In a previous edition of Overdrive Radio, News Editor Matt Cole dug into the American Transportation Research Institute's close look at the life-cycle emissions associated with the production and operation of diesel, battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trucks. As noted in the very title of that past episode, the research in some ways cut through the politics and PR that surrounds electric-vehicle technology, showing such vehicles would be no true "zero emissions" panacea when production-associated demands are considered, particularly for battery-electric trucks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15292003/how-politics-and-pr-cloud-zero-emissions-trucks-reality

In today's edition, Cole talks with Jeff Short, ATRI VP, about follow-up research that poses something of a counterfactual on the way toward throwing more cold-hard reality on top of the politics and PR around vehicle electrification. If the entirety of the U.S. vehicle fleet, from owner-operators' heavy tractor-trailers on down to passengers cars, were to suddenly be transitioned to battery-electric, what level of electric power generation would it take? What new materials demands would be required to make all those batteries? What, fundamentally, would the implications be for truckers’ operational realities (including the hours of service) and the infrastructure needs to support them?

As Cole notes at the top of the edition, that infrastructure would necessarily include a whole lot of new electrified parking spaces. "If every truck has to stop and charge," he said, "obviously you've got to have a charger pretty much at every parking spot across the country, and there's already a parking shortage."

Further, if every tractor out there had to stop to charge on the regular for hours at a time, "that parking shortage is only going to look a whole lot worse."

Find ATRI's full "Charging infrastructure challenges for the U.S. electric vehicle fleet" report via this link: https://truckingresearch.org/2022/12/06/new-atri-research-evaluates-charging-infrastructure-challenges-for-the-u-s-electric-vehicle-fleet/