I don't think ford will be able to build enough to meet demand. And ford dealers are going to price gouge the crap out of buyers. I have a friend of a friend who is a ford dealer and they are charging quite a bit over for regular F150's because of the chip shortage.
The chip shortage will look like nothing, once the EV ramp increases.
Batteries are always the bottleneck. Ford announced a 60GWh plant partnership, but that will only hold them over for several years of growth and is still a ways away from actually producing cells.
I guess the fact that's it's electric is a good step. But it seems insane to me that we don't do more to discourage massive consumption of what should be utility vehicles. I'm willing to be 80% of people buying an f150 or similar never have been and never will be building contractors or lumberjacks.
I've never been one of those things, but they're still useful. I had an F150 for a while that I only used to transport things like mulch or helping friends move or moving myself.
I still have an old Ranger that I use for those purposes today.
It seems insane to assume you can be the judge of what's "useful" or "utility".
A truck is great to have for all kinds of reasons. I think the issue is that a combination of automaker marketing and various regulatory and tax incentves/loopholes drive people to purchase more trucks than they otherwise would.
Specifically, the Section 179 deductions available on vehicles that weight in excess of 6000lbs. A business doesn't need to prove need to make use of the tax advantage. This encourages real estate agents, sales people, etc to buy new large SUVs instead of leasing or buying second hand sedans that would otherwise be suitable (Mercedes E-Class, etc). And contractors that could use smaller vehicles (Transit Connect, Ranger) to buy F-150s or large vans.
It's basically a massive kick-back to Ford and Chevy.
In the US, discouraging individual ownership of vehicles is probably not going to succeed. I don't want to give up my car and I suspect that electric vehicles and self driving vehicles (when they get here) are going to drive the cost of trips way, way down which will increase the number of trips by a similar amount. The number of vehicles on the road is going to increase.
Because of the increased demand on raods, reducing road space probably won't happen. When cars can get to and from parking spaces by themselves, parking space can move into central towers or edge lots, but the number of spaces is probably going to increase, not decrease.
We all want better forms of transportation, but there's a lot of disagreement about what's better.
My wife at the time bought an SUV, a Toyota Highlander. She never went off road, we didn't have any children, she never hauled anything. 90% of her driving was to and from work on paved roads, a job that could have been accomplished with a Honda Civic.
Now let's play another fun game: how many truck and SUV owners do you think are like you, and how many do you think are like my ex-wife?
Unfortunately compact pickups aren’t really a thing any more.
As a homeowner and a parent this would be a great vehicle for me — having the utility of a truck bed.
Not everyone that owns a home does work on it themselves but trucks are very useful. Today my only options are rent a truck or put a trailer hitch on my van and pull a trailer when I need to haul stuff. That’s so much more hassle.
Honestly, I'm not handy at all and I've only owned my home for a couple of years, but the desire for something with a truck bed grows more every summer, it's just so damn useful to be able to do something as simple as pick up a lawn mower or a ladder or not worry about the size of the flat pack we're getting from Ikea.
I do quite a bit of DIY and I have a skoda octavia combi (which would be considered small in the US). honestly the only thing i have difficulty with is drywall panels, i have to tie them to the roof bars.
obviously a truck would be much easier, but if I'm redoing a house I'll need to rent a light dump truck anyway for at least 1-2 days just to get all the old junk out, so I do the big material buy at the same time
> 80% of people buying an f150 or similar never have been and never will be building contractors or lumberjacks
Yeah, I feel this. I used to have a big work truck, but it was for work. Everyone has a truck in my hometown (seemingly). Last week I saw a big F-250 super duty pull up and the dude that got out was in scrubs (a nurse).
Friends of mine have considered the super duty’s for towing, but now they’re interested in the lightning for the same reasons.
The proportion of pickup trucks (especially the light duty ones) that are purchased as "lifestyle" products rather than for utility use is probably significantly higher than 80%, if that were measured honestly.
Yeah, +1 this. I mean, if you're genuinely in the country pulling logs, or even just in the US, then fine. People drive around my tiny country town in England in these tanks. I just find it obnoxious. It's wasteful and it's intimidating for others on the road. And it starts an arms race, because now being in a small car you can't see past other drivers and you feel more vulnerable.
Saddest emblem of modern Eurocapitalism that I know: the BMW "Mini". It's a vast, charmless travesty of the original.
1. Take a bunch of trash/old furniture/whatever to the dump
2. Move furniture
3. Pick up materials for a home renovation like 16 foot long baseboards, drywall, a few dozen boxes of laminate flooring, etc. (no need to be a professional construction contractor here)
4. Tow a camping trailer
5. Much, much more
I'm literally using my truck tonight to pick up ~500 square feet of flooring material, which is saving me ~$300 in shipping costs. The truck itself only cost me $3,700 to begin with, and between this and several other home improvement projects it has saved me ~$2,000 in shipping/moving/other costs so far in just the two years I've owned it. And I'll be saving a bundle in shipping costs on new kitchen cabinets in a few months as well. That's before you get into the convenience factor of not having to rent/borrow a truck anytime you need to move something big.
of course I have for (1-3), as have nearly all home owners across the world.. and honestly for this type of stuff a dedicated light dump truck is way more useful (especially for emptying massive quantities of building or garden debris at the tip). and that's what? 100 dollars a day? how many days a year are you really going to need to do that? 3-4 ?
> saving a bundle in shipping costs on new kitchen cabinets
Both Lowes and Home Depot offer free delivery for orders over $45. I've also done several home improvement projects, and never needed to pay a dime in shipping. Are you buying directly from the manufacturer or something I'm missing here?
F150s are amazing vehicles. It seats six with an extended cab, haul tons & tons of crap in the bed, gets roughly the same fuel economy as a minivan, it can tow pretty much anything and It will also hold its value insanely well.
Compared with, say, a Honda Odyssey, the F150 is a better family vehicle in many cases. The only reason I can think of to go with the Odyssey (which is another vehicle I love) is vehicle footprint and long-term reliability.
There's a reason the F150 sells so many units in the USA: it's the ultimate vehicle, and it comes with almost no drawbacks.
It's changed, and recently. In the last 10-20 years the utility of pickups has changed substantially, as well as the fortunes of the people who used them in their jobs. Construction, lumber, and similar are familiar as part of the market of an industry that I'm working with. Until 10-20 years ago, you could hop into a new pickup's bed, or reach the bed floor over the rails. New pickup beds come with folding ladders built in, because they're so high off of the ground it's a requirement for many owners.
New pickups do still get used for construction - but only by the owners and some management can afford a new pickup. New pickups on construction sites pull trailers to put cargo at a human accessible height.
Pickups in lumber jobs are also a luxury. Any vehicle driven to lumber sites will effectively be destroyed, they get bent, bashed, and permanently embedded with filth. The rank and file drive what they can afford and don't mind destroying due to the nature of the job, or they ride in with the rest of a crew, or more and more often they don't drive to a site because they're forced labor rented from prisons.
People who need pickups for everyday, practical uses are using vans, trailers, or buying older pickups. 20 year old pickups are so much more practical than new that certain models in excellent shape will sell for more now than they did when new. New pickups and their predecessors are entirely different vehicles.
The same could be said of sports cars - most people don't race them or push them anywhere near their potential.
But selling cars has always been the business of selling a story as much as it has been about selling a transportation technology. This goes back to the earliest days when cars were hulking machines owned by the uber-wealthy.
> or lumberjacks.
Hah, I bet a puny pickup truck isn't very useful for lumberjacks' actual work. I think they use giant tree felling machines and specialized trucks instead. Pickups seem more like small support vehicles for them.
I hope the ability to use your EV battery to backup your house power becomes an expected capability in the future. Glad Ford included it. Too bad Tesla backed away from it, i’m guessing due to their powerwall business.
Depends on the size of the house's load and the size of the battery and the efficiency of the inverter.
Ford's promo site says 'up to 10 days with rationing power' asuming 30kWh use per day with extended-range battery. But it's not clear to me if 30kWH is normal use, and rationing would be less, or if that's the rationed use. A 300 kWH battery seems rather large to me, and i haven't seen an actual spec for the Ford.
Edit: reread their site after reading sibling posts, in a different blurb they say 3 days or 10 days with rationing with the same assumption about 30 kWH per day; so their rationing assumption must be getting down closer to 9 kWH per day. Either way, a nice feature to have that would eliminate a portable generator for me.
The average household electricity consumption per day is 28.9 kWh. For comparison, the Tesla Model X long range has a battery capacity of 100 kWh.
So in theory, a fully charged Model X could power the average home for 3 days. Really puts into perspective how much energy is needed to move a car at highway speeds.
I'm interested to see if this leads to people living in places without power and using their truck as the sole source of electricity.
If you have a small cabin with no a/c, wood heat, and a propane stove - your house is going to use hardly any power compared to your truck. It would barely make a difference.
At a charging station? A lot of people do a lot of their charging not at home already - at least in cities. Presumably this could / will be true in rural areas, too.
The power draw is probably fine, but the contention for the battery would be a problem. Think, "hey honey, can we put off the Costco trip until next week so we can leave the internet up, and lights on?"
Implementing a transfer switch and dummy load just to dump solar generation when your truck is being a truck would feel like a weird exercise.
I want to know if it is 240V split phase. A lot of houses use multiwire branch circuits so getting split phase power would be a Big Deal. If Ford puts a big gnarly inverter capable of this in the F150, then I'm going to be stoked.
But I need an HD truck, and it has to have enough range to tow, which means I'm not in the market for a Lightning. Dammit.
It's great to see the best selling vehicle in the US be zero emissions. It's wonderful.
But this truck will be very heavy, very tall, and very fast. Drivers are already the leading killers of children, and more and more people are being killed while walking and cycling.
I'm very worried about the effect of making this vehicle even faster and heavier. Hopefully reduced deaths from pollution offset this.
EVs are heavier by nature (this vehicle’s battery pack alone is ~1800 lbs). Your average driver is not good at driving. The F150 sells very well. Ergo, more risk of more property damage and human harm.
You can’t get around physics. More mass with more force carries more risk.
Yeah, but it's not like the drivetrain of an F150 is light. A fully dressed Coyote V8, 10R80, driveshaft, differentials, subframes, exhaust, gas tank (with fuel), radiator & supports, fuel lines, etc, etc add up. So the batteries weight 1800 lbs, but your also removing like 1400lbs of stuff. It's pretty likely that the Lightning will weight in at barely more than a hybrid F150, and the lower range F150s, when introduced, will probably weight the same as the ICE versions.
A little appreciated fact is that a Model 3 and a Mustang have the exact same weight ranges: the SR RWD Model 3 weights about what a ecoboost Mustang does, and a GT500 Mustang is actually about 200lbs heavier than a Model 3 AWD LR Performance.
The curb weight of the Lightning seems to be approximately the same as the ICE F150s. 4600-5000lbs. Batteries are heavy, but so are engines and transmissions.
The battery being low should dramatically improve the safety of the vehicle by improving stability.
It's still a huge vehicle, though. It would be nice if we trended smaller, and left vehicles like this to people who actually need it.
My mistake then. I read a response post to the new vehicle that claimed it would come in at 5000lbs. Can't find anything authoritative, but everyone seems to be speculating more around 6500 as you said.
Does being hit by a 6500 lb vehicle as a cyclist or pedestrian really differ materially from being hit by a 7500 lb vehicle...?
Constantly telling people that existing on earth as a human is bad for x, y, z is a good strategy if you want people to tune out and stop paying attention to what you're saying.
Completely aside from the point you're trying to make: it's a pet peeve of mine when people try to describe collisions in terms of kinetic energy. It's the wrong metric--the important conserved quantity in collisions is momentum, which is simply linear mass*velocity (not quadratic velocity). After that, it becomes a matter of calculating the rate of momentum transfer, or impulse.
That's why crumple zones are important for vehicle-vehicle collisions--not because they turn kinetic energy into a stored form of potential energy in deformation, but because they drastically decrease the rate at which momentum changes.
Is there any actual data that shows there is correlation between the mass of vehicles and number of people killed?
Obviously heavier cars are more deadly when hitting people with all the other variables fixed, but not all these variables are independent. They could also depend on the weight of the cars. For example, maybe the car becomes easier to control/steer when it's heavier (totally made up point), which counters the inherent risk introduced by the weight.
Without real-world data I won't be too quick to say heavier car is more dangerous.
I'll post the conclusion for the light trucks weight reduction part (fatalities part, there is also non-serious injuries part in the paper) here as TL;DR for other people.
Reducing the mass of light trucks would significantly increase the fatality risk of their occupants in
collisions with objects and big trucks. But downsizing of light trucks would significantly reduce risk
to pedestrians, motorcyclists and, above all, passenger car occupants. There would be little effect
on rollovers because, historically, there has been little correlation between the mass of light trucks
and their rollover stability (width relative to center-of-gravity height). There would also be little
change in collisions between two light trucks, if both trucks are reduced in mass.
