> At 0.5 mph differential, the overtake takes 291 seconds — over a minute of blocking the outside lane. Annoying, but it gains the driver 5.0 extra miles across a working day.
The driver gets there 5 minutes earlier in exchange for causing a 7-km tailback multiple times per day? That seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be regulated away: the truck in front is limited to 90 km/h, you're limited to 90 km/h, you should expect to travel in convoy with that truck even through manufacturing tolerances mean your limiter is actually set to 90.5.
If the 0.5 km/h is actually valuable to the trucking industry, they can invest in more precise limiters at scale.
Seems to me that the slower truck is really the inconsiderate one here. If you’re already slower, tap the brakes a little and let the other guy slide in.
It's like when a big co says "now we care greatly about the environment" before going on to detail their plan for something that's laughably bad for it.
They see it. They just phrased the article that way because they don't want to catch hand wringing and hate comments from every idiot who does the exact same thing in their car with slightly different values for the variables outlined and without any of the physics/economics excuses to justify it.
Edit: I hope. I can't read minds, you may very well be right and they don't see it.
>>That seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be regulated away
Yes, and the regulation should NOT be limiting passing or requiring the slower truck to brake
It should allow a "Push To Pass" button that allows a 10mph boost for enough seconds to make a pass in a reasonable amount of distance so as to not create problems for other traffic.
Current technology would allow these to be easily limited to X uses per hour/day and even geo-fence the usage for safe zones (use could even be limited to passing lanes so the truck being passed cannot start a drag race to stay ahead). They could even require connectivity and disable it in poor road conditions.
The real people being inconsiderate are not so much the truckers (particularly the slower trucker failing to yield and let the other one pass in a reasonable distance), as it is the regulators who created this mess.
> That seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be regulated away
This is regulated via "no overtaking by trucks" [1] signs on portions of road that are susceptible to formation of queues, or more dangerous road conditions.
P.S. To bundle some replies:
> but they only apply during busy hours
Don't remember ever seeing the time interval next to these signs. They are tied more to the location than the time. But that's not bad? The goal is to avoid the worst issues, not to force trucks to drive in an ordered line for 8h straight.
Traffic lights also sometimes turn to intermittent yellow late in the night. Why spend a few minutes alone in the middle of the street for a red light?
> Does it still make sense for that to be "default allow?" Why doesn't the trucking industry lobby for every Truck Overtaking zone
The default should be the the one that applies most of the time. Today that's the "allow overtake". I'm allowed to very slowly overtake in my car. And I've seen this when I was driving right at the speed limit and someone else was overtaking at something like 1cm/s. It was painful to watch, at some point I just slowed down a bit to let him get in front and release the left lane.
If you ban truck overtakes and allow them only in specific zones, you'll quickly have kilometers long truck queues that never get drained. For an overtake that takes 1 min at 90km/h the trucks traveled 1500m. Many highways are 2 lanes so just one slow truck on the right lane and one slow car on the left lane screw the entire highway. Those costs go to you whether you're in your car or buying something those trucks deliver.
Does it (still) make sense for this to be "default allow?" Why not have the trucking industry lobby for every Truck Overtaking zone, instead of making residents lobby for the opposite?
I've also seen roads that have these kind of signs, but they only apply during busy hours.
However, as with any traffic controls they're useless if they're not actually enforced. Which is a shame, because it'd be absolutely trivial to automate that detection with cameras.
There's an exception made for cases where there's a vehicle on the right lane going much slower than the speed limit for trucks.
The public broadly agrees that this move was beneficial, as the miniscule benefit of some trucks arriving 15min earlier overall was not worth slowing down everyone else, particularly light commercial vehicles.
It kind of annoys me that the article says the people trapped behind the trucks are just inconvenienced, but the truck driver gains time and money. Considering commuting to and from work is what most people are doing on the road, that is exactly time and money. It really could be seen as truck drivers stealing dozens, if not hundreds, of minutes from other drivers to give themselves 5 minutes.
>It really could be seen as truck drivers stealing dozens, if not hundreds, of minutes from other drivers to give themselves 5 minutes.
People cut truckers a brake because due to the physics and rules they can only go so fast and only change speed so quickly.
