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The highway where trucks work like electric trains

Tom Scott · 5.3M views · 2021-10-25 · 4:30

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Overview

Tom Scott visits an eHighway test in Lubeck, Germany, where electric trucks with pantographs draw power from overhead wires. He explains how this could electrify road freight.

On Hacker News

The standard reference whenever threads discuss electrifying trucking via overhead lines instead of big batteries.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

Transit, cities & urban planningCars, EVs & motorcyclesRenewables, batteries & storage
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ehighwaycatenaryelectric truckspantographfreighttom scott

What people said

tenacious_tuna · 2025-04 · Reference

Sweden and Germany have phantograph-powered semi-electric trucks [1] that would make this less of a factor. The trucks do the bulk of their driving off grid power with batteries for exits/lastmile components of the drive. [1]: [LINK] Tom Scott video on the subject: [VIDEO]

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VladStanimir · 2025-03 · Reference

I remember watching a video 3 years ago by Tom Scott about trucks with overhed power like trains have. [VIDEO]

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ben_w · 2024-11 · Reference

> Nobody needs a kind of AI that consumes that much energy. Rather: nobody needs to spend that much on current quality AI. Say for the sake of argument that the accelerationists are correct about the timescale for future capabilities (I hope they're wrong in the short term, but run with it): If we had an AI that could drive robots — cars, androids, surgical machines, industrial equipment — at least as well as any human, but the compute meant that it took 10 kW to do so, at electricity prices of $0.1/kWh that AI is cost-competitive with $1/h human labour. If that happens and there's enough compute but not enough energy, energy prices rise to match human wages (so at least a factor of ten for this arbitrary example). To avoid energy price rises, and for current economic output, that would require the USA to have about 170 million (workforce) * 10 kW = 1.7 TW ≈ 3.9 times current US electrical production. (For the avoidance of doubt, 10 kW is a completely made up number with no real justification beyond it being simultaneously a relatively small number for an isolated valuable industrial device while also much more than a human brain). > A better justification for more nuclear energy is to electrify transportation and residential heating/cooling while navigating the climate catastrophe, don't you think? Not really, the reason for nuclear rather than renewables is more about the relative cost compared to time-shifting power generation with storage, and (most*) transportation alrea

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

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