I love seeing theses things in my neighborhood. Delivery trucks make the most noise after garbage trucks and assholes with modified exhausts. (edit I left off landscaping crews because that insanity just makes me angry so I guess I disappear it from my mind when at all possible)
The drivers tell me they hate them because they report every speed limit violation to their bosses. Sounds great to me!
The one that bothers me the most is landscaping trucks with trailers driving down the street (too fast!) bouncing over potholes with all of the mowers etc banging about in the back. Usually 6:30am-ish as they go to their first job of the day ... which usually starts with the mowers (and this time of the year the leaf blowers) around 7am.
ugh don't even get me started on landscaping crews. I want to start a business to displace all of these guys on my surrounding streets using solely electric equipment. I'll even run it at a loss just for my sanity. My neighbors are importing this crap to my neighborhood and some of them realize it and others are oblivious I guess. Here in my area they blow all year around even if there's no need for it.
Good luck cutting down a 60 year oak tree with an 18v electric chainsaw, or aerating a lawn going back and forth with a heavy steam roller-like machine with hallow spikes on the drum, or cutting inches into the earth while a second blade slices all the grass roots at the same time (edging) or digging fence post holes with an electric auger
Commercial grade gas powered landscaping tools can't be replaced with consumer grade electric alternatives, or even consumer grade gas powered ones, not unless huge strides have been made in the tech and power output. Pro grade mowers are upwards of 10k and run hundreds of miles a day, every day, often in the rain. I don't see that being replaced with a EV type setup. Throwing gas in something is way faster and less error prone than quick chargers, battery swaps, or dealing with a bunch of electronics that are always deployed into dirty, wet, and unexpected envs
Much like an EV can't be the only vehicle in most US households quite yet, we can still make a lot of progress in reducing pollution (noise and particulates) by getting rid of gas powered equipment where it makes sense. Cutting down a 60 year old tree is not a weekly occurrence. Aerating a lawn happens once or twice a year. Your other examples might happen once a decade or less at any given home.
Keep the gas powered equipment where it's needed but the typical weekly lawn service can replace their mowers and leaf blowers today with only slight tweaks to their day to day operations.
> Cutting down a 60 year old tree is not a weekly occurrence
The tree company I used to work for begs to differ. Our 2 man crew alone could do 2-4 trees a day depending on size, with one guy in the tree with a saw and one on the ground running the chipper and cutting the large bits into smaller pieces.
Every example I gave was in context of the comment I'm replying to, and that comment was talking about commercial crews doing this stuff all day every day and replacing their loud gas powered equipment with electric solutions. Tree companies, lawn services, fence installers, lawn care/landscaping places.
> Keep the gas powered equipment where it's needed but the typical weekly lawn service can replace their mowers and leaf blowers today with only slight tweaks to their day to day operations.
Weekly for you. Every single day for the crew, sometimes all weekend too if they fall behind due to rain, etc. They have to have EV that is just as powerful and easy to jump on and get going, run all day long and operate in dirt and wet grass, and not cost a million dollars in chargers and spare batteries, which if they are lithium ion batteries, have to be replaced a lot more often than a gas engine w/ regular oil changes would. And when the electric motors burn out (they have bushings and coils which wear out with use), I can't imagine they will be cheap or available at lawn supply stores where you can go to get any gas engine part you need to fix your money maker that day
I'm all for electric replacements, it's just a long way off imo. These machines get beat on daily and have to keep running. Gas is easy, produces plenty of power, and is cheap compared to an aresonal of batteries and chargers and electric motors and all that goes with wiring those things in wet enviroments
Of course they're talking about how often something happens in a specific location, not how often it happens for the person that makes house calls doing exactly that as their job.
Why would you use an 18v chainsaw when 80v is the new norm?
Jaws of Life are now battery powered instead of off a hydraulic system.
There are certainly pro grade electric devices; industry has been using large ac motors for a while.
Gasolind is certainly not easier than electric when talking about commercial vehicles with frequent starts and stops and heavy loads (a good reason why many fleets are more likely to use turbo diesels for the last 20 years). A diesel electric locomotive is a great example of heavy industry (and 2 very , and guess which system has higher maintenance costs.
> Good luck cutting down a 60 year oak tree with an 18v electric chainsaw, or aerating a lawn going back and forth with a heavy steam roller-like machine
Yeah because this is what the landscaping crews do every single week on my street. Not.
You're talking about the annoying workers running electric tools instead of gas ones. If you want them to be quiet on your street, once a week, they need propre electric equipment in their day to day jobs. This isn't hard to understand. They arent' going to only use electric when they come to your block just for you.