The same cannot be said for the person camping the fast/passing lane because all the entering and exiting of the slow lane "is scary" or whatever. Their normal car can most definitely meet (and exceed) the expected norm for the lane they're traveling in.
I was reading the NASA truck aerodynamics thread earlier and realised that commercial freight is one of those fields that touches everyone's daily life (everything you own arrived on a truck) but sits in a complete knowledge blindspot for most people.
I work in fleet fuel efficiency and wrote up the foundational mental model, covering why trucks weigh what they weigh, why they're all doing exactly 56mph, why diesel is so hard to replace, and why 1% fuel savings matters when you're burning 43,000 litres a year.
This is the first in a series, there's already a 2-part deep dive on hydrogen up as well. Tried to keep it accessible without dumbing it down.
> Every driver in the UK has experienced this. Most assume the truck driver is being inconsiderate.
But then go on to explain how that is exactly true. The truck driver is taking time from *all* drivers on "roughly 4.5 miles of dual carriageway", just so that they can end the day 5 miles ahead.
> The five minutes of inconvenience to you saves them meaningful time and money over the course of a day.
It's five minutes of inconvenience to *everyone* on that 4.5 mile stretch of highway that nets the truck 5 minutes (5 miles ahead at ~60 mph). That's a very selfish and inconsiderate outcome.
A very well written article! I'd add a few things though.
> Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight.
That is only relevant when hauling bulk loads, think ore, soil and the likes, or you're carrying a trailer full of IBC liquid containers. I worked in stage lighting stuff, our trailers were at least 3/4 foam by volume, they didn't even come close to maxing out their weight.
> A battery pack storing equivalent energy would weigh on the order of 16 tonnes at current lithium-ion energy densities.
You don't need to haul a fully equivalent battery. Drivers have to have their mandatory rest breaks of 30+15 minutes here in Germany - that's enough to charge 300-400km of range. Additionally, they can be charged at loading docks, provided the freight base or the customer have chargers set up.
> For a driver paid by the mile, or on a delivery schedule measured in minutes, that overtake is rational.
Payment by mileage is illegal in Germany, as a trucker you need to be paid by the hour and you need to be paid under German minimum wage law as long as you're physically on German roads. Trucker companies from Eastern Europe are infamous for evading that, but as our customs enforcement (who also do the road inspections for rest breaks and minimum wage) ramps up, it's getting better.
The remaining problem are the dispatchers, quite a few of them hand out routes to their drivers that are barely achievable when operating legally (i.e. trucks with working speed governors, drivers taking their rest breaks). Competition is fierce, there used to be talks about passing laws to force dispatchers to not give barely-legal orders but I'm not sure where these went following our government's collapse last year.
> An electric drivetrain achieves around 90%, so you only need roughly 1,600 kWh of battery capacity for equivalent range.
Yup, and most importantly, you mentioned regenerative braking cutting down on brake wear - but it's not just cutting down there, the truck can actually save a fair amount of energy as well, at least outside of highways where the truck is mostly just coasting along.
Trucks, given the right infrastructure, are also viable for running them electrically in the mid-range nowadays as a result.
this is well written. thank you - you broke down the economics nicely.
I do think maybe with a hub & spoke model - big trucks move loads to hubs -- then smaller electrified trucks cover the less than 200 miles from hub to spoke. electrified smaller trucks and vans are already economical today.
you get to benefit from using diesel for long haul routes - while also - better economics on the electrified front i.e a hybrid model
And I'd rather have last-mile trucks with Direct Vision, no blindspots etc driving around city streets, backing into stores etc., than huge 44 tonne long haulers that can maul pedestrians in an instant.
> This isn’t advisory. It’s a physical limiter in the engine’s ECU. The truck cannot go faster.
I live in Latvia (in the EU) and see a significant part of our ARTICs on the roads go well past 90km/h daily. I presume their fleets do monitor the speed and alert the driver if speeding for a prolonged period of time but they are obviously not physically limited. Maybe the limits do come from the factory but get disabled? I really couldn't say.
A recent journalistic investigation uncovered a problem with the weight limit not being followed on a mass scale too. Specifically by our lumber industry whos drivers are incentivized to break the law. Even if you see a dangerous overloaded truck on the road and call the Police, it is likely no action will be taken because there only a couple of units in the country that are equipped to weigh a freight truck out in the field.
