The chevy/gm ev trucks have bigger batteries.
I'm a current truck driver and very excited to swap out my ICE truck for a Slate next year. I need something that can haul my trash to the dump, grab a load of wood chips for the garden, and bring home the occasional sheet good from the home store.
I agree with your assessment as it applies to the Cybertruck or F150, but not the idea of an electric truck. Some people buy trucks because they need a light-duty hauling solution; unfortunately, the market seems to only want to sell luxury SUVs that happen to have truck beds.
If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.
Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.
The other aspect of work trucks is that they're generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.
Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.
1. People who need to haul stuff in the bed
2. People who need to tow stuff behind them
3. People who buy them for some form of self expression.
Electrics are probably fine for people in 1 & 3. But for 2 I have yet to find one that both tows and gets range.
1. People who need them for work. 2. People who need to carry bulky loads 3. People who need to tow. 4. People who buy them for some form of self-expression.
The only real use case for electric trucks, imho, is construction site supervisors who do most around-town driving but may occasionally need to haul stuff. Their towing range is absolutely abysmal (F150 Lightning range dropped to about 90 miles when towing a moderate trailer!).
I live in the PNW and you see people not using their trucks as trucks every single time you go out on the road. This includes urban areas.
I’ve owned an F150 and an R1T and for camping, overlanding, snow trips, etc the Rivian is hands down the most capable vehicle I have ever driven. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a Ford
But process of replacing a radiator on a Rivian really isn't any different than replacing one on a Jeep.
Most people who work on any vehicle don't know what the fuck they're doing, there's plenty of people in Autozone buying their 3rd O2 sensor for their Jeep that's throwing a P0420 as well.
It just looks too weird.
It doesn't help that nearly all chargers are arranged such that I'd block important parts of the parking lot for half an hour if I was towing when I needed a charge, then I have a complex back out (where something is behind me that I need to avoid). Most gas stations are designed so my trailer might block a pump from someone else using it but otherwise I'm not in the way.
Depends on why you're towing something. My brother-in-law is a contractor, for example, and the first thing you do when you start your own contracting business is buy a big ass pickup and a trailer to haul all of your tools and materials to your job sites.
Agreed on the chargers though, sometimes it's difficult to use a charger even with a normal-sized car just because every manufacturer wants to put the ports in a different, weird and quirky place on EVs.
The only actual difference is time you need to charge. Pull through charging stalls are ubiquitous where I live
And I just don’t know…how often are people towing loads over 100 miles regularly for this to be a problem? Where I live I see pavement princesses towing the occasional boat or landscapers towing gear and rocks.
Neither of those is going to max out the range on an EV truck in an average day
It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by a freight train at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound vehicle at 39 MPH.
The quality of the vehicle is actually quite high.
DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck
Frankly Tesla is dumb lucky the Europeans and Japanese have botched the EV market so badly overall. Tesla shouldn't even exist at this point with how trivial their lineup is.
I just find the moral grandstanding a bit off. The vehicle industry isn’t exactly a paragon of executive virtue
I don't know what the others think so I can't judge on that, but I can judge based of what Elon says and does.
And aside, Elon's been lying for years about everything and promising stuff Tesla can't deliver.
IMHO, there's a strong parallel between the Elisabeth Holmes/Theranos situation and Elon/Tesla.
The Countach was just the usual Lamborghini luxury scam, and I say that as someone who grew up a few km from the factory. Nobody cared if it was kinda crap inside, because it existed just to look like a cool car. A truck is supposed to, y'know, be a truck.
You realize style evolves right?
That style was futuristic in the 70s. It is not futuristic anymore. A lot has happened since the 70s to change what the future should look like.
Ironically, I am finding myself thinking that all the supposedly "bland" electric cars nowadays finally look like cars from the future, simply by being normal car looking, with very slight and subtle styling accents.
Because that's what a future car looks like: Roughly the same aerodynamic profile but with electric motors. That's literally what everyone wanted in the first place, as was Elon's thesis for Tesla as more than a niche car company.
The Cybertruck aesthetic is stupid because it is literally a middle finger to what people want, as Elon himself noted.
I don't get why people are so stuck on "But it looks different" as a good thing.
It's a car. Why are you so stuck on needing your car to stand out? Why is it a problem for you if cars look the same?
Just because something is "angular" doesn't mean it's in any way comparable to a Cybertruck.
Doesn’t the new ~flying car have similar design vibes?
You might see "a lot of them" because they stand out and are "memorable".
To those that downvoted, I’m sorry my opinion offended you.
"If Kenmore had the wherewithal to manufacture 4wd electric chest freezers...that's what they'd look like."
...but I'm not offended by it. I think that sort of whimsical craziness is all too often missing from modern durable goods, so I'm glad it got built.
I'm even happier that its existence upset mincing, peevish little eurotwee Conde-Nasty scribblequeefs like this Wired author. If it'd guarantee him leaping off of a tall pier, I'd pay MSRP for a Cybertruck.