Most landscaping trucks are pretty beat on with tools going in and out, heavy equipment dropping bucket loads of stuff into the beds, etc.
But let's assume they are small scale personal beater pickup trucks. If they can't afford a nicer work truck and aren't able to purchase professional grade equipment, do you think they will be able to afford electric alternatives and extra batteries, etc?
Regardless, pro or consumer, they are all the same level of loud you are annoyed with. If you think it's bad as the person hearing your neighbors yard being mowed, think of what the operator is dealing with (ear protection is a must).
Maybe I'm indifferent because I used to do landscaping and spent time around all kinds of loud machines, but imo it's not that big of a deal. It is loud, I'll give you that. But pro mowers are fast, because more lawns is more money. So on a regular city or suburb lawn they are in and out in 5-10 minutes. Walk inside, or close the window, or run an errand. Sometimes people's occupation is an inconvenience to us, but it's a tiny fraction of your day and there are plenty of things you can do to minimize it.
> So on a regular city or suburb lawn they are in and out in 5-10 minutes.
On my street there are about 10 properties within earshot that get weekly service. And it takes a good 30 minutes with mowing, trimming and blowing. It doesn't bug me as much as some people but I'm not gonna lie, it sure would be nice if the equipment was all-electric. I think it may happen in a few years, but right now the support ecosystem is just not there yet.
It would be more expensive for sure. I think I'd be willing to pay somewhere around 1.5-2x for an electric crew, and guessing many others would too. It will be interesting to see if it turns into a domino effect when it starts, and especially with HOA type areas where there is more ability for enforcement.
The cfm from electric leaf blowers are so far off from commercial gas blowers that I'm not confident they'll ever reach parity. Plus if you use high end commercial blowers you'll find that their effectiveness is somewhat exponential, that tail end of the performance lets you move a dense wall of leaves where with an electric you might as well be blowing a brick wall (I own both kinds).
Really? How old is your electric blower? If I look at current generation gas and electric leaf blowers for sale at Home Depot at similar price points, I find surprisingly similar specs in terms of velocity and CFM.
I assume that what’s going on is that the actual electric mechanism is vastly simpler — the motor is quite small, so you put it where you want it instead of worrying about belts or other power transmission devices), and there’s no need to handle fuel. On the flip side, batteries are fairly expensive.
Im actually pretty impressed at how much electric has caught up since i shopped for these a couple years ago, ego commercial 800 claims 800cfm at 190mph which isnt bad. I was thinking electric was still maxed out around 500cfm. Stihl gas blowers can do 912cfm at 240mph.
Don’t have to have doubts towards the 2cc 2 stroke because they’ve been deployed successfully in the field by literally every one in that industry for north of 50 years.
Most chainsaws are like 40cc or above, nearly 20x larger displacement than a 2cc.
I don't think I've ever actually seen a 2cc chain saw. It would be like pocket sized, suitable for cutting pencils. 2cc motors are used in hobby rc cars.
Unless the oak tree is far from an electric outlet, even inexpensive plug-in electric chainsaws are much easier to use than gas chainsaws. The high torque means it won't stall out when all but the burliest gas chainsaws give up.
You must have used some insane electric chainsaw because the ones I've seen take 15 minutes to get through a 2 inch diameter branch that you could snap by hand faster.
Going to a customer's house and consuming their electric all day isn't going to work out, or having extension cords strung everywhere, where you're literally dropping heavy trees with sharp right angle cuts, and cord snagging brush and branches, and you know, the chainsaw itself which will go through a cord in an instant and if it doesn't you won't be worried about loud noises anymore. Cord powered saws for real crews are not practical at all. That leaves the options - battery powered, and those do not have enough power to cut down large trees (I'm talking about more than falling a tree), or bring your own electric, ie, run a generator, which would be gas powered and just as loud and non-green as gas powered saws and still has the whole cord issue.
> You must have used some insane electric chainsaw because the ones I've seen take 15 minutes to get through a 2 inch diameter branch that you could snap by hand faster.
Maybe that was the case 5-10 years ago but not these days. A buddy and I cut 10-12" dia tree sections into rounds in short order with a 16" bar Ego chainsaw. It was, let's say, 10% slower than an equivalent Stihl but it had more than enough grunt and was incredibly quiet - no need for ear protection.
If you're using a dinky little 18V chainsaw then they'll choke on anything but the new stuff using 56+ volt batteries pack some serious punch. Gas chainsaws are still needed for some use cases but the lack of noise, exhaust, vibration, and fuel/filter maintenance positions them to fully replace gas chainsaws in the reasonably near future.