Probably the first thing to consider is the trucks have their speed calibrated periodically to ensure the accuracy of their tachographs (in the UK at least) so a truck doing 90kmph may show as 100kmph+ in a passenger car, I know my Volvo is 7% out, and my Seat is closer to 10% out.
That said, depending on the truck, there's fuses you can pull, ECU remaps and even for the older trucks with the magnetic sensor in the gearbox, the trick is/was to stick a magnet on the sensor (with a bit of string, so you can pull it off remotely if you get pulled over). All of these methods are becoming less feasible, as things like the aggregate wheel speed sensors used for ABS get used, you can't just fool one thing now.
As for the weight limit problem, that's a whole other rabbit hole!
Just because something is mandatory, doesn't mean it's enforced. You got 6 million trucks registered in the EU alone [1], plus fleets of trucks registered in adjacent states such as Turkey or Serbia, or old trucks out of the new Eastern European states that predate their EU membership and, with it, mandatory governors. And loggers can be manipulated as well, if you do it right there is no chance of finding that out without taking apart the truck.
Not every country is as thorough as Germany is in technical inspections, trucks from outside the EU don't need speed governors, and as long as you don't race your truck in Germany, France or Austria, chances are high no one will be bothered enough to pull your truck over for a detailed inspection on an examination wheel. Or you simply have two datalogger cards, that you swap out when going into one of these countries.
Maybe they should give the trucks a "turbo boost" button that lets them increase speed by something like 5 KM/hr for 120s every 30 minutes. Just enough to allow truck drivers to pass now and then without causing these types of log-jams on the highways, without causing safety problems. I'm sure there's a more correct combination of speeds and times than this.
Sort of like the silly "boost buttons" on the Honda CR-Z [1] or the Elantra N [2], but just lifting the speed limiter for a bit...
The incentive for the drivers would be to press the button every 30min, regardless of actual overtaking need. And when overtaking has to be done, the button would probably be in cooldown, solving nothing.
For people that want to make the calculation:
A truck does not need a 15 ton battery. In Europe, we have mandatory breaks for truck drivers. So you need a battery pack for max 400km of range, let's say 500km. When you have a break, you charge. For this, you need like 1500kWh battery pack, which weigths like ... wait, 15 tons.
But this is not entirely correct, the real values reported are between 120-150Kwh/100km, that means a half of the stated number, 7.5 tons for the battery pack.
You cannot do that, because there will never be that many charging places around. Never. The situation is so bad now that there are barely enough places for trucks to get parking spots, let alone parking spots with electric charges. I'm talking about Europe, my brother is a truck driver (right now is on a ride to Morocco, he picked something up with his truck from Hungary), I know those stories about parking spots from him.
It’s weird that he’s so in the numbers but then doesn’t carry through with the battery electric truck calculations. He just dismisses it out of hand.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
Those mandatory breaks are 45 minutes long. You're not charging 750 kWh in 45 minutes. With a fast charger 750 kWh is 2 to 7 hours. At the far more common level 2 chargers it's 18 hours. Either mandatory breaks need to be substantially longer, you need a substantially larger battery than just that required to go between breaks, or you need some sort of specialized technology for dramatically speeding up charging rates well beyond those for personal EVs, any of which cut hard into the economics.
So _if_ your route had those, you could charge in somewhere around 1.25h. Not enough for break time, but you can imagine starting with, say, a 1.1MWh battery with one +500kWH boost mid-day being enough to get you to an overnight full recharge. Lots of "ifs" there, since you might not always be able to get full charge rate from the charger, might not time things perfectly, etc., but it doesn't seem completely out of scope for a few years from now.
(And who knows, perhaps tesla will come through with those megachargers. Seems more likely than, say, building an autonomous humanoid robot.)
Charge full overnight, top up at 300-350 KW once a day for 45 minutes. 600 kWh lfp battery weighing 4.5t. This seemed to work out fine for a guy on YouTube documenting his experiences. SoC wasn't a big deal in itself, flexibility in (overnight) stops more so, but still less than I expected.
IIRC, the difference in radius between fresh tires and those worn down to just before they need replacing, changes the actual speed at any given speedometer reading by about 2%.