Even though the effect of mass reductions is statistically significant in four of the six types of
crashes, the net effect for all types of crashes combined is small, because some of the individual
effects are positive and others are negative. The benefits of truck downsizing for pedestrians and
car occupants could more than offset the fatality increase for light truck occupants. It is estimated
that a 100-pound reduction could result in a modest net savings of 40 lives, (0.26 percent of baseline
fatalities). However, this estimate is not statistically significant, the 2-sigma confidence bounds
range from a savings of 100 to an increase of 20 fatalities; the 3-sigma bounds range from a savings
of 130 to an increase of 50 fatalities. It is concluded that a reduction in the weight of light trucks
would have a negligible overall effect, but if there is an effect, it is most likely a modest reduction
of fatalities
There are millions of F150s. If you get into an accident what is the probability it is with an F150? Or an SUV or something bigger that requires a commercial driving license.
We also know that speed kills and people are driving faster today than ever before.
The location of the battery also means lower center of gravity and probably better control over the vehicle, and the curb weight is about the same. These will probably be net safer than ICE F-150s
Basically light duty trucks take an extra 10-30 feet stopping from 60 MPH. This is dwarfed by distance travelled during reaction time. In the 1960's sedans were in the ~150 ft range for 60-0, about what modern pickups achieve.
Heavier vehicles have more kinetic energy at the same speed but the braking force for all vehicles is proportional to mass and friction with the road surface which depends on tire quality and road material, and since acceleration is proportional to mass from a given force the deceleration from braking is basically the same at any mass with equivalent tires and road surface.
Have you ever lived next to a road in a city? I can tell you that the most noise comes from revving engines.
There is a also a massive difference between noise a normally driven ICE vehicle makes compared to an electric one at city speeds. The electric ones are very silent and barely audible if they don't make that humming sound. Even at 20-30mph.
I can't hear a single engine, but I can hear the hum of tires a long way away. Sure, I can sometimes hear a loud exhaust but those come and go in seconds. Tire noise is a 24x7 sound until winter (snow attenuates sound really well).
Source: typing this in a city with lots of roads and traffic.
Tires are an issue but diesels engine trucks and semis are audible. Also some times regular gas customers have modified exhausts. Tire noise is higher frequency though.
Are most pedestrian and cyclist deaths on the highways?
I would have though it would be in the city, if only for the fact that I practically never see pedestrians on country roads where I live. There can be cyclists, though.
In the city, though, most car noise is clearly the engine. Source: traffic outside my window. I clearly hear the engine noise or the exhaust if it's a scooter or motorcycle.
Don't know about in the USA, but in the EU electric cars are required to emit some noise when going slowly. Most make an eerie electric hum, but Fiat has chosen to make their new Fiat 500 play a jaunty Italian tune: https://www.motortrend.com/news/new-fiat-500-pedestrian-aler...
Once you're above 10mph or 15mph the road noise from the tires makes more noise than the quiet gas engines we have these days anyways.
This electric F-150 will not be "almost silent" in any way that matters to a pedestrian. It will certainly be less obnoxious to everyone than those grating diesel engine trucks, and I hope no one complains about the loss of that noise pollution.
> Once you're above 10mph or 15mph the road noise from the tires makes more noise than the quiet gas engines we have these days anyways.
Are you mental? I live on a residential street, not even too busy, and every single day, I hear these idiot gunning their motors to be cool. With electric its a non issue.
Yeah, EVs emit a really annoying sound. You don't really notice as a driver rolling around with the windows up, but when you pull one into a garage with the windows down, you hear that "WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOOWOWOWOWOOWEEEEEEERRRRR" echoing all over.
I don't know if 2020+ EVs are louder, but at least our Fiat 500e does make this tiny whirring sound at parking lot speeds, supposedly so pedestrians can hear it. But it is so quiet that it doesn't accomplish much. Even the quietest ICE car is substantially more audible in parking lots.
What is this noisemaker? Is it sort of an electronic whine? I thought that was just the motors. Otherwise I've never heard any kind of artificial noise from a slow-moving EV.
I work with a window facing the street, and I can hear electric cars coming well before they pass. Electric cars are near-silent only when they're moving very slowly. The noise from tyres-on-tarmac is still fairly loud when they are moving at typical city-driving speed.
Well, There's speed, and then there's acceleration.
This new Lightning (putting it that way because F150 Lightning once corresponded to a gas-guzzling Supercharged V8 trim) has 775ft/lb of Torque. For reference, the existing models are between 265 and 510 ft/lb.
Additionally, one of the benefits of an electric motor, is that torque is essentially instantly available, compared to an ICE where there's only a slim power bad where that max torque range is hit.
Unless Ford 'governs' acceleration in software, I can see some lead-foots getting themselves into trouble quickly. They probably -will-, but I'd expect them to offer some sort of switch for that, lest the Ford zealots grab their pitchforks. Let us not forget that a lot of 'Car guys' are arguably insane. When Ford considered switching the Mustang to a Front Wheel Drive Mazda design, they had to deal with death threats!
this is my biggest concern. my dad has a tesla, and you put your foot on that thing it feels like a jet on the runway. electric motors are allowing everyday, consumer level cars that can do 0-60 faster than a Ferrari, and silently as well. it leads to doing more aggressive turns and stuff like that which you can only pull off with maximum acceleration, which means scenarios like the left turn where you're whipping out like silent lightning to beat the oncoming cars, and some kid on a bike suddenly entering the road to your left where you're going, and in the opposite way in which you are looking (at the oncoming cars to the right) is toast.
to all the idiot downmodders, I am not advocating against electric cars, I am advocating against their software allowing unfettered acceleration as well as the lack of audible cues to pedestrians (some hybrid cars are now adding artifical sounds for this issue).
One of the things I've seen in the Powerboost (their hybrid model) reviews is that even when people disable traction control to launch it, there is something happening that keeps it from spinning out. I think the electric engine might have a mandatory control mechanism in it that cannot be bypassed.
first of all, despite its prominence in marketing materials, engine torque doesn't tell you much about a vehicle's performance characteristics. torque is meaningless without knowing the overall gear reduction. a 911 gt3 is about as fast in a straight line as a tesla, despite having way less torque.
> compared to an ICE where there's only a slim power bad where that max torque range is hit.
second, this is only true of naturally aspirated engines, which are pretty rare these days. engines with turbos or superchargers are usually tuned to make (roughly) peak torque all the way from 2000 rpm to redline.
this is a lot of fretting over the peak acceleration of a truck. I believe the thing does 0-60 in something like 4.5 seconds. that's really quick for a truck, but only above average compared to performance sedans. in any case, most people (even the crazy ones) do not often hit peak acceleration from a red light, especially in an EV.
>this is a lot of fretting over the peak acceleration of a truck. I believe the thing does 0-60 in something like 4.5 seconds. that's really quick for a truck, but only above average compared to performance sedans
Seems like the people in this thread arguing about a fast truck don't know about the original Lightning, nor are they familiar with modern sport trucks like the Ram TRX or Shelby F-150 Super Snake, both of which will give proper high end sports cars a run for the money in a drag race.
> Let us not forget that a lot of 'Car guys' are arguably insane.
You might want to look in the mirror. Car threads bring out really destructive attitudes, and mostly not from the 'car guys'. The stuff that gets said here is astounding...
And I've never sent anyone a death threat. I don't hate people for their choice in cars, or non-choice as the case may be. I enjoy interesting cars of all kinds. I'm not especially into trucks from an enthusiast perspective, though as a homeowner and RV owner I do happen to own a Ford F250. And I don't mind people that are into them. You have to be a bit of an enthusiast, IMO, to daily drive a super duty if you don't need it :). I'd own a Taco if I didn't need to tow anything, as it would be far more livable for daily use.
I provided a very real world example of car enthusiasts doing something that a sane human being would not do. Can you help me understand what I should be looking for?
This is like pointing to a single self-identified Democrat or Republican and then claiming they speak for everyone else who also identifies as such. This is extremely pervasive and is one of the fundamental breaks in our political dialog these days.
And yeah, a lot of people on HN are also car enthusiasts. How many of us sent death threats in response to the Ford Probe? I was even a Mustang enthusiast at that time. I never sent any death threats, nobody I know did either. You are describing a sociopath, who may also be a car enthusiast, and then claiming that this means all car enthusiasts are sociopaths.
This. The crazy acceleration rates make speeding easier (you get to high speeds in no time) and more dangerous (you surprise other people) while offering no tangible benefit except maybe for killing the sports car market.
> “If your F-150 Lightning is plugged in when your outage occurs, Intelligent Backup Power will automatically kick in to power your home,” said Ryan O’Gorman, Ford’s energy services lead, in a video briefing prior to the reveal. “When power is restored, the truck automatically reverts to charging its battery.”
Yes, compared to cars even a decade ago modern cars are very bloated. Have you seen an original 500 from the 50's/60's or 70's? They weighed around 1100 lbs. A modern base trim Fiat 500 weighs around 2400 lbs.
We all realize it's due to safety, but a lot of sports cars have gotten progressively less fun as a result. The M3 is no longer a small nimble sedan. It's larger than the 5 series was from only 2 generations ago. That's all he's pointing out.
Well then I have to disagree. A motorcycle helmet is not bloat compared to wearing a sock on your head. Sure an old car might be more fun but safety isn't bloat. AC units are.
I already acknowledged the size increase is due to safety. It's not an opinion that modern cars are physically larger and heavier than they were only a few generations ago. There's nothing to disagree with. The M3 (now called M4) has become an entirely different class of vehicle.
The 3/4 series grew in size so much that they introduced the 1/2 series to fill the void of a small coupe. They didn't have to increase the physical dimensions by over a foot in length and nearly half a foot in width. It completely changed the driving dynamics. So, yes, it was absolutely is not worthwhile considering they decided to make a replacement for it after realizing that they alienated a lot of enthusiasts.
And 500% higher risk of death. You might call that bloat but to me that is like saying a good quality motorcycle helmet is just a bloated hoodie or cap.
A great case study. The Fiat looks respectably small until you see the original which looks like one of those cozy coupes that they sell for toddlers. The comparison is sobering. Not only that, but in the interior too, the controls and dials are beautifully neat and thin in contrast to the modern version.
>Drivers are already the leading killers of children, and more and more people are being killed while walking and cycling.
I think more worrisome is the center console - pedestrian deaths had been going down for 20 years until smartphones became widespread and we've had increases every year since.
With the introduction of smart phones and social media we've seen lots of negative effects increase. For example, teen suicide was decreasing until they were introduced and then started to increase again. Girls especially.
I wish there was more discussion and acknowledgement of the dangers here.
You have a point, but I also think we should be thinking beyond smartphones and try to act on what they are used for.
Not in a "guns don't kill people way", but because I think smarphone helped spread society's worse effects on girls, but they were already in a very shitty position, and we can't just get back to the status quo before the smarphones and social networks.
We can of course also work on reducing sns negative impacts, but I think it will also be a bad, long and thorny way before seeing improvements.
When I’m on a long trip with friends or family we play a game trying to spot people on their phones by how poorly they are driving. Police are extra points. You would be shocked at how many cops you see looking down at their lap while driving.
I would rather drive next to people with .09 blood alcohol than someone on their phone.
Social media and cell phones are very convenient, but come with major drawbacks that must be addressed. Phones, for many young people, are just mental disorders with a touch screen.
I take extra caution around pickup trucks and young men in muscle cars. The former are more likely to not see you, or be on their phones. The muscle cars are likely to rapidly and erratically change directions into me at a high rate of speed.
I try to give a "friendly" honk followed by a "hang up" hand gesture. Results range from them putting the phone down and giving a thumbsup to angrily cutting me off and speeding down the freeway.
Electric vehicles often have much better safety credentials than their ICE powered counterparts for a few reasons:
* All of the weight is in the bottom of the vehicle, giving a lower centre of gravity. I'd bet this will kill the old F150 in a moose (or child!) test.
* The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.
* The electric motors are able to respond with torque far faster (in ms) than an ICE engine, so traction and stability control are more effective. Again good for things like the moose test.
* Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.
> * All of the weight is in the bottom of the vehicle, giving a lower centre of gravity. I'd bet this will kill the old F150 in a moose (or child!) test.
The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive. It's simply a test of whether the occupants will survive hitting a moose. I would wager anything that is designed to pass the moose test will kill anything that it hits that is below the moose's center of gravity. So actually the vehicle is way less safe for pedestrians than a vehicle that would fail the moose test.
But if all that matters is the safety of the occupant I guess this is okay.
> * The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.
The kind of "crumple zone" that enhances pedestrian and cyclist safety is more like a beer can. Again, the crumple zones in this vehicle are designed to keep the occupants safe but not designed to keep any other road user safe.
> The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive.
The moose test is about safely dodging around a moose that wanders out onto the road without wrecking the vehicle.
Why did you write this long comment as if you were an expert on the moose test if you don't even know what the moose test is? That's an incredibly disingenuous thing to do.
I assume because they want to see less vehicle traffic on the road. Arguments along these lines are thrown out by people that hate cars on the road to help change the argument from facts to 'what about the children'.
Ideally in the moose test the moose and car never make contact. It is a test of the car's ability to safely support extreme evasive manoeuvres, rather than its crash survivability.
