Occasionally a driver will change lanes or turn off and forget to lower the pantograph..
The pantograph is lowered automatically under computer control if the lorry leaves the lane.
The pantographs can already slew under computer control because obviously the lorry does not stay fixed rigidly to the centre of the lane.
Interesting, but doesn't seem that practical or advantageous to me. You'd have to get large numbers of lorries to switch. What would be the incentive to haulage firms to do so?
Cut price traction electricity which is a fraction of the price of diesel once you have to pay duty on it? (Unlike the railways obviously).
EDIT: 130p/litre diesel is apparently a thing now, which is about 110p/litre without VAT, and at the 45% efficiency of lorry engines that translates into an effective price of 21p/kWh.
Electricity delivered to bulk customers is nothing like that expensive, even in the mad system we have now.
There's an obvious disincentive since that these hybrid trucks are likely to be considerably more expensive than normal trucks - and harder to operate since you have another thing for the driver to have to think about.
You could simply ban the sale of new non-hybrid trucks?
Also they aren't harder to operate because the whole point is the system detects the position of the contact wire and controls the pantographs accordingly.
It's not a crude system like that used on trains.
Also worth pointing out that this will reduce diesel pollution on motorways rather than in urban areas - which is where the pollution most urgently needs to be tackled.
Given that 50-66% (depending on who you ask) of all lorry miles occur on the strategic road network.... which is only 4300 route miles, you only need 8600 lane miles to capture a huge fraciton of lorry traffic.
And if you can recharge on any motorway or other major road, battery lorries do kind of become rather more practical since you only have to cover 20 miles (or less!) at the end of the haul.
Or since you don't need a lot of range on internal power, you could even switch to a cleaner burning petrol or LNG engine.