didn't realize that, interesting and mostly agree!

I wonder how many miles the average semi (short vs long haul too) deadheads around as a % of their total miles between jobs etc, with an empty trailer or no trailer. those are still miles and if the tractor is just way heavy even while it's unloaded then it might still be doing more road damage.

I'm totally in favor of doing something but tbh I'd rather do biodiesel for actual trucking trucking in the last mile, and just work on vastly increasing the throughput and latency of our train network for long-haul. Including both building more rail, and improving throughput on the current rail where possible. Our rail system has gone back to being embarrassing, they've effectively nullified the amtrak priority mandate, etc. like I applaud the concept of the words "precision scheduled railroad" but "lol big trains cheaper" ain't it.

I know that's a pipedream but at least we can do biodiesel B99/B90 for current diesel trucks - it's generally a drop-in replacement (B90 for low-temp). Bonus, it neutralizes most of the soot from the older lower-compression diesels - there's no sulfur in it at all.

long-haul semis just occupy an uncomfortable spot between bulk transport and last-mile service, and those tend towards big and small optimums, respectively. and I get the point of wanting to develop the technology but personally I see electric semis as being useful for having fuckloads of torque/power etc than ever being the optimum long-haul design. any technology they can deploy will be better off on a rail (free guidance!), potentially electrified rail/catenary, with like 16 of them stuck onto some railcar. which we could call a micro-engine.

or even "distributed" per-wheel systems like electric cars, but on every single car/etc (would have to be split-grade the whole way) so effectively every car is a self-locomotive. like if you legitimately can get them away from grade and run them really fast, automatically, with reasonable following and self-deceleration profiles, such that they at least buffer up, catch/couple each other, and brake together etc why couldn't you run them at inhumanly close spacings? they'll bunch up and guide each other to contact IOT style (they have known keys to each other), or at least if they collide they'll hopefully auto-couple (physically) and brake together etc.

This is going to be a nuclear-hot take but I don't think it really matters that (off-grade!) microtrains can absolutely 100% safely stop themselves. If 0.1% of loads of lumber or xboxes get smashed but you can move 4x the capacity per rail, oh well, that's a matter for insurance. You can make sure you don't end up with east palestine where the poison railcars get piled into by oil cars etc. And there's already absolutely nothing any train conductor beyond an airport tram can stop if you are on the rails. Light rail operator still needs far longer than you'd think to stop the train. When you see that subway/el train coming that operator needs you to exit that car pronto, because he absolutely cannot do anything to stop it other than nail the brakes (if at speed, there is a maximum rate they can apply without derailing the train), and they tend to have nightmares afterwards. Yup, disconcerting number of train engineers will have fatal accidents in their lives, almost entirely out of their control.

if you can precision-schedule cars then you can at least make sure that hazmat is transported in a secure pattern. there is a ton more cement and wheat and sheet steel and i-beams moved around than the super-poison, and you can pad the superpoison shipments with inert stuff (or even neutralizing/absorbing agents for bad stuff). even oil spills, if they happen, are whatevs at 1-car scales really. if you limit the scale of the clamity to 1 or 2 microtrains/4-8 cars and guarantee everything else can safely brake to a halt, it's probably statistically safer in general and gets way more throughput per rail.

self-driving semis needing giant batteries and big torquey engines is just such an insanely self-invented problem, there is a guidance rail built right into it right there, many times with power source too! Even if you want to go dual-mode and drive onto roads for last-mile, use the rail to go cross-country! etc

but I also think we just probably need way more rail, having like one line for certain major routes may not be enough. the federal interstate system wasn't built by just modernizing highways, it was a whole bunch more capacity. I know there's not the political will for it and electric semis are probably what we can get, but they're not really a good technological solution.

icebreakers are an interesting case of electrification (technically hybrid diesel-electric transmission) being used for their extreme power. for when you want a ship to just fling itself forward onto the ice, then vigorously pump water between its waddle tanks to roll and crunch the ice with the weight of the ship. electric go brrr.

https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Water/Al...

http://www.mightymac.org/cgcmackinaw.htm (love the pic with the Speer, that is a Saultmax bulk cargo freighter, what a fucking fatass)

(same reasons the russians did nuclear icebreakers too really!)

bulldozers probably would be another good one, and conventional bulldozers are maintenance nightmares so if you can actually make a good, reliable bulldozer with low operating/maintenance costs they'd probably love that. Even if they had a runtime/chargetime cycle for generators/etc I bet (or run them direct-cord with big trailerbed generators).