I’ve recently concluded the reason Waymo is dominating has nothing to do with automation and everything with reliability.

Both Uber and Lyft bet on maximising driver availability, even at the cost of reliability and quality. That left wide open those willing to wait a bit longer for a car that won’t cancel, won’t smell and won’t have someone who drives unsafely while on the phone. (And apparently even willing to pay a premium for it.)

Because unless someone else crashes that market (Scania is clearly angling to be the one) they get away with selling rinky trucks so there’s no reason to spend more.

As a European visiting US/Canada I once struck a conversation with a truck driver who had a really cool vintage semi, with lots of chrome and flare. I told him that I really liked the look of his truck, but that vintage trucks of that age would never be allowed on the road again in Europe, at least not for commercial jobs.

He then told me his truck was basically brand new...

Besides me making a fool of myself, I really grew an appreciation for the EU having rules about semis, especially in the noise department. Yeah, US domestic semi trucks are cool in their own way, but the constant noise of clutch fans, air brakes, 'jake' brakes, 'stack' exhaust with no of mufflers, etc. would drive me insane.

In (most of) Europe, all vehicles are subject to strict noise and emission rules, and many larger cities are now congestion zones which prohibits larger/older diesel powered vehicles from entering the city. Same for my city, where most trucks and busses are now electric. Since it happened gradually the change wasn't all that noticeable, that is until you go somewhere else and hear (and smell!) a diesel powered bus/semi drive by... We like to complain about all the 'stupid' government rules, but when you go to a place without those laws you really start to appreciate them, it truly feels like taking a step 'back' for the worse.

I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all, the current through the motor windings will be very high, causing the windings to overheat, potentially fail and potentially short circuit. There's a high risk of damaging the MOSFETs in the motor controller, which very much could lead to a fire risk depending on the failure mode.

There's not really many ways to solve this problem - in a normal 3-phase winding, all you can do is remove the current until it cools down and try again, but that will force the motor to stop and then try to restart, so creating an even larger load. Possibly if you have 6 more more phases and more magnets such that each of the normal 3-phases has multiple windings and magnets, you can cycle through the different ones and still keep applying some torque, but obviously this would still not really solve the fundamental problem.

Essentially the problem is the same for ICE vs EV - if the gradient is so steep and load so heavy that the engine / motor can't provide enough force, then it will be overloaded. Whether that's through pressure / shearing / excess heat in an ICE or through excess current / excess heat in EV, the outcome is failure to continue forward at best.

The only real solution is to massively over engineer the engine for normal situations, but human nature being what it is, there will always push things way beyond the designed limits and safety margins until it fails.

Don't know how fast these things can charge though, but suspect they'll have more than your typical 350kw passenger car chargers.

This is the same argument people used to have about electric cars: if I can't drive nonstop for 18 hours at 95mph up a mountain hauling a speedboat and recharge up to 100% in 30 seconds then they're worthless etc etc. In reality these are not realistic or typical usage patterns.

These have exactly those

You might be thinking of long distance haules, but what's long distance also depends on the environment

In 500 km you can cross most counties in europe

Paris to Rotterdamn is under 500km, and Paris to Le Havre is much shorter (although these also have train routes).

Similarly, they could serve basically any route in the UK or Ireland.

I'm getting really nervous as we cross into the megawatt-hour territory. A tank full of diesel fuel isn't exactly a walk in the park during a disaster, but it takes a few minutes or hours to burn off. The battery can dump all of its energy in seconds. Managing a diesel fire is a much more understood artform.

What would a million watt hours look like if released in <10 seconds? How many casualties would we have if this were to occur in a tunnel or other confined roadway environment?

I think this is an example of a "good" outcome: https://ctif.org/news/electric-semi-truck-lithium-battery-fi...

Put the battery underneath the trailers and you've basically solved the problem.

[1] https://www.peterbilt.com/trucks/zero-emission/567EV

So who provides this Volvo Semi batteries? Geely / CATL or someone else?

