A Canadian trucker with Edison Motors recently destroyed the electric vehicle narrative in a two-minute video on social media.
While Edison Motors’ website explains that the company is committed to developing electric and hybrid trucks, as well as electrical vehicle conversion kits that produce fuel savings “without comprise,” the trucker explained that he does not foresee himself driving a fully electric vehicle.
First posted on the “freightfamous” TikTok account, the video shows the Canadian trucker’s response to a cameraman asking why he does not ever see himself transitioning to a fully electric vehicle.
“I mean, maybe if battery technology gets better, grid infrastructure gets better, but … a logging truck uses about two-and-a-half megawatts of power per day with extra capacity in the battery, means you need a three-megawatt battery pack,” the trucker said. “The biggest one is a Tesla semi, which is a one megawatt, so you need three megawatts to run an electric truck. That would mean you need to pack 50,000 pounds — 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of batteries, just to do a full day.”
The trucker explained that even if manufacturers were able to get the 40,000 or 50,000-pound batteries down to a “reasonable” weight, the current grid infrastructure would not be capable of supporting fully electric trucks on a nationwide scale in Canada.
“We haven’t invested in our electric grids since the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s … Logging trucks in British Columbia, that’s a niche industry,” he said. “There’s 5,000 logging trucks that haul logs at two-and-a-half megawatts of consumption per day. That’s 12.5 gigawatts of power.”
The trucker explained that the Site C Dam has been in the process of construction for the past 15 years. According to the trucker, the cost of the project for 1.1 gigawatts of power has been $20 billion. He compared the 1.1 gigawatt capacity to the 12.5 gigawatts that logging trucks alone are currently using.
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“You would have to flood an area of land the size of Wales to produce that hydropower,” he said.
“We need a lot to make a fully electric vehicle feasible on the North American grid with batteries and all that, he added. “But if you can make it more efficient, and you can make it a hybrid and you can reduce your fuel consumption by 50% and you can burn that as a generator, it’s one R.P.M. [revolutions per minute], running hot, burning cleaner.”
The Canadian trucker concluded his argument by proposing that a 50-60% reduction in vehicle emissions is a significant improvement compared to investing countless billions of dollars into fully electric technology that he claimed is “not really going to work for 90%” of consumers and will result in people continuing to use fully diesel and gas-powered vehicles.
