How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries?

When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.

As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging)

By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?

As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?

By rolling that into the swapping cost?

Could you please ask questions a little harder than "What does 1+1 equal?" I'm seriously not getting why you don't already know the answer to these questions you're asking.

Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process.

Wait a minute, you think that when people talk about battery swap they're talking about someone going up and swapping batteries by hand?

mounting may preclude a fast removal operation.

Many companies have already demonstrated battery swap for cars, which is a far harder target than trucks. With trucks, my preferred mounting is on the trailers themselves (with the cab having its own, non-swappable batteries). You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors. It's an order of magnitude easier challenge than for cars, which you practically have to have disassemble their frames to get their batteries out.

The operation may take 40 minutes overall

Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.

Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety

And you're envisioning that one would load all of the batteries only on one side or something...?

Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank

And think about having the tank you plan to switch out be a standardized external tank mounted in a standard form factor on a standard trailer.

Assuming an overall pack energy density of 200 Wh/kg, 1kWh would weigh 5kg. A typical truck may move around 1 tonne 120 miles per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains about 10kWh of energy. An electric motor will use it about 2,5 times more efficiently than a diesel ICE, so 120 miles per gallon of diesel equates to 300 miles per 10kWh of electricty, or 30 miles per kWh electric, or 30 miles per 5kg of battery pack. So every 30 miles of range you want takes up 0,5% of your cargo mass. If you want say 300 miles range then it would consume 5% of your payload.

On the other hand, the price difference in the cost of fuelling the truck (diesel vs. electricity) would be massive. For each tonne of cargo (assuming 300 miles vehicle range and an average haul distance per hour of say 60 miles), giving up 50kg of cargo to enable to you spend $0,30 on electricity ($0,10/kWh) instead of about $1,80 on diesel ($2,70/gal), or a savings of $1,5 for giving up 50kg of cargo. If we scale to say 50 tonnes of cargo then this equates to giving up 2,5 tonnes (5%) of your cargo to save $75 per hour.

There have been electric delivery trucks for a long time - for example, Smith Electric Vehicles has been making li-ion trucks almost as long as Tesla has been around. And they follow up on a long history of electric delivery vehicles on a continuous line dating back to the early lead-acid days. But "existing" doesn't mean "having blown the market wide open". The big question is when that could happen.

You know, though, as ridiculous as it sounds, I almost wonder Tesla's efforts could evolve into a killer delivery vehicle. The Model S / Model X drivetrain is already starting to get into the power range of a big rig, and big rig budgets can afford their high prices. Combine that this potential solution to charging over long distances and you really could have a winner.

I wouldn't count on really powerful fast chargers ever getting really cheap. Cheaper than they are now, sure, but just ignoring all of the communication and high power conversion hardware you still have to have:

1) A powerful cooling system in your charger (for a really powerful connection, you even need to liquid-cool the charging cable)
2) A huge amount of copper (or aluminum, but that comes with a number of additional challenges) in your charger
3) A high power feed installed to your location
4) A high capacity and high power battery buffer to even out your charges if you want really fast charges / fast charges for big packs (say, 250+ kW)
5) A professional electrician to do the installs (and remember, we're not talking about home wiring here, we're talking about huge-current high-voltage connections). ... and so forth. These things will always add up. So maybe we'd not be talking about $100k to add one.... but I'd be shocked if even in mass production they could be manufactured, delivered and installed for under $10k. Probably several tens of thousands of USD per unit.

Betteridge's law of headlines says "No", and that's good enough for me.

TFA is a good article, but The "Start Button" was really a non-innovative, pedestrian multi-function, customizable menu button.

I always marvel that people write thinkpieces about "The Start Button" like it was some big tech innovation.

The "Start Button" was, essentially, just like any other "Menu" option in computing every used, it just used a different word. And to that end, ontologically speaking, "Start" was one of the most patronizing, over-simplified, dumbed down choices they could have made and still made it to production.

Hoo-kay.. you're just yet another pedantic, argument-loving internet person, and as such I'm not taking you seriously. Maybe you should just relax a little? We're not world leaders, nothing we say here is going to decide who lives and who dies, we're just having a conversation. Just chill out instead of getting all lathered up over a single word.

No, I upgraded last week. RTM has been out since July 15.

All the wireless solutions are flaky or expensive. Go wired.

HDMI can go up to 45 feet. If you need to go farther than that there are HDMI to Cat6 converter boxes. Run the HDMI over the Cat6, run it through the conduits... easy peasy.

If you tell me "I don't have conduits" or "this sounds like too much work"... You're shit out of luck so far as I understand the issue. That is how I understand that has to work.

Yes... there are wireless options but the most you would want to do with those is maybe a movie. If you do gaming or websites or anything responsive... No.

And even the movies is unreliable. I've been nothing but annoyed with all the high res wireless solutions. They all seem to be shitty.

Wired works.

This if you can manage it with 45 feet:
http://www.amazon.com/High-Spe...

Or this if you need to send it a lot farther:
http://www.amazon.com/AVUE-HDM...

That's 400 feet... but I suspect you could chain them together to send it a lot farther. Fucking miles if you really wanted to...

Its not expensive.

Just run the wire.

Here you might be saying "but how do I use my keyboard, mouse, anal vibrator without close access to the USB on my computer?"... good question... and the same answer:
http://www.amazon.com/Monopric...

that's 150 feet... I'm sure there are ones that transmit farther if you look for it or care. 150 feet is pretty good if you're just trying to go downstairs through the conduits.

I have a server closet in my house. Most of my machines hang out in there. Most of them are just VNCed into or something. But some of them I want a tight hardware interface to and for THOSE... this works.

Keep in mind, you don't want to do more than keyboards and mice over a USB extender. They tend to have shitty bandwidth so plugging in a blueray reader or something is a mistake.

I wouldn't be surprised if they could get some more specific clues on what water it's been in - for example, marine growth species types or isotopic ratios - to help pin it down better than just general drift calculations (lots of places could dump debris on Réunion). There are could also be potential clues on how much sun or what temperatures it's been exposed to, such as rates of plastic degradation, and perhaps that might also help give them better ideas of what areas it's been in based on weather patterns since the flight was lost.

There are so many potential clues... each one rather vague on its own, but all together, I imagine they'll get pointed in the right direction.

I hope they find significant pieces that don't lend themselves to being easily transported. Unfortunately a single relatively small piece of plane is not enough evidence to prove that the plane went down in the ocean, only to prove that a single, relatively small piece of plane was found in/near the ocean.