Even those can likely be replaced with hybrids, after all a locomotive pulls a lot more (900,000 tons of steel according to the poet, but I think he's off a bit) and you can't build a transmission for that.
Well, you can, but the history of locomotives with gearshifts is not a happy one. British Rail in the 1950s had a Diesel road locomotive (not just a railcar) with a manual transmission. The shifting was powered, but not automatic. Hitachi has built some switching locomotives with geared transmissions and a really big 12-plate clutch.
i think youre right and i think the market will adjust, but the current application is just trying to take what works on local and regional beer haulers and ups vans and scale it up. very myopic and leads to a lot of frustration when logistics companies realize their drivers arent qualified to leave the state with bigger loads because they never learned stick
According to a random internet search, the average "semi truck" age is 11 years.
So even if all brand-new trucks starting TODAY were fully electric with an electric/nonshifting drivetrain, it'd take 11-22 years to "clear out" the existing.
For a large country that's true, but regulations could adjust that. If you want to drive a truck into a city in Scandinavia or Germany, there's a good chance it needs to be newer.
For example, to drive into Copenhagen a truck or bus must be from 2015 or later, or there's a €1700 fine. (https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ has a list/map.)
If you have a truck that's too old, you might have use for it elsewhere in Denmark, or you could sell it to someone who will drive it somewhere without these regulations and sell it there (i.e. eastern, southeastern Europe, Turkey, north Africa).
There's a diagram that would be excellent if it weren't fuzzy on page 5 (Figure 2) demonstrating this nicely. It's not at all unusual to see a truck in Romania or Bulgaria which has the shadow of some German company logo/name on it, where the logos have been removed.