Tall SUVs typically fare worse at this because of their higher centre of gravity causing instability:
> The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive. It's simply a test of whether the occupants will survive hitting a moose.
Your second point is also untrue. The shape and structure of traditional car crumple zones and impact areas like the hood and headlights have a significant impact on pedestrian survivability: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257775117_Crumple_z...
I agree with the rest, but I'm pretty skeptical of this claim:
> Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.
Do you (or anyone) have order-of-magnitude estimates for either/both of these figures? I mean, electrification in general is great, but the F150 cannot take credit for all of it. I am interested in reduced pollution deaths/QALYs that can be attributed to F150 electrification specifically -- that's the topic of this article and thread.
On average in the US, the CO2 output required to power an electric vehicle is 1/3 of an ICE vehicle. So theoretically this would translate to less deaths as bb123 suggests, but hard to compare to direct pedestrian deaths. (Yes there are some logical gaps as ICE C02 output is a very low percentage of total fossil fuel output).
They are maybe 40-50% lower. Does this move the needle for climate change? No. And it’s not just lifetime car emissions. It’s the car dependent life that cars require
It's only 50% lower because most electricity grids emit a lot of carbon. Once the grid switches to 100% carbon-free, the number becomes a lot lower. And most of the embodied carbon in the car comes from industrial electricity or transport, so as the grid & transport goes green the embodied carbon goes down, eventually to zero.
Electricity only accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, but it also enables industry (20%) and transportation (15%) to decarbonize too, by allowing them to replace their fuel with electricity.
A 50% reduction is already massive, but electrification of both vehicles and the industrial processes creating the vehicle will eventually let that number go to zero which should be our goal.
> The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone.
Crumple zones don't help pedestrians.
The new F-150 will be bigger and heavier than the absurdly huge early-00s Hummers. The hood is so tall and long that they're talking about putting forward-facing cameras inside the cab because you can't see anything in front of you shorter than 6" tall out the windshield.
If Ford was interested in safety, they would reduce the outrageous length and height of the front end which is now no longer even pretending to be necessary housing for an engine. Vehicles made to work prioritize visibility, Ford trucks are made to intimidate and kill.
That’s completely untrue - The design of crumple and impact zones like the hood, bumpers and headlights absolutely do help pedestrians. There is a suite of Road safety tests designed to specifically evaluate exactly that: https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...
The F150 is only really sold in the US/Canada market, at least as a passenger car. You might be able to import one as a commercial vehicle in Europe but I've certainly never seen one.
F-150 isn't sold in the european market, and neither are any other American flat-top high front trucks precisely because they are too deadly to pedestrians.
But the top half of the bulbous front end that basically every modern car has is mostly empty space and flimsy plastic to create what's basically a crumple zone for pedestrians.
> Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution
The sizable majority of modern car pollution comes from particulates that come off asphalt, not emissions from engines. It's still important to go EV to reduce carbon, but that doesn't improve local air quality. Modern internal combustion engines have pretty minimal pollutants in their emissions.
Getting older cars off the road is the major way to improve emission pollutants. Beyond that, improving air quality to any significant degree requires either fewer cars on the road, or less heavy cars on the road. Asphalt particulates scales quadratically with the weight of the car.
> The lack of engine means ... This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too.
this is important. It is an option they DID IGNORE! for marketing.
The thing that kills pedestrians (both physically and preventing vision) is the high trunk. They could have lowered it since there is no 9L engine or whatever inside. But they decided to keep it for "frunk" marketing.
You are contending that there is no difference in pedestrian fatalities between vehicles? And also that it isn’t harder to see children in an unnecessarily tall vehicle?
Is a truck an unnecessarily tall vehicle or is replacing sedans with taller hatchbacks we pretend are SUVs an unnecessarily tall vehicle? Because one is tall for a reason and the other is tall purely due to consumer preference.
What reason are pickup trucks tall for, other than assuaging the drivers doubts about their own masculinity? You can get just as much construction work done with a Toyota Tacoma or even a Mercedes utility van.
Gaming EPA fuel efficiency regulations. Making them taller/wider essentially saves the manufacturers money because those regulations aren’t very well designed.
It makes a big difference where one is hit. Being hit in the head by a head-height truck grille is a lot different from being hit in the shins by a 1964 Datsun. There's also the small matter that nobody driving this truck can see anything at all for ten feet to the front.
It needn't have been this tall. With the internal combustion engine out, Ford could have designed a lower, more curved, less deadly front end.
Instead, they kept the high nose and used the space as a trunk. After all, injuring fewer pedestrians sells no cars. Indeed, the market prefers an enormous, deliberately threatening-looking chariot that makes you feel big and virile.
Ford are behind this game in that they haven't given their truck an explicitly hostile name like “People Mulcher”.
Just because you live in a city, does not mean the city was "made for" you. Cities are a side effect of many people clustering around key resource points. Resources are almost always much more valuable in trade than they are remaining at a stationary point, which requires transport infrastructure and vehicles. The fact that you don't want to live in a city in which people drive vehicles is your problem, not society's.
Cities are no longer resource points as most economic activity in cities is generated by services and knowledge work. Even if you go by your logic of economic supremacy, society would want to protect the most valued economic assets in its cities: the people. The death machines are also noisy as fuck and generate pollution, take up valuable and scarce urban space … there is absolutely no need to have huge roads with unrestricted traffic going right up to dense urban centers.
Almost every major American city is also a shipping port, freight train depot, major freight airport hub, etc., etc., manufacturing is still a thing (in fact domestic manufacturing is on the rise in the last decade). Good luck feeding, clothing, sheltering, etc. the millions of inhabitants in American cities without roads that accommodate large trucks and people who do real work.
I'm sure there's some societal tradeoff between global electrification and pedestrian deaths. Until the government adds pedestrian safety to US crash standards, Ford will make what the image conscious truck market wants.
Blame for killing falls on the driver of the vehicle, not on the company designing it or the shape of the front of the vehicle.
Don't hit anyone with your vehicle and you won't kill anyone. I've been hit by a truck bicycling, thankfully not too hard. But I don't really think it would have been better to have been hit by a low slung sleek car. It would have put all the force through my legs.
Even HN cannot see past the perverse dangers and flaws of modern auto design responsible for the current vulnerable road user epidemic in America. [1] When it comes to cars - it's "personal responsibility". When it comes to treadmills - it's a "manufacturing flaw" [2]
Ever heard of crosswalks? They're these things that people use to travel in front of cars while they're standing still.
Ford trucks are the #1 killer of children and adults at crosswalks because drivers can't see what they're about to run over, vehicles of that front-end design account for 40% of all pedestrian traffic deaths.
So, you're trying to tell me, it's the truck's fault that a driver doesn't know they're at a crosswalk?
Do you own a truck? I do. I've owned a truck for 15 years. Some of them lifted, and unless you are pretty much parked on top of a crosswalk, there is no problem seeing the crosswalk. Especially 3-4 foot objects in said crosswalk.
Edit: F150 is the most popular vehicle in the US. So, yeah, it stands to reason it will kill more people than any other vehicle, too
I'm telling you it's the truck's fault that the driver can't see the crosswalk.
There is a such thing as good and bad design. If I sell a hammer that shoots a bullet whenever you swing it for no good reason, I'm responsible for people getting shot.
That analogy doesn't hold water. A hammer isn't meant to shoot bullets. So shooting bullets would be something the hammer was never intended to do.
What I'm telling you is that you have an opinion that is different from mine and also probably an ignorant one since you didn't answer my question about whether you have ever owned a truck.
And obscuring driver's visibility to the point where they can't see objects less than 6 feet tall that they are about to hit all for the sake of aggressive and intimidating presentation to other road users isn't something pickup trucks were intended to do.
That's why professional models typically have cabover or sharply-sloped hood designs, not the enormous flattops that are marketed at suburbanites.
I have owned a truck, I drove a 1999 Chevy Silverado for ten years, it could haul just as much stuff as a 2020 F-150 but it also let me see the road.
"objects less than 6 feet tall" That is utter nonsense. You're honestly saying you can't see something five feet off the ground in front of an F-150?
"1999 Chevy Silverado for ten years, it could haul just as much stuff as a 2020 F-150 but it also let me see the road" - this is also utter nonsense. A 1999 Silverado 1500 is a 1/4 ton truck with a TC of about 4,000 pounds. A 2020 F-150 is a 1/2 ton truck with a TC of about 7,000 pounds.
So the more apt comparison would be with a Ford Ranger, which obviously sits lower to the ground than an F-150, but having owned both a 2500 Silverado and several F-250, the front visibility isn't much different.
My lexus has a 360 camera that turns on when the car is moving at low speeds (e.g. when stopped at a crosswalk). I assume new ford trucks at even a few trim levels up will have this feature. You can prevent these kind of fuck-ups with cameras easily.
You shouldn't need to take your eyes off the road to look at a camera screen just to see what's on the road in front of you. It's a car, not an armored fighting vehicle.
You get into your parked vehicle, check your phone for directions, find a route, confirm your arrival time, then put the key in the ignition and immediately run over a kid who stepped in front of your truck to grab their ball.
And so that's the vehicle's responsibility? Like, you're complaining that a truck/suv has a 9-foot blind spot.
What's an acceptable blind spot - where if someone hits a laying down/sitting kid in front of their car, it's the driver's fault and not the vehicle's?
Vehicle safety regulations aren't about "blame", ever. They're designed to save lives. If you can do that with better driver behavior, great. If you can do it with assistive technology, great. If you can do it with different vehicle designs, great. You do what you can, based on the techniques available and the costs involved.
To wit: if you start your safety analysis with "fuck the pedestrians, that's the driver's fault, not Ford's", then you're doing it wrong.
That’s why I wish car manufacturers would affix big metal spikes to the front of cars for the aesthetic value. After all, they’d be blameless for any casualties.
Judging the appearance of some late model vehicles, I'll joke that we might as well skip a few small steps and go straight to mounting Hellfire missiles on the front. :-)
Blame for killing almost never falls on drivers. Look at news headlines--"Car runs over person" and not "Driver runs over person" and you can see how this is viewed. There is a term to describe this--"windshield bias." Auto safety takes multiple approaches and not just saying the drivers are responsible because they are currently not, at least in the US. Does the person that hit you with a truck still have their driving license?
As someone who doesn't own a truck, I always find it funny when people bring up "big and virile" type lines about truck owners. "They're compensating for something..." These people need to get their minds out of the gutter, stop thinking everything is about penis. Trucks are functional vehicles, like a giant tool for transporting bulky stuff, and I remember this every time I think about asking a friend if I can use his truck for anything.
No insult intended here: I assume people who have never had this thought have also never done things like replacing their kitchen cabinets or some other simple home improvement project. That's fine, but it's also quite relatable to many people, and it has nothing to do with penis.
I picture a gardener turning up to work on a tech person's yard, unpacking his mower and tools and soil and plants, and the tech person shaking their head from their window and saying to themselves 'wow he's clearly just got that truck as a substitute penis...'
I bought a truck for two reasons. Hauling the occasional thing around (having a home makes this happen more than I had initially thought) and it fits 6 (we just had our last child in January).
I WFH so it's lower fuel economy is a non-issue to us.
It has literally _nothing_ to do with "feeling big" or any compensation thing. I had no idea how much I'd use the utility until I bit the bullet and purchased one.
I'm incredibly excited for the F-150 Lightning because I am a perfect candidate for it.
> I always find it funny when people bring up "big and virile" type lines about truck owners. "They're compensating for something..." These people need to get their minds out of the gutter, stop thinking everything is about penis.
I used to work at a horse racing track and every single jockey (really small dudes) had the hugest truck you have ever seen. We're talking Ford F-350 with a lift kit and bigger tires. The works. You needed to use a ladder to get in them.
There is definitely a thing that some people want bigger, taller vehicles because it makes them feel bigger and stronger. And there is definitely a thing that truck size becomes a pissing contest for some men where it's not just enough to have a big truck, you need to have the biggest one among your peers.
(And if you think nerds are immune to this phenomenon, perhaps take a more critical look at your gaming PC, boardgame collection, etc. We're a tribal species competing for mates using status symbols. Few of us are totally immune to this effect.)
At the same time, many truck owners are not motivated by that and painting them all with the same brush is uncharitable and unkind. I drive a pick-up. I absolutely love it. I have yet to kill any children, destroy the ozone layer, crush another car in a parking lot, or any of the other many moral crimes this thread seems to accuse most truck owners of.
Paraphrasing Freud, sometimes a truck is just a truck.
Their thinking is literally 'I don't understand why anyone needs a truck when the Google employee car park is so well surfaced and my laptop fits on the front seat'.
The problem is not that the truck is off the ground, the problem is that the top of the hood is higher than a pedestrian's head.
Trucks designed for work have low frontends for maximum visibility. I drove a 1999 Silverado for 10 years, went offroading often, it had just as much horsepower as last year's F-150, but with a front-end that was basically indistinguishable from a sedan's, instead of the new ones that are so tall they have to put cameras in the cab so that you can see what's in front of you.
The frontends of modern trucks are for intimidation, not work.