For example, I think trucks in california are usually almost new due to regulations.

https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/brands/products

https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/company/history

- many U.S. truckers are owner-operators --- the rig has to appeal to them, and is in many ways, an extension of their self-perception

- bring up a map of the U.S. and plot occupations on it, removing "school teacher" and "farmer" --- for many rural counties, the most common (and one of the best-paying) is long-haul trucker --- I can still vividly recall the elaborate drawings and plans which many of my classmates in a rural school would draw up of elaborate 18-wheelers (that this situation was brought about by the county board of supervisors being comprised of large land owners who wanted an essentially captive population to work their farms is a different discussion)

One part of this is the batteries. When you have the amount of batteries needed to drive a truck for a reasonable distance, you automatically get a high amount of power output as well. The power is distributed over many cells, so no overload there.

EV motors are significantly smaller than their ICE counterparts, they’re relatively cheap, don’t require significant maintenance and they generate much less waste heat for a given power output. Adding more motors+inverters to handle the required power is not over engineering in the case of an EV truck, it’s just good engineering. I suppose it’s even necessary to some degree, to deal with the lack of a multi speed gear box

As mentioned in the other comment, the problem is often overheating in brakes. This is also less of an issue with EVs. You can distribute the energy dissipation to the motors/batteries and the brake pads, so the heat load is less concentrated. Energy sent to the batteries is absorbed as energy stored, with very little waste heat.

Most new cars charge at speeds of least 1200km per hour, many far quicker.

The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.

There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.

The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.

Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.

EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.

Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.

https://www.thetruckersreport.com/news/tanker-explodes-on-pa...

Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.

Even firetrucks, the ones I saw in SF looked so cool compred to the ones I see over here.

You're not nearly jaded enough. The dude isn't doing product placement for Scania. He's making trucker content for urban white collar demographics hence the direction of the spin to fit that niche.

The problem isn't overloading the engine when you go up, it's overheating the brakes when you go down. The reasoning here is probably that EV semis will use regeneration for some of the braking thus avoiding the overheating to some extent.

But such a gradient would be completely unusable for any ICE! EVs can deliver an absolutely insane amount of power at even the slowest speeds. If an EV has the power to sustain highway speeds, it'll also have the power to go up a steep hill at a snail's pace. On the other hand, an ICE will struggle significantly with steep hills - even if they technically have the horsepower to do it.

I highly doubt it'll result in a fire, though. Measuring motor current isn't exactly rocket science, so it'll just go into an overload mode. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if EV motors were explicitly designed to survive short-term stall currents. Measure the wheel speed and it's pretty obvious to figure out when you're stalling and should shut down to avoid damage.

Modern luxury EVs have a range of close to 500km, and they are able to charge at over 1000km of range per hour. Split that 6-hour leg into two 3-hour legs with a 15-minute charging session & pee break, and you can easily do that.

Besides, why optimize for the absolute best experience on your once-a-year trip? What about the _other_ 300+ days of the year? How much time are you going to save by plugging your car into a charger when you get home once or twice a week, instead of going to a petrol station to fill it up?

500km doesn't even get me to the capital of my European country. Maybe you're thinking specifically about Eastern Europe or something, where there is a bunch of smaller countries closer together?

What is needed are 8 or 10-hour endurance trucks, even if at a lesser load, as that will cover a driver's day and allow recharge during rest periods.

The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.

A full diesel tank on a truck is circa 13 megawatt hours

A bigger risk than the energy density (or how bomb-like it is) must be the self-sustaining fires.

Per mile driven, electric trucks have less fires than diesel ones but when they go on fire, they can be harder to put out.

It's different risk profiles, diesel can run downhill in an accident and create a fairly hard to contain situation. BEVs don't really do that but they reject attempts to snuff them out.

I like the Edison Motors concept a lot. Diesel generator running at peak efficiency charging a small battery. From a fire hazard point of view, probably worst of both worlds when it does go up in flames but i'd still expect less fires than conventional diesel trucks, based on nothing but the gut feeling that the drastic simplification of the drive train results in fewer ignition opportunities.

In my layman pov… A diesel engine can take the least aerodynamically shaped body and move it at 60 mph for 1k miles no problem. As an American, I guess it’s just natural to me that if it can move, then it should move with glory!!