> Rail is superb for what it does: moving bulk commodities... The problem is last-mile.
Before around 1950x-1970x rail networks were more dense (at least in Europe) - any significant goods source/destination (like a warehouse, a factory e. t. c.) had a railway spur. Lots of rail tracks / spurs were abandoned /removed when it was widely believed that trucks are the future and railways are outdated.
If all these spurs were kept last mile problem would not be as bad for railways. Also electric trucks are well suited to solve this last mile problem.
I think they gloss over a major factor also. They mention:
> Distribution centres are built around motorway junctions (J24 of the M1, the Golden Triangle in the East Midlands) because that’s where road access is.
But they skip _why_ is that road access and motor junction there. It's there because the government decided building roads was something that was it's responsibility. I know this article is UK focused, but for the US if the government decided to build rails also, then they could put them in more convenient places. Instead they allow rail companies to decide which monopoly corridors the companies get to control.
The article makes it sound like the Tesla Semi is physically infeasible. Yet, it is in active use on a sufficient number of long-haul routes that ignoring this proof of existence undercuts some of the central points the post tries to make.
The combination of higher efficiency, regenerative breaking, and some regulatory wiggle-room such as slightly higher allowable gross-weight (2000 lbs in the US, and 2000 kgs in the EU), together with reduced maintenance cost and time significantly affect the economics of trucking.
As regulatory frameworks price in more externalities of internal combustion engines, such as the climate and health effects of their emissions, burning diesel will no longer make economical sense. All road transport will end up being battery-electric. The declining cost of owning and operating electric vehicles compared to internal combustion ones will reach this point even without regulatory changes, just at a slower pace.
Is regenerative breaking signifiant on long routes? I barely brake on long distance but the gas pedal is used almost uninterrupted. My naïve guess is truckers optimize even more their acceleration/beaking.
Readit News
The driver gets there 5 minutes earlier in exchange for causing a 7-km tailback multiple times per day? That seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be regulated away: the truck in front is limited to 90 km/h, you're limited to 90 km/h, you should expect to travel in convoy with that truck even through manufacturing tolerances mean your limiter is actually set to 90.5.
If the 0.5 km/h is actually valuable to the trucking industry, they can invest in more precise limiters at scale.
From the article. Then goes on to show exactly how they're inconsiderate with maths. How they're not seeing it is baffling.
It's like when a big co says "now we care greatly about the environment" before going on to detail their plan for something that's laughably bad for it.
They see it. They just phrased the article that way because they don't want to catch hand wringing and hate comments from every idiot who does the exact same thing in their car with slightly different values for the variables outlined and without any of the physics/economics excuses to justify it.
Edit: I hope. I can't read minds, you may very well be right and they don't see it.
Yes, and the regulation should NOT be limiting passing or requiring the slower truck to brake
It should allow a "Push To Pass" button that allows a 10mph boost for enough seconds to make a pass in a reasonable amount of distance so as to not create problems for other traffic.
Current technology would allow these to be easily limited to X uses per hour/day and even geo-fence the usage for safe zones (use could even be limited to passing lanes so the truck being passed cannot start a drag race to stay ahead). They could even require connectivity and disable it in poor road conditions.
The real people being inconsiderate are not so much the truckers (particularly the slower trucker failing to yield and let the other one pass in a reasonable distance), as it is the regulators who created this mess.
This is regulated via "no overtaking by trucks" [1] signs on portions of road that are susceptible to formation of queues, or more dangerous road conditions.
P.S. To bundle some replies:
> but they only apply during busy hours
Don't remember ever seeing the time interval next to these signs. They are tied more to the location than the time. But that's not bad? The goal is to avoid the worst issues, not to force trucks to drive in an ordered line for 8h straight. Traffic lights also sometimes turn to intermittent yellow late in the night. Why spend a few minutes alone in the middle of the street for a red light?
> Does it still make sense for that to be "default allow?" Why doesn't the trucking industry lobby for every Truck Overtaking zone
The default should be the the one that applies most of the time. Today that's the "allow overtake". I'm allowed to very slowly overtake in my car. And I've seen this when I was driving right at the speed limit and someone else was overtaking at something like 1cm/s. It was painful to watch, at some point I just slowed down a bit to let him get in front and release the left lane.