I live on a sheep farm (though the sheep are gone these days). I recognize how incredibly useful tractors and high-clearance pickup trucks are. I also think helicopters are useful too. Neither are safe in the city.
Incorrect based on 50% of trucks on the road today being absolutely pristine, and simply looking at commercials and their wording ("commanding the road")
Advertising/marketing/PR persuades people to want buy certain things, not by telling them these things exist at a certain price, but by influencing them psychologically in deeper ways. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
This in turn has actual effects on their behavior, including but not limited to making certain purchases more likely. Obsessing about power and speed and commanding the road definitely has an impact on how people drive - especially younger folks.
Commercials for my tax software tells me it makes people using it feel ecstatic. It doesn't really - it's used by people just trying to get their taxes done and they don't feel anything about it.
These couldn't be more different. Tax software choice is a private choice with no effect on the public space. Tax commercials happen for a couple months.
Car choice influence an incredible array of things up to how cities are built. Car commercial are omnipresent and include product placement in movies as well as, apparently, US presidents gunning it in a new truck, which is the topic of this whole thread.
Have you been around people who actually use trucks for work or leisure? They aren't just hitting the side of their trucks with 2x4's or dropping gravel from ten feet in the air like commercials. Lots of people use their trucks for pulling trailers that carry thousands of pounds of their stuff. They use the bed of their truck for carrying things that are long, heavy, grain, sawdust, smaller animals, there is a wide variety of use cases for a truck and a lot of them don't affect the aesthetic of the truck.
Trucks very much have a place in society. Farmers, construction workers, and some other areas definitely need them.
The trend that they need to be an everyday vehicle for anyone is something that should be looked at. What is the psychology and intentional planning that's caused this shift? What subtle population engineering has lead to this without people realizing it?
Speaking personally, I've never owned a truck but began considering it during Covid. Why?
The cost premium of hiring someone for home improvement jobs vs. DIY seems to have gone up. And the difficulty of finding someone qualified, reputable and with available capacity seems to have become exponentially higher.
"So I guess I need a truck" is what I've recently been thinking.
A van is better in almost every dimension for construction. Effectively the only reason to own a pickup truck (vs some other better utility vehicle) is if you have trailer that needs it.
When you say "construction", are you referring to something like drywall/framing/roofing or electrical/trim work? I ask because fitting a stack of OSB sheets in a van can be anywhere from challenging to impossible (depending on the type of van of course). Certain trim levels of the F150 for example, are designed with the specific requirement of being able to accommodate standard sizes of construction materials, like a 4x8 sheet of OSB.
> A van is better in almost every dimension for construction.
Vans are nice and in the used market often cheaper. I used to rent/borrow a friends full size van before having a truck. Still, the roof creates limitations. Can't transport a fridge or water heater upright, for example.
And for towing as mentioned, a van is limited to a bumper pull trailer whereas a pickup can pull a fifth wheel or gooseneck.
In a similar vein covid changed my recreation habits enough to make me consider a truck/suv. With nowhere to go except outdoors I spent a lot more time camping/kayaking in Tahoe and national parks. Bringing an inflatable kayak, paddle board, and camping supplies for the weekend was doable in my hatchback but not exactly comfortable and wouldn’t work with more than two people. Something with more storage and 4WD drive started sounding very appealing. The F-150 is very competitive with a new 4-runner or Tacoma on cost and features. Just wish it wasn’t so gigantic.
There are a certain group of users that need the machines to be strong for towing, tall for required ground clearance, and with bed capacity to haul material, tools, and other everyday cargo.
There is another group that doesn't need any of things but is convinced that they might some day. They are aspirational requirements. Why are those people convinced they need these things? The same reason anyone is convinced they need anything in the modern world. Advertising. Truck ads tell you that the Ford F150 is a tough truck for men who are tough (or want to be) and don't take nothin' from nobody (once they get out of this crappy job) and are masters of nature (or surely would be if they didn't live in the suburbs).
They buy product placement in all the badass movies, their commercials look like b-roll from a transformers movie, and the trucks themselves get more comfortable and less utilitarian every year.
Ford is not in the business of selling (light) trucks - they are in the business of selling an aspirational lifestyle to a population that thinks they might one day become an action hero. The F150 is, and has been for a long time, a consumer toy and not a serious work vehicle.
I’m about as “casual” of a user as possible and it’s still much less that I might theoretically need these things someday and more that I do need them, occasionally. For myself or for friends + family.
This. Before I left the bay, I daily drove a motorcycle or a Jeep. Many of my weekends required truck. If you can only have one, the truck is the better tradeoff.
I got a good deal on something very well equipped with low mileage, and trucks tend to hold their value exceptionally well. It’s also just more convenient this way.
As a thought experiment: for the vast majority of this sorts of tasks a panel van is a superior choice- more secure, more protected from the elements, better milage, much less cool. I'm fact actual trades people are much more likely to use one than am f150.
Could you ever see yourself buying a panel van? Why or why not?
There’s a lot of times it’s more convenient to just throw something over the side of the bed so I would miss that but as a purely utilitarian vehicle vs a work truck absolutely yes.
However for my truck in particular I got a somewhat luxury trim with 50k miles for only $20k, so it was a good mix of things I would want in a vehicle generally as well as the utility. Panel vans aren’t really offered in that configuration, and I probably wouldn’t get one now because I plan on just keeping this truck as a secondary vehicle long after it’s paid off and I eventually get a smaller daily driver.
All that being said the one thing that could make me change my mind is an electric van with extensive usage of solar panels. That has a rather unique value proposition so if it existed in the future I’d be interested in it at least.
There are a good number of legitimate uses and legitimate users for these vehicles (I know a lot of legitimate users), but the vast majority of the giant vehicles on the road have only 1 visible occupant and no visible cargo.
And although I am doubtless projecting, I can't help but envision a fresh hot latte in their cupholder, which the driver is on their way back from procuring.
YMMV--but, in my experience, a single user multiple vehicles in the US can be pretty tough (at least, going from 1 to 2; it seems a lot easier when you go from 2 to 3). I am looking at a new, single vehicle, and this electric F-150 might be it--because I need to be able to carry plywood sheets and my Hyundai subcompact isn't gonna cut it.
I can't speak to the more general, aspirational subculture to which you refer, but the aggravation of multiple vehicles is in some ways the first stop on this tour.
It’s a vehicle, not a mental disorder. Some people just want to be able to occasionally tow a boat or haul some furniture without needing to rent a truck.
I think the attitude of “you don’t need a truck unless you’re a blue collar worker” is pretty elitist and ignorant, honestly. As if the decision to buy a truck is somehow invalid because white collar workers don’t see the need for one.
It’s honestly a lot more practical than people seem to think. And if electric trucks hold their value anything like ICE trucks, getting one with a tax credit at about $40k for the base model is probably the best deal in a new vehicle you can find.
> I think the attitude of “you don’t need a truck unless you’re a blue collar worker” is pretty elitist and ignorant, honestly.
A sedan with the rear seats folded down will likely hold as much as you can get in a Costco run.
Or two bikes you throw in there.
I know because mine does both of these things.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of current truck owners 1) don't own boats 2) rarely, if ever, haul furniture 3) use the space in the rear on a regular basis.
Against this we have the known statistics of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities due to the obstructions to visibility provided by the very high front grille and very high ride height (plus wide A-pillars, etc.)
So it's therefore not only a waste of gas but a public health hazard, and making that claim is not "elitist", it's merely "rational" and "empirical" (and allow me to add, "humane")
"Recent research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found the share of pedestrian deaths involving trucks, vans, and SUVs has increased from 22 to 44 percent since the mid-1980s. More SUVs and trucks in the fleet = more pedestrian injuries becoming deaths instead."
Most sedans have a max payload < 1000lbs including all passengers.
An F-150 has a payload over 3000lbs and can tow up to 14,000lbs.
Do you need that for your groceries? No, but if you don't live in the heart of the city the F-150 enables you do many many things that a sedan can't do around yard work, home ownership, agriculture, hauling gear, etc..
A sedan is about the worst car design anyway.. you'd have more of a leg to stand on if you had argued for a hatch or a minivan.
I've never owned a truck, but they have their uses.
I'm a big fan of small cars, but I'm also a big fan of having friends that own trucks. just off the top of my head, I've needed to borrow a friend's truck to move a couch (twice), buy a new bedframe, and buy a TV. this is all in the past year. none of those things fit in my hatchback with any combination of seats folded down, and they certainly wouldn't fit in a sedan. if I had to rent one from uhaul or home depot, that would have cost me hundreds of dollars in total. instead, it cost me a couple meals at chipotle.
it's also hard to find anything smaller than a truck with 4WD. if you live outside the city/suburbs, this can be a pretty important feature by itself.
> want to be able to occasionally tow a boat or haul some furniture without needing to rent a truck.
The mystery to me is how very occasionally that seems to be, at least anecdotally. Perhaps >95% of pickup trucks I see are not hauling anything bigger than groceries. Yet, they’re hauling around their own ridiculously giant metal frame and emitting huge amounts of fossil fuels in the process. Those occasional boat trips are very net expensive in atmospheric carbon! Thankfully electric pickups will partially mitigate that problem although pickups will be hogging space in commuter parking garages for many decades hence I’m sure.
I’m pretty sure this is the kind of attitude that causes rural folks to be so skeptical of climate change. Some (I’m assuming) city-dweller talking down to them about how they don’t need what they feel to be a useful tool in their daily lives.
I mean, it sounds like your real reservation about trucks is not that they emit carbon, but that they are hogging up space and inconveniencing you, which is not a very persuasive argument.
> I’m pretty sure this is the kind of attitude that causes rural folks to be so skeptical of climate change
I didn't mention rural truck drivers and made no comment that could reasonably be interpreted as such. If you have to deal with corrugated dirt roads and hauling materials etc on a daily basis then it's perfectly understandable you won't exactly be driving a hatchback.
> I mean, it sounds like your real reservation about trucks is not that they emit carbon, but that they are hogging up space and inconveniencing you, which is not a very persuasive argument.
Or, numerous city and urban commuting giant truck drivers is an effective image of the ridiculous excess they represent in the vast majority of their uses whereas carbon is a less visible but extremely negative externality from that excess.
/s But yes, those that point out this are the real problem.
I own an F150 I use primarily for commuting but it also has a comfortable ride, >20 highway mpg, good visibility, utility for when I need to move furniture etc, and it’s relatively affordable and holds its value. Trucks depreciate slower than any other category of vehicle. Literally the only downside is that it’s a pain to park sometimes.
Most sedans get somewhere in the 30s on the highway unless they are hybrids, so it’s about a 50% difference. Not insignificant, but not as massive of a difference as you would think. From a purely economic point of view you’d have to drive a lot for the cost of gas to cost you more than you save from having less depreciation.
First off, you can't compare the fuel economy values between countries just by doing a conversion. Europe has different testing procedures that give higher numbers than the American EPA test does (normally around 20-25%), and the only way you'll have an accurate number is if the car is sold in both countries.
The F150 has fuel economy close to that of wagons sold in the US. The F150 is less efficient, but it has way more than half the fuel economy of a wagon. Examples:
A base E-Class Wagon gets 24 mpg (22 city, 28 highway).
A 4WD V6 F150 (which I think is the most popular) gets 21 mpg (19 city, 24 highway). The most efficient F150 available (the 2WD Hybrid) gets 25 mpg (25 city, 26 highway).
It is the base E Class in the American market. Americans don't drive <150 HP manual cars and would never buy them. Those are the only versions of cars that get substantially better gas mileage then the versions of cars that Americans typically drive.
The fact that Mercedes (a luxury car manufacturer) choose not to import their smaller engines to the US doesn't mean you can't get smaller engines. Subaru outback, kia niro, even a volvo v60 or audi a4 come with efficient 2l engines if you absolutely want luxury
Did you not read the link I posted in my first comment in this chain? Two of the cars in the fuel economy comparison are the Subaru Outback and the Volvo V60. The most efficient Outback has 29 mpg (26/33) and the most efficient F150 has 25 mpg (25/26). Almost identical in city, and in the same ballpark for highway. Numbers are similar for the Audi A4 Allroad (though you'll have the same concern as the E-Class as only the higher worldwide trims are available) and for the V60.
Ah sorry I’m on mobile, didn’t see the horizontal scrolling!
It’s crazy that the choice is so limited in the US. I can understand why the Prius was so popular with you guys, despite handling like a whale on wheels.. there are nearly no options in the big hatchback segment .
You're going to be really sad when you do the comparison for people who drive sports cars. Porsche 911's run at 19 mpg for the 2020 models and ~14mpg for the 2000 models, and the 2010 Cayenne (SUV) runs at 11 mpg. 11!
I actually had a Fiesta ST before my truck and because it required premium fuel (it would run on standard fuel but burned it quicker and had less power doing it so it was pointless) the actual $ cost per mile was similar to the truck I have now but with shorter range because of the much smaller fuel tank
If I drove it a lot yes but I typically only do 4000-6000 miles a year. Even with this vehicle I average less emissions than a typical commuter would. That being said I will probably replace it with an EV as a daily driver when it’s paid off & use it on an as needed basis.