The cost of electric power would be no barrier. You can charge a whole car for less than the cost of gas and two stroke oil, never mind tune ups when the plug gets fouled. And somehow builders manage to plug in their tools. The emissions from gas landscaper equipment is very high compared to cars. Should be more tightly regulated.
It's not the electricity itself, but the batteries. They don't hold a lot of runtime, so you would need to have a truck with many dozens of spares, and they are heavy and expensive. And they wear out pretty quick.
Commercial mowers do exist, for example Exmark[1] (some not launched yet) and Toro[2]. Based on the pricing I'd guess the breakeven vs gas is still >3yrs without tax credits.
100s of miles a day? Are these mowers going 20 miles an hour? That seems like a lot, 10 hours a day, driving on unleveled ground? Probably a lot smaller distance.
The square footage they cover, going back and forth, back and forth, over your entire lawn, and many others, some that are 2+ acres, easily becomes hundreds of miles of total distance that mower drove.
Personally, as my garden equipment has needed replacement, I have been switching over to Ego battery-electric. Awesome equipment, very happy with it (I now have a mower, weedwacker, blower, chainsaw and hedge trimmer).
The only real issue is that the blower doesn't last long on a battery, which is no problem for cleanup after mowing, but not so good for leaf cleanup in the fall. Since I now have multiple pieces of equipment, I do have a battery (and charger) for each including a large one for the mower that I can swap out as I'm working. By the time the last one is drained, I have been able to charge a couple of fresh ones.
I'm doing the same, and also with the Ego which works well. My wife makes me mulch the leaves and dump them in one spot so she can use the compost in the spring.
These days in the fall I use the blower to spread the leaves across the lawn, then I mulch the leaves with the grass using the mower with no bag on "mulch mode". Gets rid of the leaves and also fertilizes the lawn.
Ooh, cool: mind if I ask how well the chainsaw works? Taken down any trees large enough to require proper notch/hinge cuts? A lot of the battery-electric chainsaws I've looked at in the past looked like glorified pruning saws, but this one looks like it could be better.
The [Ego] chainsaw is quite capable, but it's a relatively small saw (16" blade). Perfect for most backyard type applications, and it handily cut through a 5" pressure treated fencepost that I was replacing and had to cut to length.
The real issue with bigger trees would be the blade length, not the battery (well, unless you're taking an entire tree down in which case you'd need extra batteries).
Also, like any chainsaw, keeping the blade sharp is also key.
No, I haven't had to take any trees down, this is mostly for trimming and chopping up fallen branches etc.
I've been using the Kobalt-branded 80V line (which they discontinued, sigh) but their 18" chainsaw is awesome. Lots of runtime and it cuts comparable to a midrange gas.
DC passed a ban on gas powered leaf blowers. It has been excellent
Longer term I feel like two thirds of this job is very automateable.
I fully expect a fleet of little mower bots to be rolling off some mothership vehicle in under a decade. There's still shrub trimming & gardening roles that seem infrequent enough to be manual. And for a while I expect there probably would be an onsite human, but eventually it feels like it'll be regular enough for many dwellings.
I also wish this sort of thing were just done municipally. Trimming is once every other week. Bot swarm has a preprogrammed path. Rates are incredibly low for basic service. Shuttling gear & crew around for individual lawns like is bonkers inefficient.
For a landscaping service I imagine battery run time would be a challenge? The electric mowers I’ve seen can run 2-3 hours on a charge. That’s more than enough for personal use but won’t last the whole day if you’re a landscaper. And charging while they’re on the go seems hard as well.
Perhaps there’s options with large swappable battery packs.
He can charge his mower while between jobs and while using other tools. I would say it works for companies that do mostly residential mowing in sunny places. If you were a larger landscaping business you would probably want at least two crews with different setups: Heavy duty gas equipment for larger yards or tough first time mows and a battery setup for residential "maintenance" mowing.
Nearly every landscaping brand has backpack based battery systems that set you up with tons of power. And you just toss in extra charged batteries as needed. Lawn care companies have historically carried gas cans, nothing blocks them from carrying batteries.
swap-able battery is probably the answer here. You don't need the structural rigidity of a car and you have a truck/garage to store the other battery in.
Why no simply add more battery. I own a cast aluminum gas mower that weights about 80lbs.
If these plastic owners 70lbs of batteries I bet they would last the day.
That gas owner is 28 years old. I would if a battery operated plastic one would have lasted me that long?
