[dizzystar]

The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day.

NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.

[CPLX]

Plus the drivers.

Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.

[cogman10]

You don't need more drivers, just more trucks.

A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy.

There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.

[lamontcg]

What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.

[mike_d]

What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks?

Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.

[the-rc]

There are many stations already, every few blocks. And the company running them, Citibike, already wants to connect them to the grid. Now you have a more tractable problem: when there's snow coming, some of the (many) unused bike racks can be dedicated to recharge truck batteries instead. I don't know what the hydraulics would look like and if that's something that can be installed seasonally or perhaps just a few days in advance.

[josephcsible]

Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?

[Spooky23]

No. Capital costs tend to be bonded, and infrastructure to support idle trucks is expensive.

[bobthepanda]

You need parking spaces for 33% more trucks. There isn’t exactly land freely available for that in New York.

[mattmaroon]

I'm not even sure depreciation matters with these anyway! Idk how much of a resale market there is. You might just run it into the ground and then scrap it.

[beambot]

It's entirely feasible to do battery swapping if high uptime is a requirement -- e.g. see Monarch Tractors.