It’s been less than a year since our last report on the hurdles associated with “greening” winter road maintenance. In December of last year, the folks in New York City who are in charge of such things discovered that Electric Vehicles suck when it comes to snow removal but held out hope for a solution.
As it turns out, the solution was to scrap the notion entirely.
Primarily intended to clean streets and remove garbage, one of these Mack trucks had been fitted with a snow plow as part of an experiment. Essanews reports the move has been a failure. The reason was given as a simple lack of power:
The plow, dragging across the road and the snow buildup in front of it, created substantial resistance. Moreover, the plow required almost constant movement, eliminating the option for loading pauses.
Consequently, the electric vehicle’s power supply was insufficient for the demands of a New York winter, known for its heavy snowfall.
The report further detailed that after nearly two hours, the electric plow had to discontinue the route for recharging.
While the truck was efficient for garbage collection, its performance significantly dipped when faced with the snow removal tasks.
I’m not surprised NYC tried it, but I am amazed that no one expected this result. Battery-powered heavy equipment fails are legion. Add to this the deleterious effects of cold weather on EV tech, and success was never likely unless the goal was wasting money on another empty virtue signal. And waste the money they have.
Garbage trucks do double duty as plow trucks in winter. EV garbage trucks can’t plow snow. Storing EV anything in a garage or near other vehicles invites disaster, but there are only so many places to put any vehicle, especially municipal vehicles. The City will continue replacing aging equipment (the garbage never stops piling up), but if they want garbage trucks to keep plowing snow, they must be diesel.
On a bright note, the City only purchased seven EV trash haulers in a fleet of 2000, and the lesson could translate to other municipalities with similar green dreams.
The real question, however, is whether failure will translate to common sense when pursuing EV versions of other heavy equipment. This seems unlikely. The indifference to wasting other people’s money combined with their starry-eyed devotion to the net-zero lie is how they spent more than three million on trash trucks without much thought about their ability to move snow.
I’m sure someone, somewhere in the mammoth mountain of nonsense doing business as the City of New York, asked the question, but was it only in their head? Did they suggest it in a meeting, an email, or a Zoom call? Were they dismissed, or did political pressure overwhelm common sense, standard procedure on liberal urban plantations?
In 2021, news broke on NYC ordering EV trash haulers. In 2022, Mayor Adams proudly announced the City was expanding its EV fleet three years ahead of schedule. That included another nod to buying seven new Electric Garbage Trucks. In Dec of 2022, we reported on how they were not suitable for the plow duty existing trucks had handled with ease. And now they’ve been benched for not being plow-capable in winter.
And no one saw that coming? Did no one mention this to the manufacturer to ask if it would work?
I guess what I’m wondering is who screwed up and if we’ll ever know because green dreamers walk among all of us, and they aren’t much different in their thinking than the goons running New York City. They don’t think things through because if they did, they’d stop saying how expanding the EV fleet is greening the planet and would admit they are just offshoring emissions.
HT | Breitbart
