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Electric garbage truck trialled in regional Australia drives 'like a limousine' (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (21 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (18 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

will the increased requirements to charge all these vehicles increase power plant emissions worsening the effects of coal over regular vehicle emissions?

No, that's never going to happen. A huge coal power plant is always going to operate at a higher efficiency than a little engine inside a car or truck. It's the efficiency of scale. And that's the starting point! Our grid is already nearing 50% renewable in some places and it's rising.

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