I don't know where you live, but where I live it's an all under the table business, mostly done by people without papers, presumably for under minimum wage. It probably wouldn't pencil out to go straight.
Please, for the love of god, teach your crews to back their trailers into customer driveways.
It's always frustrating to me trying to get around landscaping trailers street parked on winding roads with no shoulders. Half the time you just have to hope that there's no one coming the other way too fast to stop.
I can understand that in some places there's just nowhere to park, if the driveway isn't particularly long or already filled, but even when there's a hundred or more feet of empty drive no one ever seems willing to back in and get out of the street.
Total tangent, but a street a couple of blocks away has been getting resurfaced, and man! Some piece of heavy equipment sounds like a diesel truck idling a few meters away.
I can't believe how much the noise transfers.
> speed limit
I'd probably have to quit that job. I at least need the autonomy to drive the vehicle if I'm the one risking my life in it
This seems like the future, though. I'm sure some tech will be developed to do this to everyone, probably with a punitive system attached, per usual.
>I'd probably have to quit that job. I at least need the autonomy to drive the vehicle if I'm the one risking my life in it
Speed limits are less about you and more about everyone else around you. Your autonomy means nothing to the mother and child driving the limit when you smash and kill them.
Let's be real here for a moment. Amazon didn't implement a system like that 'For The Children', they did it to limit their liability and produce goodwill/leniency/court-appeal for when, if ever, they need it.
It produces a very nice after-effect of additional safety, but it's not the raison d'etre.
I don't think the comment implied that it was the "raison d'etre". A company who has employees on the road should strive to make them follow the law. If the vehicles are owned by corporation XYZ, the drivers are employed by corporation XYZ -- it stands to reason that they should ensure that laws are followed. e.g. that the drivers have valid licenses, they are authorized for employment in the region they are employed, etc.
Why should following speed limits trigger this train of thought?
Yeah, but that's a little beside the point: the liability and social pressure exists (in part) for that reason, especially since without it we all kind of understand what companies like Amazon would do.
Yeah, everyone knows that these hourly workers get impossible schedules that have every moment allocated and they can't recover when something slows them down, speeding is one way to get there.
That's just companies externalizing their costs. Instead of paying for more staff + vehicles to get the job done quicker, they're externalizing the cost to the people they hit. At amazon or doordash scale, it's not a matter of if they injury or kill someone, it's a matter of how many people they will injury and kill by causing their drivers to speed.
The speed limit on interstate highways is too low. There are no Amazon packages being delivered to homes whose driveways go directly on to the interstate.
Correct. It’s not a great citation because I assumed that the average HN reader knows the games municipal
police play with speed limits but I got downvotes and (at the time) no replies.
If you're driving a delivery truck in a residential neighborhood, most of the people around you are at FAR more risk than you are. If I'm operating (and liable for) a fleet of such vehicles, I'm going to do everything I can to ensure the operators are doing so safely (especially in the face of incentivizing them to also operate efficiently).
Yeah but seeing these delivery trucks and ride share based delivery cars accelerating as fast as possible and stopping as fast as possible over and over again in your neighborhood where your kids play outside is not so great.
If you drive the 55mph speed limit on "the bypass" in pretty much any metro area in the united states, you are risking your own life to be going so slow relative to traffic.
I'm generally the slowest driver on my commute, judging from the fact that I rarely pass anyone; however, I go faster than the speed limit, at some point during the trip, nearly every time I get in the car.
I think this is extremely regional - it's not true in the Grand Rapids, MI metro area (here we have to fight to get people to zipper merge at the lane closure instead of backing up 5 miles down the expressway in one lane because they heard it was closed...)
But having driven in Chicago and San Francisco, it's quite different in some places. Probably needs local differences in policy and application.
Because Amazon also fires drivers if they don't manage an insane pace of deliveries-per-hour. Speeding is basically the only way you can meet the target they set. So it's pretty shitty of Amazon to put drivers in this Catch-22.
In real world practical tests, speeding does not reduce the overall travel times proportionally with the speed. This is ESPECIALLY true for city driving and for a job with a ton of stops like a delivery driver.
Going 45 in a 40 is a 12.5% increase on paper but maybe 3% more deliveries in a day at best. I'd be shocked if that much honestly.
It's a large chunk of logistics. When EDL (electronic data logging) became mandatory a crapton of drivers left the industry because they could no longer fudge records.
The labor churn is an unintended, and ignored side effect.