Edit: my bad I didn’t properly read your post

A large proportion of truck traffic in the EU is regional trunking - regular runs between distribution centres, typically as part of a hub-and-spoke model. To give an example, If I receive a parcel via Royal Mail, it's likely to have travelled via the Midlands Super Hub to my local mail centre, a distance of about 120 miles. At either end of that journey, the truck is likely to spend at least 30 minutes being unloaded and loaded.

There are many thousands of routes like that, with a constant flow of trucks covering relatively short distances on a predictable schedule. The operators running those routes have fleets of many thousands of vehicles and would have no difficulty whatsoever in managing a mixed fleet, using diesel or electric based on what's most suitable for the role; with diesel costing over $7 a gallon, there's a very obvious financial advantage to electric trucks.

Currently, the rollout of electric trucks is overwhelmingly bottlenecked by grid capacity rather than vehicle range - installing rapid chargers on every loading bay in a medium-sized distribution centre might require 20 megawatts of peak capacity, which isn't the kind of thing you can wire up overnight. Many operators are ready and eager to switch a large proportion of their fleet to electric trucks, they're just waiting for the grid to catch up.

This is what I got used to in California but unfortunately should you find a fantastic outdoor restaurant table to enjoy the European sunset, chances are somebody will be smoking right next to you and your kid.

Just more of Musk kicking cans down the road.

In normal use, only one phase is active an a time, so the duty cycle is 1/3. When the motor slows almost to a stop, the duty cycle on that winding is 100% meaning that the effect of that current on heating the wire is much worse than normal.

The catastrophic failure is when the MOSFET fails in a way that it doesn't protect the winding or battery from a short circuit which could lead to runaway heating in the battery as well as the motor. But even before then, unless the controller is actively limiting current to safe levels, the motor will get destroyed.

The only happy day scenario is if the motor control is actively limiting the current to safe levels well below the expected failure point, and then the EV will just fail to move at all under that load, other than rolling backwards.

As I said, the limit for this will be based on what the manufacturer expects the maximum load will be, but people have a knack for trying to carry more weight than their vehicle was designed for, or taking it places that are unsuitable. That's just humans being humans.

It's possible to design an EV that could withstand significantly steep hills with heavy loads, e.g. by putting many more sets of individually wired windings in parallel, but it'd be expensive and unnecessary for the typical situations that they'd be used in, and so unlikely to be commercially viable.

2. Electric semi trucks are not ideal for long distance trips, they're more for predictable day routes, so it wouldn't surprise me to not encounter many of them on what was presumably a highway drive.

Speed in relation to semi trucks always seemed the most absolute vanity metric on earth!

Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.

Can i go in and order 100 of these? Are they custom/super-expensive?

Pragmatically speaking, At least for the weight of a 'US Style Electric Tractor' my concern is that nobody in my state is following the Truck Speed limits as is. The added weight on top of the speeding means our roads turn to shit way way faster (I live near a major US/CA transit point for freight that also has sharp seasonal changes.)

Where this becomes a semi-concern for the practicality of such drivers (i.e. potential buyers,) the advertised range likely is based on certain assumptions, and going 70MPH+ likely results in a notable range reduction.

All of that said, I do really like that Frito Lay is using E-Transit vans for local distribution now; that 'last leg' is arguably at least as important as long haul, yet has the advantage of being way easier to solve from a logistics/planning standpoint. Amazon seems to have it figured out well with the rivian vans and they aren't changing strategy.

Most EVs are direct drive from the motor without a gearbox. There absolutely is a minimum speed depending on how the motor is wound. If you imagine, say 12 magnets around the motor driven by 3 phases, the idea is to have one winding attracting the magnets, and this phase is the one the motor is "trying to get to". In this situation, this winding is active until the motor is in the correct position (actually slightly before) when it is depowered and the next phase is powered. The longer the motor stays in that position, the hotter the winding gets for the same current. At the point where the motor stops being able to rotate at all, that winding is receiving 100% duty cycle.

There are strategies that you could try - the simplest is cutting power and letting it cool down, but then the motor will stop where it is, and starting the motor from stationary requires even more power than keeping an already moving motor going. You might apply a reverse polarity to the previous winding for a bit to repel the magnets and then swap back. If the motor has passed the mid point this will be less effective, but still better than nothing.