You can't compare yourself to someone that drives more than you do and use it to say anything about how much you pollute. Comparing to a small European sedan (or maybe a VW Golf) driving the same amount of miles would be more telling. Apples to grocery carts.
Americans want it because everyone else has one. Down here in TX, the number of pristine trucks that have never seen a speck of dirt, never had anything in the bed, and that are parked on their 1/8 acre lots in the city is staggering.
Fuel efficiency standards killed the small truck. In the turn of the century EV era, Ford had an electric Ranger which was built on the much smaller (at the time) Ranger platform. But you can't make an ICE small truck that meets the 200x updated CAFE standards, so the small trucks either disapeared (S10) or got bigger (toyota small trucks), or got bigger then disappeared and later reappeared still big (Ranger).
An EV truck presumably can be any size, but there's no current small truck platform to build on.
I have a few friends that are engineers in the auto companies. Its kind of amazing how many negative impacts the CAFE standards had--not on purpose (hopefully), but through unintended consequences. Apparently the Nissan Leaf for example was strictly manufactured to generate credits/offset the environmental impact of the Nissan truck and van line that could not be adjusted to meet the CAFE standards.
My dad had a Ranger in 97 that was just about the perfect truck for day-to-day use. It fit 2 adults comfortably, had a tiny 4 cylinder engine, got great gas milage, and could be used to pull a small trailer. He was crushed when Ford got rid of the Ranger. And what they've released now is basically the size of the old F-150 from the 90s
The "negative" impacts of CAFE standards were entirely by design. They were written that way to benefit the domestic auto industry, which is very uncompetitive in the small and midsized vehicle segments. By making smaller vehicles uncompetitive (or simply unavailable), it eliminated some serious competition.
I think a lot of people don't realize how many regulations are designed by incumbent domestic companies explicitly for the purposes of making foreign companies and upstarts noncompetitive.
You're right that CAFE is literally designed to favor trucks. And the definition is so vague that even vehicles like the PT Cruiser are considered Light Trucks for the purposes of CAFE. It is also designed to hurt small cars, because vehicles with footprints (wheelbase * wheel wide) smaller than a Mustang (literally, to the square inch) have to face ever-more-strict CAFE standards.
As a result, cars like the Fit are might face a CAFE penalty while a base F150 does a-okay despite getting like half the fuel economy. And that's not even getting into BS like flex fuel credits (basically, being flex fuel capable is like adding ~5mpg to the vehicle CAFE score).
This is exactly why every small vehicle is a crossover anymore (they are light trucks for CAFE purposes), and why cars like the Civic get are today, the size an Accord was in 2005 (CAFE is less strict the larger the vehicle is).
>Apparently the Nissan Leaf for example was strictly manufactured to generate credits/offset the environmental impact of the Nissan truck and van line that could not be adjusted to meet the CAFE standards.
Which seems pretty crazy if the net effect is that any car manufacturer has to produce a full line if they want to build any inefficient cars.
I've owned and driven a handful of trucks. Ranger sized trucks feel the least useful. Can't tow much. Can't haul much. Can't get into muck. Can't hold many people. Aerodynamics of a brick. An electric F150 is compelling. We just upgraded to a new one because we need the tow capacity and the F150 beat out the F250s we were looking at. It's a great size and checks all the boxes.
Small trucks may be the least useful, but they often provide(d) the right amount of utility. Lots of truck owners never go off the pavement and never tow, but make good use of the bed. With a 4-cylinder engine, fuel efficiency was not terrible, but it's a lot easier to put a pinball machine in the back of a truck than the back of a Honda Accord.
That's a strong statement. Heavier vehicles do better in snow because they fit in better. Trucks with more ground clearance can get up and over things that smaller trucks can't. If we're just talking about rock crawling, sure. If we're talking about practical use cases and messy conditions, I'll keep torque and weight on my side.
"The tariff affected any country (such as Japan) seeking to bring light trucks into the U.S. and effectively "squeezed smaller Asian truck companies out of the American pickup market."[16] Over the intervening years, Detroit lobbied to protect the light-truck tariff, thereby reducing pressure on Detroit to introduce vehicles that polluted less and that offered increased fuel economy.[15]"
How effective was this at anything other than making loopholes big enough to drive a truck through, and eventually getting assembly moved to NAFTA countries?
Having a 40 mpg target for a small truck and a 25 mpg target for a big truck makes it pretty hard to build and sell a small truck.
Hmm, that's interesting. If manufacturers have been basically locked out of making small pickup trucks due to unattainable fuel efficiency requirements [1, 2], an implication of that is that as EVs become easier to make at reasonable cost, there's a potentially huge untapped market that could be filled by whoever is the first company to make a small, simple, and cheap electric pickup truck.
A modern version of, say, a Datsun 620 [3] or an 80's Ford Ranger [4] could be pretty popular. One might even be able to circumvent the chicken tax by importing the body/frame of a foreign-made truck and building an electric drive train in the U.S. or NAFTA country.
> there's a potentially huge untapped market that could be filled by whoever is the first company to make a small, simple, and cheap electric pickup truck.
Well, the third really; Ford made 1500 1998-2001 Ford Ranger EVs, and Chevrolet made a few hundred 1997-1998 S10 EVs. But yeah, one with modern batteries and drive trains and (therefore) decent capacity and range could sell a bunch.
Yes, it will be heavier, and yes it will have more acceleration...
But newer vehicles also have AEB with pedestrian detection. If these vehicles displace older existing vehicles without those safety systems we will see fewer fatalities overall. Most kids and pedestrians are hit at low speed, not at 60+ mph due to the driver not paying attention or not being able to see the pedestrian. While AEB can’t save all pedestrians that would otherwise be hit, we know that these systems lead to big reductions in preventable accidents [1].
The problem with trucks like the F-150 is all marketing. My impression after seeing a recent F-150 is that the goal is to feel big and luxurious. Even on the ICE version of the truck, the area under the hood is mostly empty.
The reason an entire car hide in front of the bumper, out of the driver's view is that it makes the truck look cooler. The window sills are also at a silly height, to make the truck feel bigger, but at least that doesn't create the same safety issues (for everyone outside the truck) with no real value.
Motorcycles and busses are more dangerous for pedestrians than trucks.
"Compared with cars, buses were 11.85 times and motorcycles were 3.77 times more likely per mile to kill children 0–14 years old. Buses were 16.70 times more likely to kill adults age 85 or older than were cars."
A truck in this discussion is a car, not a real truck. A bus is not comparable to a car. Compare a bus to a real truck. A motorcycle will in every single statistics drive faster on average than a car. I'm not saying your point is wrong but it is at a minimum like a click bait title.
"Passenger cars and light trucks (vans, pickups, and sport utility vehicles) accounted for 46.1% and 39.1%, respectively, of the 4875 deaths, with the remainder split among motorcycles, buses, and heavy trucks."
If you count crossovers as cars, trucks make up like 35% of auto sales and account for 39% of pedestrian deaths.
That's probably because buses have more interaction with pedestrians, both due to people getting in and out, but also, operation in urban areas where there's a lot of pedestrian traffic.
Automatic breaking systems are getting even better and have been pretty good for awhile. You can expect preventable fatalities of pedestrians and other drivers from cars and trucks to decline as this technology becomes better.
I feel like this same criticism should apply for the Model S Plaid then too since it accelerates faster than almost every car and is heavier than most cars as well.
I’m not sure how much the weight really matters if you’re colliding with a cyclist or pedestrian anyway though.
Valid point about the height, but it’s no different than any other modern truck on the road today (all of which are too high if you ask me).
I’m very passionate about pedestrian deaths in cities (SF specifically), but based on all the incidents I can remember I don’t think pickup trucks are causing a disproportionate number. Pedestrian deaths are mostly caused by normal cars going at high speeds through red lights or crosswalks. A truck sold with automatic braking would likely be much safer than a car from the past in terms of pedestrian safety.
SF just has fewer trucks, which is why you probably don't recall too many incidents. Nationwide, increasing number of SUV/trucks is a major problem in ped safety.
I'm sure this image is heavily photoshopped, but it looks like they're trying to make a center console that's half touch screen, half physical controls. I wonder what that will look like in reality.
For my part i hope that they figure out that not literally everything needs to be crammed on to a flashy screen. The purging of tactile controls must stop.
This interface is already in production in the electric mustang. The buttons are all touchscreen, with the exception of the physical center wheel which is embedded in a hole in the screen. The photo on this article may be helpful: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/02/im-obsessed-with-the-ford-...
Then they'd have to add extra hardware to detect whether it's there or not, and change the interface accordingly. And for what? I can't imagine an actual use case to justify it.
It's not half and half, it's touchscreen with a physical volume knob which in my opinion is the right way. Having touch controls for volume is a horrible idea (my car has touch control for everything and I despise trying to get the volume adjusted quickly).
If a touchscreen is bad for volume, it is probably bad for most other up and down adjustments too (e.g. temp). I'd argue touch screens are bad for everything when you are driving, because you can't feel your way around.
Touchscreens aren't as bad as the cheap capacitive switches that seem to be taking over the Appliance product space. Every appliance in my new house's kitchen has those damn capacitive switches and they only work ~10% of the time.
>Having touch controls for volume is a horrible idea
I second that. This also applies to heater controls and lighting and almost everything else that i can't think of. The benefit of the tactility of physical buttons and switches is sadly being coldly ignored by those who design our cars.
Maybe I am asking for too much but I want physical knobs for: Volume Control, HVAC Fan Speed, HVAC Temp.
A tangential question: Does anyone know why there is an AC button on older cars? I can turn the temp all the way down but that just does outside air temp. If i want real AC I need to hit a button to turn it on. In my ideal car turning the knob to the lowest temp would get me cold air no matter what.
Because the button is connected to a relay that turns the AC compressor on or off. The compressor actually draws quite a bit of power.
The hot/cold adjustment is adjusting a baffle/mixer that can either let in "cold" outside air, or air that's been heated by the engine compartment into the car. Think of it like driving around on a sunny day in the fall - sun is heating up the inside of the car, but the outside air is cold enough it would be silly and a waste of gas to turn on the A/C compressor.
I had a 1996 (iirc) Buick that had AC/Heat knob that did that. It was red on the right, blue on the left. If you left it at the detente position it was outside air. Turn in left, AC; turn it right, heat. Then there was just a separate knob for fan speed. Now that you mention it, I’ve never seen that again.
If you want to defrost your windows, you want hot, dry air. Air conditioning dries your air. If you combine A/C and heat, you get the best defrost performance.
A/C also consumes some amount of power and fuel efficiency- you may want the coolest air you could possibly have without A/C.
Two reasons:
1) The compressor uses some power from the engine, reducing gas mileage.
2) You can actually use it in conjunction with the heater to get dehumidified hot air.
You mean like in every car made before 2015? Do new cars really have that many more features?
With the touchscreen cars I've rented or driven for work I'd have loved to have a little bluetooth or serial connected control cluster that sat near to hand with basic radio and climate controls. Something I could operate by feel. Seems like there are enough bad touchscreen consoles out there to make an aftermarket kit viable but maybe I underestimate the technical challenges.
Maybe I'll just keep driving my junkers until voice control gets good.
The top level Settings menu in my 2020 Ford Explorer doesn't even fit on one page. It would end up looking like the cockpit of a commercial airliner if everything had to be mapped out to a physical control.
Every action doesn’t need its own physical control. Knobs and buttons can be multipurpose. My mazda3 has touchscreen but it’s disabled because I can navigate and control everything with a single “command” knob.
It isn't to say "All menu items are strictly button based" like the space shuttle or something. It means that the screen will not be touch-based.
This often means a large knob that one can turn, use as a joystick (up down left right) and push in for selection. This knob is used for navigating the majority of the console. There are some unique buttons and knobs for things like volume, climate, etc.
This is what my Mazda does, it's perfect. The big knob does exactly what you describe, where turning the knob scrolls. There's also a small dedicated volume knob that you can push in for mute and left/right to change tracks, and dedicated home and back buttons next to the big knob. All easy to use without looking.
> “Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,” said Matthew Valbuena, Mazda North America’s lead engineer for HMI and infotainment.
> “And of course with a touchscreen you have to be looking at the screen while you’re touching...so for that reason we were comfortable removing the touch-screen functionality,” he added.
Someone needs to start a dash company for these auto manufacturers. They are all hideous and have terrible functionality. Why would I ever want to control my heated seats through a touchscreen? Or A/C? Or Radio presets. I want to buy a newer vehicle but they are all so bad.
Range rovers have been doing something like this for a few years. Theirs can go between being radio controls and climate controls pretty seamlessly. I think it's a great compromise between touch controls and tactility
I still think massive touchscreens in cars are a horrible idea, so Ford doing better than Tesla at something I hate and wish would go away is not super convincing. :)
My Mercedes has this. Except the knob isn't on the screen, it's where the right hand would rest.
In my humble opinion, It's superior to touch screen experiences, at least while driving the vehicle. That said, dedicated knobs (such as a knob for a/c) are still the best for some things.