If you ban truck overtakes and allow them only in specific zones, you'll quickly have kilometers long truck queues that never get drained. For an overtake that takes 1 min at 90km/h the trucks traveled 1500m. Many highways are 2 lanes so just one slow truck on the right lane and one slow car on the left lane screw the entire highway. Those costs go to you whether you're in your car or buying something those trucks deliver.
[1] https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1728143251/vector/no-overta...
Does it (still) make sense for this to be "default allow?" Why not have the trucking industry lobby for every Truck Overtaking zone, instead of making residents lobby for the opposite?
However, as with any traffic controls they're useless if they're not actually enforced. Which is a shame, because it'd be absolutely trivial to automate that detection with cameras.
https://trafficban.com/news.1590.html
There's an exception made for cases where there's a vehicle on the right lane going much slower than the speed limit for trucks.
The public broadly agrees that this move was beneficial, as the miniscule benefit of some trucks arriving 15min earlier overall was not worth slowing down everyone else, particularly light commercial vehicles.
People cut truckers a brake because due to the physics and rules they can only go so fast and only change speed so quickly.
The same cannot be said for the person camping the fast/passing lane because all the entering and exiting of the slow lane "is scary" or whatever. Their normal car can most definitely meet (and exceed) the expected norm for the lane they're traveling in.
I work in fleet fuel efficiency and wrote up the foundational mental model, covering why trucks weigh what they weigh, why they're all doing exactly 56mph, why diesel is so hard to replace, and why 1% fuel savings matters when you're burning 43,000 litres a year.
This is the first in a series, there's already a 2-part deep dive on hydrogen up as well. Tried to keep it accessible without dumbing it down.
> Every driver in the UK has experienced this. Most assume the truck driver is being inconsiderate.
But then go on to explain how that is exactly true. The truck driver is taking time from *all* drivers on "roughly 4.5 miles of dual carriageway", just so that they can end the day 5 miles ahead.
> The five minutes of inconvenience to you saves them meaningful time and money over the course of a day.
It's five minutes of inconvenience to *everyone* on that 4.5 mile stretch of highway that nets the truck 5 minutes (5 miles ahead at ~60 mph). That's a very selfish and inconsiderate outcome.
> Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight.
That is only relevant when hauling bulk loads, think ore, soil and the likes, or you're carrying a trailer full of IBC liquid containers. I worked in stage lighting stuff, our trailers were at least 3/4 foam by volume, they didn't even come close to maxing out their weight.
> A battery pack storing equivalent energy would weigh on the order of 16 tonnes at current lithium-ion energy densities.
You don't need to haul a fully equivalent battery. Drivers have to have their mandatory rest breaks of 30+15 minutes here in Germany - that's enough to charge 300-400km of range. Additionally, they can be charged at loading docks, provided the freight base or the customer have chargers set up.
> For a driver paid by the mile, or on a delivery schedule measured in minutes, that overtake is rational.
Payment by mileage is illegal in Germany, as a trucker you need to be paid by the hour and you need to be paid under German minimum wage law as long as you're physically on German roads. Trucker companies from Eastern Europe are infamous for evading that, but as our customs enforcement (who also do the road inspections for rest breaks and minimum wage) ramps up, it's getting better.
The remaining problem are the dispatchers, quite a few of them hand out routes to their drivers that are barely achievable when operating legally (i.e. trucks with working speed governors, drivers taking their rest breaks). Competition is fierce, there used to be talks about passing laws to force dispatchers to not give barely-legal orders but I'm not sure where these went following our government's collapse last year.
> An electric drivetrain achieves around 90%, so you only need roughly 1,600 kWh of battery capacity for equivalent range.
Yup, and most importantly, you mentioned regenerative braking cutting down on brake wear - but it's not just cutting down there, the truck can actually save a fair amount of energy as well, at least outside of highways where the truck is mostly just coasting along.
Trucks, given the right infrastructure, are also viable for running them electrically in the mid-range nowadays as a result.
Deleted Comment
I do think maybe with a hub & spoke model - big trucks move loads to hubs -- then smaller electrified trucks cover the less than 200 miles from hub to spoke. electrified smaller trucks and vans are already economical today.
you get to benefit from using diesel for long haul routes - while also - better economics on the electrified front i.e a hybrid model
This is why LTL shipments can be a significant fraction of just sending an entire container, and that's assuming they're still palletized.