If you ignore feedback from the axle and just cycle through the windings at the desired speed, then there definitely is a minimum speed. Because when the load is too great and the motor doesn't move and you cycle to the next phase, then next phase won't exert much magnetic field on your magnets and the next phase after that, you're working against the direction you want to go.

It's true that if you gear an EV motor, the torque should be able to be geared down to any speed. But typically pure EVs are direct drive, because usually they have enough torque for the low speeds and adding a gearbox just adds inefficiencies. But for a heavy load, maybe gearboxes are required. As a disclaimer, I don't know if EV trucks have gearboxes or not, but certainly EV cars tend not to have except for hybrids.

- Volvo Cars, a chinese company owned by Geely. Formerly a part of Volvo Group/AB Volvo aka "The Volvo" people usually reference.

- Volvo Group/AB Volvo, which is still the original Volvo from 1927.

Volvo Trucks is part of Volvo Group not Volvo Cars

The two companies share name and logo

So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?

I'm in The Netherlands and I feel that we aren't even close to the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany.

Maybe it's easier to justify the investments for a much larger country/market.

I live close enough to the Pa. Turnpike that it's not particularly pleasant to be in my front yard (back is okay) and am still angry about a previous set of neighbors cutting down the trees which markedly screened the noise and filtered some of the road dust.

https://www.mhiaa.com.au/

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com.au/

2.4%[1], which is more than I would have guessed, but I think that number includes delivery vehicles. For semis, it's 0.4% (and 2% of new registrations in Q1 2025). So, still a long way to go.

That's for vehicles registered in Germany. Half of the heavy trucks on the Autobahn are registered elsewhere[2], which makes sense given geography -- I guess it's similar in the Netherlands.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrolastkraftwagen#Deutschl... but the source is government data

[2] https://company.toll-collect.de/de/magazin/lkw-verkehr-deuts... roughly; 5 years ago

[1] https://www.rabobank.nl/bedrijven/groei/duurzaamheid/elektri...

He has a german channel which has more and longer content: https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker

For raising capital. Waymo is beating Tesla on robotaxis, BYD on cars and Volvo on trucks.

The trucks are all designed to be driven for the legally mandated maximum of 4.5 hours at highway speeds and to be recharged sufficiently in a 45 minute break to be able to do that again for another 4.5 hours. In particularly adverse conditions a little less driving time before recharging is possible but for an average load the currently available tech works just fine and it is mostly the charging infrastructure that limits adoption.

I only recently got a personal electric car not because they only recently got good enough or only recently made sense, but rather because my last petrol car finally needed replacing. I suspect trucks are similar - they're not going to replace them right away when they have an existing one that is working fine and still has many years of use ahead of it. Keep using the existing ones until they need to replace them, then go EV. Otherwise you're losing that amortization of the capex

Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, torque, reliability etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.

Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.

If it would be true, that'd be great.

For me saving time on the gas station is negligible. I drive around anyway, but yes, I agree with you - charging at home is very cool. Just plug it in when you get home and you can drive in the morning.

The only way I see this, have 2 cars. One for longer trips (diesel), one for shorter, every day usage (electric). But this needs 2 parking spaces, insurance, taxes etc. I can't affor this either.

If charging the battery of an electric heavy goods vehicle or bus requires supervision or involvement of the driver, then this time needs to be recorded as 'other work.' On the contrary, if the driver can freely dispose of her/his time while the battery is charging, then the time taken for the battery to charge has no effect on the breaks or the daily rest of the driver. Any movement of the vehicle from the charging location would be deemed to be an interruption or an end to a break or rest period.

https://corte.be/images/documents/CORTE_ENF_007_2024_Elec_ba...

https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu

>>Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.

Well good thing recharging is not the same as refueling. Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons. Recharging doesn't have such limitation.

Tesla: 800km range, 82k lb capacity, 70% charge in 30 minutes (with a much higher capacity battery), $250k

Telsa would also probably have better dealer network, better software (self driving), better charger network

Why would anyone buy Volvo?