Folks I know that have owned Ford vehicles in the past few years have done nothing but complain about issues with electrical subsystem and accessory breakdown. I'd be very wary of buying a Ford period, much less one that relies entirely on electricity to move.
Not FUD, as I have no dog in the fight and personally don't care if anyone else buys one, but its a make of automobile I avoid.
Mate, this is textbook FUD. :) It’s anecdotal and there is no connection between the reliability of a vehicle’s electric motor system and the electrical systems that may have troubled your acquaintances.
Take it as what you perceive, that's fine. That said, saying that there is no connection is speculation. The design, implementation, and supply chain of both aspects of the vehicle deal with electronic components. I don't know if they will make the same mistakes with the drivetrain electronics that they do with other aspects of the vehicle's construction.
American vehicles had a history of poor quality control and reliability but it's improved in the last 20 years. F150 is the #1 selling truck in USA in Canada.
Our 2011 F150 has been very reliable, mechanically, but the audio wiring is broken in interesting ways. My buddy's older F150 has exactly the same issue. Otherwise it's been trouble free.
I've noticed that in that era of Ford vehicles, including my own. I have a 2006 Mustang that mechanically has been a tank, but electrically has had multiple issues (it's on its 4th alternator). The audio deck has been similarly flakey. They may very well be better nowadays.
A friend had to have “the wiring harness” on his 2019 f350 replaced, it was 10k took 5 weeks and would have been at his cost if he didn’t have the extended warranty
I know you are heavily downvoted, and my experience is anecdotal, but I proudly bought a Ford Fusion sedan in 2010 (my first "new" car) and I have had nothing but trouble with its electrical systems. It burns out lights every year or other year. It even managed to melt the receptacle for one of the front headlights at one point in time. It eats through car batteries (I'm on battery number 5 in 11 years of ownership) and has had a ton more maintenance costs compared to my 2008 Toyota Sienna that I bought used and has literally had no unplanned maintenance issues.
I'm really happy to see Ford step up in the EV field. The Mach-E looks fantastic, as does the F-150. I have no ill-will towards them and I want them to succeed. But there just isn't anyway I can get over the sour taste in my mouth from owning my Ford Fusion and it is hard to take a leap of faith with them when they are new at the EV game.
The aspect I'm most curious about is towing range. I have a 5000lb travel trailer that I tow about 200km away a few times a year. I'm pretty sure I'd be out of luck with a vehicle like this.
It has the ability to pull the trailer with ease, but most preliminary estimates are that range would be two digits with that sort of load. In my current vehicle I do stop for gas midway, but it would be an entirely different situation hoping for a charger spot (with connected trailer) and then the time to charge.
Still a great truck, though. For a huge range of uses, including more local towing situations (the vast majority of commercial uses), it could be brilliant.
And eventually they can market a super-range battery you can tow. I kid...or do I?
Cut the advertised range in half. That is about the max you can expect for towing range. So the extended range version may let you tow the distance you want to.
I doubt it would be a very viable choice for recreational towing, but then, that market is probably significantly smaller than the standard truck use-cases.
Ford includes several pictures of towing recreational trailers (travel trailer, boat) in seemingly remote locations among their promotional images for this truck: It certainly isn't the bulk of the market, but it is a very important market.
They're appealing to people who tow stuff currently and aspirationally (e.g. people who don't currently tow trailers, but like to imagine that one day they will. "What if" scenarios).
Eventually the charging infrastructure will be there, including for towing vehicles, and it would be a case of scheduling a lunch around a charge.
I just bought a little teardrop camping trailer, and it was amazing how much it impacted my gas mileage. I tow with a Subaru outback, and I went from low 20s (23/24 on highway) to mid teens. Almost ran out of gas on our first trip since it went so much faster than I expected!
I can't imagine that the F150 would be good for long haul trailers... just so much energy involved moving weight around.
I've found towing mileage change was very dependent on the vehicle.
For example, I had a Dodge Durango which got pretty much 16mpg no matter what, whether driving empty or towing a car on a flatbed trailer at highway speeds, still 16mpg. Next vehicle was a used manual transmission BMW X5, got 22-24mpg empty on the highway, but just towing an empty flat trailer would drop that to 17mpg, and a car on it would be 16, and the same towing a small U-Hual box trailer, just instantly drop to 16. So, one was highly stable and the other highly variable with different weight/aero loads.
It will be interesting to see what the real-world experience is like, but I don't expect any good news. People towing tiny travel trailers behind Model X's get brutal reductions in range.
The problem is that an EV is so inherently efficient to begin with that towing a big hollow brick behind you makes a tremendous difference in how much fuel it takes to pull it. Contrast that with a pickup that is already getting mid-teens fuel economy, the change in efficiency is much less pronounced. And with the easy filling ability of the ICE pickup, it's going to be the go-to choice for a number of years until batteries get significantly more capacity, denser, and cheaper.
A very typical pickup/travel trailer combo will get 10mpg. Maybe a couple more for a diesel. You can find outliers, but I've been towing RVs for a while and the topic comes up for discussion periodically, 10mpg is by far the most common experience. Trying to cram enough capacity into a battery for this kind of terrible efficiency is going to be tough for a while.
I have no idea if this’ll be lightning or a lead balloon, because a significant amount of pickup truck buyers do it for the machismo.
Which sounds like some city-slicker talking down to the cheap seats, except, I grew up in a town named Farmington. (Go Farmers.) I know pickups. I know the people who drive pickups. My dad sneers at fancy new pickups because he used to shove a good 700 pounds of mink pelts in a pickup, and he thinks all that leather would get stained by the blood nowadays. And pickup truck buyers love their macho trucks. They like the burble of the engines and the swagger and that it’s not some little penalty box of a green car.
An electric pickup? Sure, sounds rational, especially with that torque. But does it trigger the libs enough?
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Something that might help, though: that price.
“but rather its price because the 2022 F-150 Lightning will start at just $39,974 before any government rebates.”
Given the just eye-watering prices of pickups these days: that’s cheap, relatively.
There's a couple classes of 'Truck guys'. The Truck guys that just want power, yeah they'll probably go for this.
The Truck guys that like throwing turbodiesels in to get HP/Torque numbers like what we see in the lightning, I would say it depends on whether Ford makes it 'Moddable' or not.
It isn't fair to characterize everyone this way. I've owned my fair share of small cars (by US standards) but I bought a used F150 (my first truck) a few years ago and I love it. I don't care about how loud the engine is, nor do I think it makes me any more macho (I don't buy things for what others think of me.) It carts my family around comfortably and I can haul lots of things with it without caring if it's dirty/wet/etc. My second favorite vehicle is my wife's minivan - it's too bad they have a bad stigma.
My concern with the Lightning (and EVs in general) is range anxiety. I can fill up my F150 in what 3-4 minutes. How long before I can go 400 miles on a charge? What happens during an extended power outage, can I carry 100 miles worth of range in a portable container that's as easy to handle as 5 gallons of gas?
None of these concerns have anything to do with this vehicle making me feel more manly ;)
It will take some change in behavior, but it’s worked out ok for me. I charge over night (and frequently using solar in the day when at home). That leaves me with 400km of range everyday.
For those infrequent long trips I stop every 3 hours/350km and charge for 30 mins. Watch some Netflix, use laptop, or have a short nap and move on. Works out ok.
After reading your comment I went and CTRL-Fd the page for green, environment, carbon and sustainable. These words either don't appear or aren't selling points.
Ford's marketing department knows what they're doing, they're marketing this truck as tough and powerful. I like it.
To some people machismo means strength, to others machismo means self-reliance. The 11 power outlets and the ability to power your house will really appeal to them.
If the world turns Mad Max, someone with an electric truck and a few solar panels won't have to worry about the gasoline gangs.
99% of truck-driving Americans will starve to death in the first month of a societal collapse, and there's nothing their truck can do about it. If you need a truck with a 120 kW-h battery pack it's either going to take a week to charge it from the excess capacity of a domestic solar array, or you need to quadruple the size of said solar array. Either way, between the truck and the solar panels you'd probably have been better off spending that money on land and seeds.
If the world turns Mad Max, The Humungus will be driving around in the electric truck he took from some sap who expected to ride out the apocalypse with his solar panels and electric vehicle.
This truck will do very, very well in a fleet context. The price point here will mean that commercial and government buyers who pencil out TCO(total cost of ownership) will have a compelling cost savings in maintenance and fuel.
> significant amount of pickup truck buyers do it for the machismo
Those are weasel words unless you can back them up with data. Ford sells over a million pickups a year, and they're just a third of that market. There's no way to get an audience this large by going for machismo, pickups sell because they have broad appeal.
It is a bit insulting but I suspect many people have enough experience with this that its a bit of a gut reaction. I know a lot of big ego people, they all drive trucks. I've been flipped off by drivers of all vehicles, but only run off the road by trucks, usually for very trivial things. because you know, getting into someone elses lane is effectively a challenge to their manhood, and they better make a point about it less they lose their social standing. That's not the actual thoughts in their heads, but it is their reaction. Trucks are _also_ comfortable, convenient, and all those other things, which is _also_ crucial. But I just can't imagine any of these big ego people driving a small car (and yes, more than a few have explicitly said as much).
At any rate, what exactly would objective supporting data look like here?
> At any rate, what exactly would objective supporting data look like here?
I don't know, which is why I wouldn't stereotype such a large group of the population. To a reasonable approximation, everyone in America is a truck customer. It's way too broad to have a common defining characteristic.
I agree that there is a subgroup (think of them perhaps as the 'brodozer' crowd, I guess) that seem to be who you're thinking of. They mostly don't drive F150s, they're more likely to go for a diesel HD pickup. And even then they are just a niche of that market. I know lots of superduty owners that want nothing to do with those folks.
It's funny, I view buying a truck for the machismo as one of the primary emotions/feelings/identity actually means buying it for whatever the opposite of machismo is.
As a contrasting anecdote: I work with IT people, about 20% of the parking lot is pickup trucks.
So while there might be pushback from the "salt of the earth"-type, I suspect a lot of urban truck owners are very far removed from that. The gas/long bed/bench seat base model may continue to sell for the rest of my life to farmers and construction crews, but most people buying a truck likely don't need a truck: It is just a utilitarian general vehicle that may haul gardening supplies, camping gear, and dump runs every so often.
So you likely are correct, it just may not matter for the more common demography for trucks in 2021+.
I hope ford's got a plan for making millions of battery packs for these things.
I wonder if "backfeed from the EVSE" is going to be a regular / standardized feature of some vehicle chargers in the future?
Combine this with time-of-use awareness and auto-auction mechanisms to backfeed the grid when power's necessary (and turn off back-feeding to not kill linemen repairing wires) it seems like a pretty good extension to car charging.
Elevator pitch:
Public charging installed on streets; charges 3 prices -- "I need power now", "I need this much power before this time" and "I need this much power by this time and you may draw power out of my battery between now and then so long as I have this much charge by this time".
Then you network interconnect these chargers and make a distributed peaker power plant and also make subscription / power deliver fees.
I just remember Clarkson talking about the hybrid f150 on TG. He said then that Ford had a survey of features that customers wanted added to the truck. A hybrid powertrain, he claimed, was something like number 24 on the list. In other words there are 23 things customers want more then a hybrid. If that is true, then i'm unclear how much of a profit- maker a fully electric f150 will be.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford
The people answering your survey probably weren't aware they could power an entire jobsite with just a truck. Killer features such as this will be how electric vehicles penetrate the holdouts.
F150 is the best selling vehicle in America. The price is actually comparable to the gas version. This might be the vehicle that really changes the EV game.
If they have the capacity to produce the battery en masse, which is doubtful given what they announced so far. Only Tesla and VW seem to be serious about this.
If Ford falls on it's face in battery capacity due to a lack of planning, it will be the biggest belly flop in years. They have to know they're sitting on a gold mine with this. At this moment, the game is theirs to lose. The Ford I know and love is likely to screw it up, unfortunately, now that Mulally is long gone.
I'm not sure it makes sense though. Now you have to choose between transportation and powering your home. As well, the power needs to go out when the truck happens to have a full charge. I think it cost them little to add (because they already have on-board power ports, which does make sense), but from a practical standpoint, I don't know how useful it is.
In many scenarios, you can anticipate power going out and so make sure to charge up before that.
I do a similar thing with my ICE car. We don't get a lot of snow here, but every few years we'll get a storm that leaves up to a foot on the ground. Significant snow like that is rare enough that the cities and county don't keep a large fleet of snow removal equipment, so they only clear the bigger streets.
I'm on a long dead end street that won't get plowed for quite a while, if at all. People with the bigger trucks and SUVs can still get through, and there are enough of those further up the street from me that usually in a day they'll have made enough trips that my smaller SUV can get out.
When it looks like we might get one of those storms, I top off my car. If I lose power, and my house cools off enough that even with a sweater and jacket it gets too cold to stay in, I can move to my car. A full tank of gas will run the engine idling just enough to power the heater and radio and phone charger for about 24 hours.
Power would almost certainly be restored by the time I'd be running out of gas.
That's a good point. I've been through a couple hurricane-caused outages for up to two weeks, but in one of those, I required transportation. I've been through probably half-a-dozen outages of a few hours to a couple days that were due to equipment failure by the utility that I couldn't have anticipated. That's over decades though.