I live in Latvia (in the EU) and see a significant part of our ARTICs on the roads go well past 90km/h daily. I presume their fleets do monitor the speed and alert the driver if speeding for a prolonged period of time but they are obviously not physically limited. Maybe the limits do come from the factory but get disabled? I really couldn't say.
A recent journalistic investigation uncovered a problem with the weight limit not being followed on a mass scale too. Specifically by our lumber industry whos drivers are incentivized to break the law. Even if you see a dangerous overloaded truck on the road and call the Police, it is likely no action will be taken because there only a couple of units in the country that are equipped to weigh a freight truck out in the field.
That said, depending on the truck, there's fuses you can pull, ECU remaps and even for the older trucks with the magnetic sensor in the gearbox, the trick is/was to stick a magnet on the sensor (with a bit of string, so you can pull it off remotely if you get pulled over). All of these methods are becoming less feasible, as things like the aggregate wheel speed sensors used for ABS get used, you can't just fool one thing now.
As for the weight limit problem, that's a whole other rabbit hole!
Not every country is as thorough as Germany is in technical inspections, trucks from outside the EU don't need speed governors, and as long as you don't race your truck in Germany, France or Austria, chances are high no one will be bothered enough to pull your truck over for a detailed inspection on an examination wheel. Or you simply have two datalogger cards, that you swap out when going into one of these countries.
[1] https://trans.info/de/eu-lkws-alternde-flotten-449472
Sort of like the silly "boost buttons" on the Honda CR-Z [1] or the Elantra N [2], but just lifting the speed limiter for a bit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CR-Z#Powertrain
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Elantra#Elantra_N/Avan...
You cannot do that, because there will never be that many charging places around. Never. The situation is so bad now that there are barely enough places for trucks to get parking spots, let alone parking spots with electric charges. I'm talking about Europe, my brother is a truck driver (right now is on a ride to Morocco, he picked something up with his truck from Hungary), I know those stories about parking spots from him.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
Assuming some amount of tesla over-hyping there, Tellus is doing 600kW chargers: https://chargedevs.com/features/inside-tellus-powers-600-kw-...
So _if_ your route had those, you could charge in somewhere around 1.25h. Not enough for break time, but you can imagine starting with, say, a 1.1MWh battery with one +500kWH boost mid-day being enough to get you to an overnight full recharge. Lots of "ifs" there, since you might not always be able to get full charge rate from the charger, might not time things perfectly, etc., but it doesn't seem completely out of scope for a few years from now.
(And who knows, perhaps tesla will come through with those megachargers. Seems more likely than, say, building an autonomous humanoid robot.)
https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
Lots of good info but it all feels a bit like it is being used to create a "just so story" to support whatever the current status quo is.
C=πD and all that.
Before around 1950x-1970x rail networks were more dense (at least in Europe) - any significant goods source/destination (like a warehouse, a factory e. t. c.) had a railway spur. Lots of rail tracks / spurs were abandoned /removed when it was widely believed that trucks are the future and railways are outdated.
If all these spurs were kept last mile problem would not be as bad for railways. Also electric trucks are well suited to solve this last mile problem.
> Distribution centres are built around motorway junctions (J24 of the M1, the Golden Triangle in the East Midlands) because that’s where road access is.
But they skip _why_ is that road access and motor junction there. It's there because the government decided building roads was something that was it's responsibility. I know this article is UK focused, but for the US if the government decided to build rails also, then they could put them in more convenient places. Instead they allow rail companies to decide which monopoly corridors the companies get to control.
The combination of higher efficiency, regenerative breaking, and some regulatory wiggle-room such as slightly higher allowable gross-weight (2000 lbs in the US, and 2000 kgs in the EU), together with reduced maintenance cost and time significantly affect the economics of trucking.
As regulatory frameworks price in more externalities of internal combustion engines, such as the climate and health effects of their emissions, burning diesel will no longer make economical sense. All road transport will end up being battery-electric. The declining cost of owning and operating electric vehicles compared to internal combustion ones will reach this point even without regulatory changes, just at a slower pace.