If there were any significant amount of a saved money then a 'brick style' tractors like Peterbilt 389 [0] would be long gone purely by economical factors. It's still a brick on wheels which pushes a multi-ton load.

It's more a combination of a lack of a meaningful train system, an overall spareness of the cities and the roads and a male appendage measuring cont^W^W^W^W history and customs around the trucks[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peterbilt_Semi-Tractor.jp... It was introduced in 2007.

EDIT:

[1] heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479293

Oh wait, you want government regulating (with massive costs) to apply to other people for your comfort!!!

I wonder why people hate the government and excessive regulation?

> So this could be happening here as well: Chinese say “hey let’s do electric” and the rest happens in Sweden. Would it then be really a Chinese vehicle?

Yes, that's the nature of corporate headquarters. If the company doesn't want to be thought of as a Chinese company, it could relocate its corporate headquarters elsewhere.

This says nothing of the ownership structure and so on. A company could be just as Chinese due to ownership and/or control independently of where its corporate HQ is located. I don't think that this framing is especially useful, because there is no such thing as a stereotypical company or person. Individuals make up companies. Companies are just people, acting in concert.

To say a company is Chinese makes me wonder why that is important to the person saying it, and makes me wonder why that is the way they choose to phrase it, and makes me wish they would tell me more about actual individual people that exist and what their views and goals are. Corporations aren't people. People are corporations.

https://www.peterbilt.com/trucks/on-highway

Yikes 100-250 mile range.

Probably fine for what it is.

Disagree. All you have to do is look for lack of a front grill or flush door handles to tell if a car is an EV.

A quick search says it heats the engine less than accelerating, so shouldn't cause overheating.

Property rights as described by Ronald Coase would help find a near optimum solution.

Even if it’s an engine issue, I don’t see how an EV would be more likely to catastrophically overheat. An EV will generate a lot less heat for a given amount of power. There’s also less potential for oil and fuels leaks which exacerbates the issue.

Even budget EVs have such charge rate and do 300km on a highway.

Most charging stops I do I can't even leave my car to grab lunch because I'd have to be running back to unplug the charger.

On the other hand, the highway infrastructure has plenty of space for large trucks. If the roads to & from the main highway network can handle it, some countries will give you permits for all sorts of fancy combinations[1] up to 83 ft long. Considering that it'll still be pulled with a regular cab-over truck, that's a lot of space for freight. They are now even trialing the "Super EcoCombi", which is essentially two full semi-trailers[2], for a total of 105 ft!

[0]: https://assets-global.website-files.com/6424195493a93d7e7fe4...

[1]: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langere_en_Zwaardere_Vrachtaut...

[2]: https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6454ab292f622...

Milence's first site in the UK, opened in March this year, provides 8 charging bays with 4 chargers shared between them. So to provide a similar number of overnight parking spots a further 2000 need to be built. Or to put it another way, these charging stations would need to be approximately as frequent as McDonald's restaurants in the UK. Not accounting for the areas of the country located further away from the strategic road network and the other 35% of the vehicles they surveyed parked in lay-bys and industrial estates.

Only up to a point. The relationship between speed and fuel burned is not linear, and fuel is the largest cost.

The legislated maximum speed for heavy vehicles in Australia is 100km/h, but most major fleets electronically limit their vehicles to 90 for efficiency reasons.

Every extra km/h over 90 has a negligible impact on trip time while imposing a large penalty in terms of fuel burn.

I was confused there for a second until I realized you meant "breaks."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

So I guess all the cars and trucks should be taken off the road to improve my safety right? How dare they pollute with their engines and break dust, that is harmful to my health! I should not have to wear a mask to bike safety in a city because vehicles emit dangerous emissions and pollution.

FYI the local garage truck is a diesel and I can hear it because my windows are old and crappy

Friction brakes convert momentum into heat. If you ride the brakes going down a mountain you generate more heat than the brakes can dissipate into the air and the brake temperature keeps going up until they're hot enough to start a fire.

> The charging station was not working, even though it says that it works. Thanks to that, we had to use slower chargers and wait for our rental EV to charge for quite a while.

> Non of the 4 chargers worked.