Grid power is so damn reliable in most places that any backup solution is going to have limited use. I guess I see this feature of the F-150 as icing on the cake, not something that would sway my purchase decision.
Its not a complete solution obviously - but it is pretty good in a pinch - and doesn't require installing a bunch of dedicated batteries.
And for most scenarios it works - having some energy is always better than none. eg. The fridge will stay cold enough while you go shop for more food or whatever.
> Now you have to choose between transportation and powering your home.
It is interesting to me that this is phrased as a negative thing. If you are at the point where you are choosing between transportation and powering your home, at least you _have_ the choice and it is not made for you.
I'm curious, with the advent of electric what's the advantage of a truck vs. a minivan for a lot of situations? IIRC there were literal space constraints before which is why a minivan couldn't tow like a truck, but since the motor and batteries sit underneath the car, couldn't one build a van/minivan with just as much power as this?
If that's the case, other than hauling very tall objects, why get a truck? A minivan with the 2nd and 3rd rows folded is already longer than most truck beds.
Curious to hear thoughts on this. I know culturally a van would never beat a truck, but I'm curious more mechanically/technically.
Another thing I'm curious about with a truck in particular is if a custom fit gasoline tank could be placed in the bed of a truck that has an inverter that could charge the car, so even if your battery was dead you could effectively use the car as a gas one, in a pinch.
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As an aside I'm willing to bet within a decade this will outsell the gasoline version. A F-150 used frequently requires a lot of maintenance. I imagine this will be significantly easier to maintain.
Look, if people made rational decisions all the time, economics would be a real predictive science.
Based on utility, most minivans beat all SUVs in tasks not involving going off-road. Minivans definitely beat pickup trucks for moving people, and often for moving stuff -- but not always.
Purchasing a vehicle in the USA is only partially based on function, for most people. Price and culture figure in a lot more.
Depends on the "SUV" you're referring to. Full size SUVs like the Suburban can tow heavy loads, have lots more storage capacity, have actual 4wd (snow), and generally have a powertrain that's going to outlast a minivan.
The advantage of a truck is you can carry more, or taller things, and they don't get the inside of your vehicle dirty. imagine you just mowed a wet, muddy lawn, do you want the mower in the back of your minivan, or in the bed of truck? Also, many tall things that you might haul in the back of truck can't simply be reposition into a minivan (tall and long or tall and many).
Ah yes, that's a good point. Other than tall or dirty objects, is there any reason to get a truck? Genuinely curious, because at some point I'll have kids and wonder what the trade-off is between minivan (more people) and truck (more hauling) is with an electric vehicle.
For a family, a minivan is very practical. Not only for your one, two, or more kids, who will easily be accommodated in a 7-seater or 8-seater (if you add the optional middle seat in row 2), but when taking their friends along to the park etc.
My minivan is a Chrysler with the stow'n'go fold-down seats; in about 5 minutes I can fold all the passenger seats down into the floor and have 8' x 4' cargo space, which is more than most pickup beds.
Pickups have the advantage of height, as pointed out previously; if you need to move a refrigerator or a Harley, probably a pickup is better. Also, pickups can tow trailers & RV's.
But for taking my family on holiday, or when transporting a sound system, musical instruments, and 2 other musicians all in one vehicle, the minivan works best for me :)
One problem here though is the combo of family holiday and moving lots of objects. When you need all the mentioned cargo space, the van becomes a two-seater. A crew cab truck can move 5 adults comfortably as well as a full load in the bed. Huge advantage for camping. I know you can use roof storage on a van, but i'd argue its more of a hassle, with less capacity, and more dangerous as the vehicle is much more top heavy.
I like vans and own a van. However, in addition to the bed being outdoors, lined with a shell and having no roof, truck suspension can also receive heavier loads without risk of damage. They also have a higher clearance, which has some utility off of roads as well as allowing the truck to settle with a heavy load without affecting its safe path or speed as much.
It’s a good thing for consumers that the two vehicle types have so much overlap in utility.
There's a certain lifestyle aspect where my high school friend dropped a pulled junkyard engine in the bed of his truck and shoved it into place and strapped it down and he doesn't care about the interior of his truck bed, its "outdoors" for hauling "outdoors" rated objects.
Technically my wife's van could carry that engine very easily but the process would almost certainly destroy the carpet and leather seats and maybe some windows and the bumper cover etc.
My buddy had hoists on each end of the trip to insert and remove the junkyard engine. This is widely understood in industry and construction in general and using a crane with a pickup truck is no big deal. With a van I guess you could use a forklift and pray the inevitable damage to the interior doesn't turn the vehicle into an instant insurance writeoff, but ...
Imagine for example how easy it would be to wipe out the stereo speakers or the wiring for the GPS in the back of a van vs a seemingly indestructible truck bed. The older the truck the tougher they were built and the more likely the owner doesn't care if its beat up, so you can toss bricks into trucks and similar behavior that would not be tolerated with a van.
I will say the best way to haul 1000+ pounds of yard landscape rock is to pay home depot $59.99 to have truck delivery with a forklift drop the pallet within inches of where I asked. I could have bought a $75K pickup truck and loaded and unloaded all that rock myself by hand, but sixty bucks sounds like a better deal LOL. If I had a full time landscaper job the numbers would be different...
Yeah I have a U-Haul nearby and can rent a bench seat pickup with an 8 foot bed for <$100 to do what I need to do around town. I have to keep this in mind when looking at trucks and trying to justify the utility aspect. $50K is a lot to pay for convenience and I don’t regularly tow anything…
Speaking from the perspective of having generally owned older trucks (currently a '97 Dodge Ram 1500, previously an '84 Ford F350) - conventionally built, body-on-frame pickups are easier to repair and maintain. Most minivans are monocoque, whereas full-size pickup trucks have enough space between the internals to make DIY repairs straightforward. On my 84 F350, I could fit my head between the tire and the wheel well to bleed the brakes easily; on my current '97 Ram, you can replace body panels using a socket wrench.
EVs may tilt the equation, but one thing Big Three US automakers have absolutely perfected for their trucks over the last 40 years is maintainability. Go on autotrader.com, search "Ford F-150" or "Dodge Ram 1500" and sort mileage high to low - can a 20 year old minivan travel roughly the same distance as the moon and back?
The initial models have a far smaller packs than the F150, however, given that most of these will be for business use locally, not distance hauling. If Ford were to make a model of the transit with a large pack, you'd have the much larger bed space along with towing. This would likely be a hit with the van-life community.
The minivan has the space but only if you plan ahead and allocate the space to hauling. I've underplanned trips in my minivan for large/bulky items (e.g. beverage fridge, ikea bookshelf) several times and had to do impromptu adjustments of the seats/positions to get items in. It doesn't help that I have a bunch of kids car seats to deal with when converting to "hauling mode".
Beyond the practical reasons re irregularly hauling something to the dump or picking something up for a Reno, two reasons we got a truck that don’t seem mentioned here are for (a) visibility on the road (it is just nicer IMO to be up high) and (b) my wife has long legs and often sits between our kids in the backseat on long drives and it has as much legroom as a Bentley.
The Pacifica is nearly as good as a pickup truck with stow-and-go. I was sad when I realized the hybrid version lacks that feature because of the batteries being in the floor.
This is the big one for my wife and I. We've been using an old Buick Rendezvous (somewhere between a van and SUV) with the back seats removed as our "truck" for a while now and while you can actually load quite a bit of mulch in the back, you have to load it all by hand which is pretty awful.
Ground clearance is another issue in a lot of places. Our Rendezvous is higher than most minivans, but I've still scraped the bottom before, and have had to turn back from a water crossing on a dirt road.
Generally my experience has been that the Rendezvous can do most of the same things my old Ranger did, but not as easily and with a lot more anxiety about breaking things. Ohh and come to think of it, it actually gets worse gas mileage.
If you are hauling concrete or mortar mix, you wouldn’t want the dust getting into the cabin. You can of course get vans that partition the passenger space away, but then that would make it impractical as a family car.
Length. The size of trailer you can pull behind a tow vehicle is very dependent on the stability of the tow vehicle, and a lot of that comes down to wheelbase. As long as people want to tow 30+ foot long RVs, they will have to have tow vehicles the size of HD pickups.
300 miles of range unladen seems very low to me. When towing, this range will likely be cut by more than half. The truck is priced competitively, so it will make sense for "Regular daily driver, and occasionally I need to put something in the bed" truck owners, but definitely not "Tow my trailer to the mountains once a month" truck owners.
We've added ~1000lb to the weight of these monstrosities (now 6,500lb), faster acceleration from a stop, and preserved the enormous front, with its twin features of blindspot and zero chance that someone can roll over top of it when you hit them. But now it's there for trunk space...
Maybe CT style will prove attractive in the market, but I think Tesla could have designed something more like the Rivian pickup. i.e. F-150 inspired but modern Tesla styling.
One issue I see with the Cybertruck is the angled sides of the bed. There are a lot of things designed to go on the back of a normal pickup truck, from simple shells to campers like this [1].
Cybertruck seems like it would require special versions of these kind of things. One of the reasons people buy pickups is versatility, and you lose some of that with Cybertruck because of its different shape.
Yep, as someone that actually uses a truck on the range, the only misgiving I have about the Cybertruck is the angled sides. Though that being said, given how apparently it's going to have a bed that can be covered and a ramp out the back, maybe that's actually not necessary. Really need to use to understand if the sides are a dealbreaker, methinks.
People are overlooking the CT saying its a lifestyle vehicle. Its gonna be lighter (unibody, structural pack, megacastings), more efficient (triangle for aero), and have better range per cost of vehicle. That has to mean something for fleet managers looking at cost.
The design looks avante-guard from a consumer perspective, but its a result of making it more functional and easier to manufacture which is hard to argue with when your using for business even if you think its hideous. I think the f150 will compete for sure but its traditional branding and smaller bed will probably attract more consumer oriented existing pick-up owners. City people will continue to buy model Y because they have to run errands in tight spaces.
So according to this[1] it looks like the motors and batteries are in the bottom of the car like in other EVs. Which makes me wonder:
What's under the enormous hood in front? Is it just empty space?
I understand they did not integrate the motors and batteries into a new frame built specifically to accommodate them like Tesla did but rather added them on top the existing frame. I really like that Tesla is a ground up design and something about this F150 annoys me for carrying on all of the institutional inertia of a 100 year old company.
Also, I read Ford is planning on 40k of these and their Transit van each year and marketing them toward fleets.
1,441 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 447 ms ] threadBatteries are always the bottleneck. Ford announced a 60GWh plant partnership, but that will only hold them over for several years of growth and is still a ways away from actually producing cells.
I still have an old Ranger that I use for those purposes today.
It seems insane to assume you can be the judge of what's "useful" or "utility".
It's basically a massive kick-back to Ford and Chevy.
a) reduce road and parking space in order to encourage better forms of transportation ,
b) reduce our consumption of natural resources
,maybe we need to discourage individual ownership of 3000kg utility vehicles?
Because of the increased demand on raods, reducing road space probably won't happen. When cars can get to and from parking spaces by themselves, parking space can move into central towers or edge lots, but the number of spaces is probably going to increase, not decrease.
We all want better forms of transportation, but there's a lot of disagreement about what's better.
>a) reduce road and parking space in order to encourage better forms of transportation ,
I don't see that happening. SUV's and pickups are so popular in the US because most cities are more similar to Houston and LA than NYC or Chicago.
My wife at the time bought an SUV, a Toyota Highlander. She never went off road, we didn't have any children, she never hauled anything. 90% of her driving was to and from work on paved roads, a job that could have been accomplished with a Honda Civic.
Now let's play another fun game: how many truck and SUV owners do you think are like you, and how many do you think are like my ex-wife?
As a homeowner and a parent this would be a great vehicle for me — having the utility of a truck bed.
Not everyone that owns a home does work on it themselves but trucks are very useful. Today my only options are rent a truck or put a trailer hitch on my van and pull a trailer when I need to haul stuff. That’s so much more hassle.
I currently own a Ridgeline - it's not quite compact, but rides better than a Taco or Ranger and the trunk under the bed is useful.
If the Hyundai existed earlier this year, I'd probably own it instead.
My understanding was that classification meant there was a disincentive for manufacturers to build smaller trucks (fuel efficiency and/or emissions?).
obviously a truck would be much easier, but if I'm redoing a house I'll need to rent a light dump truck anyway for at least 1-2 days just to get all the old junk out, so I do the big material buy at the same time
2003 ranger:
188-203″ L x 69″ W x 65-68″ H
2021 ranger:
211″ L x 78″ W x 71-72″ H
2003 F150
207-244″ L x 79-80″ W x 71-77″ H
Yeah, I feel this. I used to have a big work truck, but it was for work. Everyone has a truck in my hometown (seemingly). Last week I saw a big F-250 super duty pull up and the dude that got out was in scrubs (a nurse).
Friends of mine have considered the super duty’s for towing, but now they’re interested in the lightning for the same reasons.