I think they're definitely trying to maximize _cause_ for firings, such that if and when they do firings, they can't (as easily) be accused of firing for wrongful cause.
sounds more fair to drivers if everyone is policed equally. otherwise like you say, they are forced to speed. if you want to drive safely you can't and also keep your job. whereas now the metrics will show what is reasonable.
What is the resolution of the speed detection? When was the map last updated?
Or to put this another way:
We have a system for perfectly knowing what the drivers speed is.
We also perfectly know what the legal street speed is.
Instead of limiting the drivers maximum speed to the legal street speed, we instead just tell their boss?
Looks to me like Amazon wants their drivers to violate the speed limit but then also want to have a record of when they do so they can fire them for cause.
Both resolution and updates are imperfect, therefore, the reporting system makes more sense. The appeal process for an on-vehicle limit is instant, real-time interaction with the hardware, while for the latter you can talk to a human.
If you were cited for going 68 in a 25 you can point out that you were on the highway 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after the incident, and had no way to get to the access road under the highway. If your vehicle decided you were speeding and slammed on the brakes in the middle of the interstate, you'd need a much more reliable system.
If your relationship with your employer is dehumanized to the point where these reports, reviews, and penalties are interactions with an uncaring piece of software, that's a different problem.
Right. That is my point, so now you are expecting the Amazon delivery manager to take time to go through all the reports with each employee. The employee to remember what was going on at the time and the system to be fair.
Or:
The Amazon manager is either going to fire the employee after a number of reports or keep the reports in their back pocket to use when they need an excuse to fire the employee.
> Instead of limiting the drivers maximum speed to the legal street speed, we instead just tell their boss?
I don't know about the Rivian, but many driver monitoring systems are aftermarket retrofits, not vehicle manufacturer parts. The driver monitoring system is just a fancy dashcam with cloud uploading features, and a bunch of people in a low-income country manually labelling video clips.
I bought a house two months ago and have about a quater of an acre of mowable grass. I bought an 80v Greenworks Pro push mower for the job and can litteraly mow the whole lawn in one of the two batteries I have. The biggest thing for battery push mowers is that not only is it less finicky and quieter..but the VIBRATION. My hands thank me compared to gas. I really think that for push mowers (riding is a little different) short of the bottom of the market, there is no reason to buy a gas push mower anymore. That market is dead.
When it comes time to replace the batteries for your electric mower, you might consider getting an oldschool "reel" mower (the sort with no motor.) You might have to mow more often since they work better with shorter grass, but for a quarter of an acre they're pretty reasonable. The big advantage over an electric motor is lower operating costs in the long term. Of course it depends on what kind of grass you have.
You mow one large yard every couple weeks. Landscapers mow multiple in a day. It's already a low paying gig, with how expensive batteries are I don't think they'll be using electric equipment anytime soon.
I've heard of landscapers moving to Ford Lightnings and charging equipment on-site (and maybe while driving?). Of course, those are roughly $100k each so those are probably landscapers with much higher margins than your typical residential landscaper.
Speed limiters should be an on all vehicles, especially commercial ones. Speed limiters are virtuous technology; they remove a source of dont-ask-dont-tell coercion for delivery drivers to beat a schedule. Slow(er) moving trucks and cars also make neighborhoods safer. It's win-win.
It also puts the screws on management who want to squeeze faster delivery times out of drivers but don't want to know where that time is coming from.
"Oh no, of course I don't want you to speed! But I'm SURE you can come up with a way to do this route in 50 minutes instead of 60! If not, I bet we can find someone that can."
There is zero reason why landscaping and construction equipment can't have basic noise abatement features. Especially the worst noise offenders like ride-on mowers and backpack blowers. A little muffler goes a long way
I'm all for having the vans snitch on drivers. Delivery drivers are trying to get deliveries done so fast that they're by far the most wreckless drivers on residential streets in my suburban neighborhood.
I'm surprised they can go fast at all while squinting at my suburban house number artfully written in cursive on the eaves instead of something more utilitarian.
for some time now, i've noticed that the delivery app folks have had other people in their car. i know as a teen, my friends and i would just drive around hanging out with no real purpose. now, they can still do that, but make some cash while doing it.
>> The drivers tell me they hate them because they report every speed limit violation to their bosses. Sounds great to me!
To be fair, they probably essentially have to speed to meet their quotas, else they have very serious & real consequences.
If Amazon didn’t try to completely milk drivers for all they’re worth, I’d feel better about the detection/auto reporting. Yes it sucks they’re speeding thru residential areas, but they’re essentially pushed to it.
The drivers tell me they hate them because they report every speed limit violation to their bosses. Sounds great to me!