Resistance at 60 is a huge amount higher than at 50.

Go 10% faster if you want, but you'll use 30% more fuel over the same distance.

Numbers are approximate.

Trucks/lorries drive lots of places other than UK motorways, and they are not doing 60mph down the A4.

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I can engine break with my diesel car and do that pretty often in fact. Or I misunderstand what engine breaking is.

And you should also feel entitled to clean, breathable air while walking and cycling. Any local government that cares about the safety of residents would agree, I think.

So it almost seems optimised for the mandated break timing.

On average truck journeys in europe are only 72 miles anyway so...

https://www.marketurbanist.com/blog/why-americas-freight-tra...

The numbers you quote don't show math, and even if they did, the math is different for each vehicle airflow.

Regardless, efficiency has many properties.

Time means more labour cost + cost of spending another day on the road, plus time not shipping something else.

I sometimes, in my car, drive from Quebec to California. It can take an extra day to make this drive, if I must drive slower due to weather, traffic, or construction.

EG 60mph vs 80mph average (yes, average without stops).

A little more fuel pales in comparison to these costs.

A diesel engine does not have a throttle valve. Engine speed is controlled purely by the amount of fuel being injected. This is why diesel engines can "run away" if an uncontrolled fuel source such as oil leaking from a turbocharger enters the intake, and why older pre-computerization diesels can be smoky under hard acceleration (or any time if poorly tuned). When you release the accelerator the engine stops receiving fuel and thus stops producing power, but aside from friction there's nothing working to slow it down. Air is sucked in more or less unrestricted and some energy is spent compressing it as the pistons rise in the cylinders, but much of that energy comes back out as the pistons come back down so the only energy loss in the system is what's converted to heat. You would get the same effect in a gasoline engine if you shut off the fuel pump but kept the throttle wide open.

In someways it seems similar to why the hub and spoke model has fallen out of favor for airlines. It might be more efficient to have one large flight between hubs and two small flights to regional airports, but passengers would rather have a direct flight.

FWIW, that link notes that over 25,000 miles of track was shipped overseas for the war effort.

The specific example I am aware of was several counties/county seats connected to a small town was 94 miles in length.

That’s astonishing. I’d be curious to see the median and mode distances compared between the U.S. and E.U.

And forgetting the practical components, the highways would look really bad with wires overhead...

Your car also has rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag to contend with. Might work well at slowing a passenger car, not so much with a 50K lb. vehicle, hence the Jake brake.

That depends a lot on how you look at it. The US got screwed by geography and doesn't have a lot of inland waterways. This means that rail freight is the only viable option for a lot of bulk cargo. The US is sending an awful lot of coal and grain via train, but in Europe most of that is done by river and canal.

The US also has a rather poor record quality-wise. Electrified rail basically doesn't exist, precision-scheduled railroading has made delivery times a joke, the infrastructure is crumbling, and freight trains are utterly incapable of playing nice with passenger rail. Heck, they are literally running trains which are too large to fit on the railways! It has been optimized for dirt-cheap bulk transport and as a result it isn't really capable of doing anything else.

The fact that US railways have such high tonne-miles, despite the state of the railways, says more about the complete lack of competition than it says about the railways.

We have some of the largest inland-waterway networks in the world. We just Jones Acted ourselves out of being able to use them.

I like to believe I'd recognize the difference, especially since it's a manual car and I can tell the difference between letting it roll in neutral and shifting down a gear which slows down the car :) Maybe it's not that it doesn't work on diesel cars but the effect is just less than with petrol?

But I think you've hit on the difference, as I vastly simplified what is going on. Not that I expected you to read the link I gave, but it does give some explanation as to what's going on. And what's going is that the pistons are still going up and down because air is continually drawn into the engine. Air is compressed, and even though there is no fuel to make it go bang, that air still needs to uncompress and so returns a lot of the energy back to the crankshaft. Ergo, very little engine braking.

As a personal example, our diesel Sprinter van (automatic tranny, FWIW) had some degree of engine braking, but so little that I wouldn't rely on it for much more than coasting to a stoplight or other low-stakes slowing. If I'd like to stop sometime in the next day or two, I hit the brake pedal.