Valley they don't have anything in Scottsdale and Phoenix in the north valley and nothing in the west or south valley.I woudn't call it a cab company,they been involved in a few accidents and were shut down for a couple of weeks,you won't see a Waymo except in a very low traffic area.I rode a Waymo to the parking lot at Sky Harbor from the terminal