Saddest emblem of modern Eurocapitalism that I know: the BMW "Mini". It's a vast, charmless travesty of the original.
1. Take a bunch of trash/old furniture/whatever to the dump
2. Move furniture
3. Pick up materials for a home renovation like 16 foot long baseboards, drywall, a few dozen boxes of laminate flooring, etc. (no need to be a professional construction contractor here)
4. Tow a camping trailer
5. Much, much more
I'm literally using my truck tonight to pick up ~500 square feet of flooring material, which is saving me ~$300 in shipping costs. The truck itself only cost me $3,700 to begin with, and between this and several other home improvement projects it has saved me ~$2,000 in shipping/moving/other costs so far in just the two years I've owned it. And I'll be saving a bundle in shipping costs on new kitchen cabinets in a few months as well. That's before you get into the convenience factor of not having to rent/borrow a truck anytime you need to move something big.
Both Lowes and Home Depot offer free delivery for orders over $45. I've also done several home improvement projects, and never needed to pay a dime in shipping. Are you buying directly from the manufacturer or something I'm missing here?
Cars and mid size SUVs all seem to be converging on the same shape with minor differences where as trucks still have some individuality.
So I went to check this supposition out and whew, I’m confused.
CAFE standards, harmonic means, compliance flexibility, offset credits are all more than I can wrap my head around from my smartphone.
Not to mention trying to read the actual CAFE regulation is very convoluted.
Anyways, I thought I had an answer for you but all I’ve got is a rabbit hole in crawling out of.
https://reason.org/e-brief/cafe-standards-in-plain-english/
"For example, Ford sells both the Focus, a mid-size car that gets 31 mpg on highways, and the F-150, a midsize truck that gets 25 mpg on highways."
I mean, just think about how similar those numbers are given the vehicles. Pretty wild.
Compared with, say, a Honda Odyssey, the F150 is a better family vehicle in many cases. The only reason I can think of to go with the Odyssey (which is another vehicle I love) is vehicle footprint and long-term reliability.
There's a reason the F150 sells so many units in the USA: it's the ultimate vehicle, and it comes with almost no drawbacks.
New pickups do still get used for construction - but only by the owners and some management can afford a new pickup. New pickups on construction sites pull trailers to put cargo at a human accessible height.
Pickups in lumber jobs are also a luxury. Any vehicle driven to lumber sites will effectively be destroyed, they get bent, bashed, and permanently embedded with filth. The rank and file drive what they can afford and don't mind destroying due to the nature of the job, or they ride in with the rest of a crew, or more and more often they don't drive to a site because they're forced labor rented from prisons.
People who need pickups for everyday, practical uses are using vans, trailers, or buying older pickups. 20 year old pickups are so much more practical than new that certain models in excellent shape will sell for more now than they did when new. New pickups and their predecessors are entirely different vehicles.
But selling cars has always been the business of selling a story as much as it has been about selling a transportation technology. This goes back to the earliest days when cars were hulking machines owned by the uber-wealthy.
> or lumberjacks.
Hah, I bet a puny pickup truck isn't very useful for lumberjacks' actual work. I think they use giant tree felling machines and specialized trucks instead. Pickups seem more like small support vehicles for them.
Folks who sit in their Civic every day for a couple of hours because they need to live here and work there.
Folks who own Subarus who rarely, if ever, make use of the AWD.
Folks who never ever use the back seat of their cars and might as well have a car that's 3 feet shorter.
Folks who own cars that can go over 70 mph.
Ford's promo site says 'up to 10 days with rationing power' asuming 30kWh use per day with extended-range battery. But it's not clear to me if 30kWH is normal use, and rationing would be less, or if that's the rationed use. A 300 kWH battery seems rather large to me, and i haven't seen an actual spec for the Ford.
Edit: reread their site after reading sibling posts, in a different blurb they say 3 days or 10 days with rationing with the same assumption about 30 kWH per day; so their rationing assumption must be getting down closer to 9 kWH per day. Either way, a nice feature to have that would eliminate a portable generator for me.
The F150 Lighting has up to a 150kWH battery, so somewhere in the 1-2 week range, depending on use.
So in theory, a fully charged Model X could power the average home for 3 days. Really puts into perspective how much energy is needed to move a car at highway speeds.
If you have a small cabin with no a/c, wood heat, and a propane stove - your house is going to use hardly any power compared to your truck. It would barely make a difference.
The mentality is extremely different, you do at home what you can, to the maximum.
The power draw is probably fine, but the contention for the battery would be a problem. Think, "hey honey, can we put off the Costco trip until next week so we can leave the internet up, and lights on?"
Implementing a transfer switch and dummy load just to dump solar generation when your truck is being a truck would feel like a weird exercise.
But I need an HD truck, and it has to have enough range to tow, which means I'm not in the market for a Lightning. Dammit.
But this truck will be very heavy, very tall, and very fast. Drivers are already the leading killers of children, and more and more people are being killed while walking and cycling.
I'm very worried about the effect of making this vehicle even faster and heavier. Hopefully reduced deaths from pollution offset this.
You can’t get around physics. More mass with more force carries more risk.
The weight of an entire small car!
A little appreciated fact is that a Model 3 and a Mustang have the exact same weight ranges: the SR RWD Model 3 weights about what a ecoboost Mustang does, and a GT500 Mustang is actually about 200lbs heavier than a Model 3 AWD LR Performance.
The battery being low should dramatically improve the safety of the vehicle by improving stability.
It's still a huge vehicle, though. It would be nice if we trended smaller, and left vehicles like this to people who actually need it.
Constantly telling people that existing on earth as a human is bad for x, y, z is a good strategy if you want people to tune out and stop paying attention to what you're saying.
Depends how fast it's going.
40% is like speeding up to 60.
If you are worried about vehicle weight, worry more about speed.
That's why crumple zones are important for vehicle-vehicle collisions--not because they turn kinetic energy into a stored form of potential energy in deformation, but because they drastically decrease the rate at which momentum changes.
The crumple zone spreads that energy transfer out over a longer period of time.
Obviously heavier cars are more deadly when hitting people with all the other variables fixed, but not all these variables are independent. They could also depend on the weight of the cars. For example, maybe the car becomes easier to control/steer when it's heavier (totally made up point), which counters the inherent risk introduced by the weight.
Without real-world data I won't be too quick to say heavier car is more dangerous.
I'll post the conclusion for the light trucks weight reduction part (fatalities part, there is also non-serious injuries part in the paper) here as TL;DR for other people.
We also know that speed kills and people are driving faster today than ever before.
Basically light duty trucks take an extra 10-30 feet stopping from 60 MPH. This is dwarfed by distance travelled during reaction time. In the 1960's sedans were in the ~150 ft range for 60-0, about what modern pickups achieve.
Heavier vehicles have more kinetic energy at the same speed but the braking force for all vehicles is proportional to mass and friction with the road surface which depends on tire quality and road material, and since acceleration is proportional to mass from a given force the deceleration from braking is basically the same at any mass with equivalent tires and road surface.
2022 Ford Lightning: 6,500 lbs
2021 Ford F-150 Hybrid: 5,794 lbs
2021 Ford F-150 ICE: 5,014 lbs
(All 4-door models)
There is a also a massive difference between noise a normally driven ICE vehicle makes compared to an electric one at city speeds. The electric ones are very silent and barely audible if they don't make that humming sound. Even at 20-30mph.
Source: typing this in a city with lots of roads and traffic.
I would have though it would be in the city, if only for the fact that I practically never see pedestrians on country roads where I live. There can be cyclists, though.
In the city, though, most car noise is clearly the engine. Source: traffic outside my window. I clearly hear the engine noise or the exhaust if it's a scooter or motorcycle.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/14/2016-28...
All electric vehicles sold in the US since September 2020 must have a Pedestrian Warning System that emits noise at speeds less than 18mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound...
Once you're above 10mph or 15mph the road noise from the tires makes more noise than the quiet gas engines we have these days anyways.
This electric F-150 will not be "almost silent" in any way that matters to a pedestrian. It will certainly be less obnoxious to everyone than those grating diesel engine trucks, and I hope no one complains about the loss of that noise pollution.
Are you mental? I live on a residential street, not even too busy, and every single day, I hear these idiot gunning their motors to be cool. With electric its a non issue.
I don't know if 2020+ EVs are louder, but at least our Fiat 500e does make this tiny whirring sound at parking lot speeds, supposedly so pedestrians can hear it. But it is so quiet that it doesn't accomplish much. Even the quietest ICE car is substantially more audible in parking lots.
The F-150 is already a bloated monstrosity, it makes no difference if it’s electric. It’s some tiny bit faster, but they’re all fast enough.
This new Lightning (putting it that way because F150 Lightning once corresponded to a gas-guzzling Supercharged V8 trim) has 775ft/lb of Torque. For reference, the existing models are between 265 and 510 ft/lb.
Additionally, one of the benefits of an electric motor, is that torque is essentially instantly available, compared to an ICE where there's only a slim power bad where that max torque range is hit.
Unless Ford 'governs' acceleration in software, I can see some lead-foots getting themselves into trouble quickly. They probably -will-, but I'd expect them to offer some sort of switch for that, lest the Ford zealots grab their pitchforks. Let us not forget that a lot of 'Car guys' are arguably insane. When Ford considered switching the Mustang to a Front Wheel Drive Mazda design, they had to deal with death threats!
[edit]
Example: https://youtu.be/HGzlV4ggudM?t=425
> compared to an ICE where there's only a slim power bad where that max torque range is hit.
second, this is only true of naturally aspirated engines, which are pretty rare these days. engines with turbos or superchargers are usually tuned to make (roughly) peak torque all the way from 2000 rpm to redline.
this is a lot of fretting over the peak acceleration of a truck. I believe the thing does 0-60 in something like 4.5 seconds. that's really quick for a truck, but only above average compared to performance sedans. in any case, most people (even the crazy ones) do not often hit peak acceleration from a red light, especially in an EV.
Seems like the people in this thread arguing about a fast truck don't know about the original Lightning, nor are they familiar with modern sport trucks like the Ram TRX or Shelby F-150 Super Snake, both of which will give proper high end sports cars a run for the money in a drag race.
It's worth checking out the 1/4 mile times from guys with RCSB F150s, whether it's an Ecoboost or a Coyote.
At this point, I'd say that the main limitation tends to be traction issues.
You might want to look in the mirror. Car threads bring out really destructive attitudes, and mostly not from the 'car guys'. The stuff that gets said here is astounding...
And I've never sent anyone a death threat. I don't hate people for their choice in cars, or non-choice as the case may be. I enjoy interesting cars of all kinds. I'm not especially into trucks from an enthusiast perspective, though as a homeowner and RV owner I do happen to own a Ford F250. And I don't mind people that are into them. You have to be a bit of an enthusiast, IMO, to daily drive a super duty if you don't need it :). I'd own a Taco if I didn't need to tow anything, as it would be far more livable for daily use.
I provided a very real world example of car enthusiasts doing something that a sane human being would not do. Can you help me understand what I should be looking for?
And yeah, a lot of people on HN are also car enthusiasts. How many of us sent death threats in response to the Ford Probe? I was even a Mustang enthusiast at that time. I never sent any death threats, nobody I know did either. You are describing a sociopath, who may also be a car enthusiast, and then claiming that this means all car enthusiasts are sociopaths.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/19/ford-f-150-lightning-elect...
> “If your F-150 Lightning is plugged in when your outage occurs, Intelligent Backup Power will automatically kick in to power your home,” said Ryan O’Gorman, Ford’s energy services lead, in a video briefing prior to the reveal. “When power is restored, the truck automatically reverts to charging its battery.”
We all realize it's due to safety, but a lot of sports cars have gotten progressively less fun as a result. The M3 is no longer a small nimble sedan. It's larger than the 5 series was from only 2 generations ago. That's all he's pointing out.
2021 G80 M4 length: 189.1″, width: 74.3″, curb weight: 3,840 to 3,890 lbs
2011 E92 M3 length: 180.4 to 181.8″, width: 71 to 71.5″, curb weight: 3,704
2001 E46 M3 length: 176.8", width: 70.1", curb weight: 3415 lbs.
2021 M5 length: 196.4″, width: 74.9″, curb weight: 4,345 lbs
2010 M5 length: 191.5, width: 72.7, curb weight: 4,012
2001 M5 length: 188.4″, width: 70.9″, curb weight: 4,024 lbs
I think more worrisome is the center console - pedestrian deaths had been going down for 20 years until smartphones became widespread and we've had increases every year since.
I wish there was more discussion and acknowledgement of the dangers here.
Not in a "guns don't kill people way", but because I think smarphone helped spread society's worse effects on girls, but they were already in a very shitty position, and we can't just get back to the status quo before the smarphones and social networks.
We can of course also work on reducing sns negative impacts, but I think it will also be a bad, long and thorny way before seeing improvements.
I would rather drive next to people with .09 blood alcohol than someone on their phone.
Social media and cell phones are very convenient, but come with major drawbacks that must be addressed. Phones, for many young people, are just mental disorders with a touch screen.
* All of the weight is in the bottom of the vehicle, giving a lower centre of gravity. I'd bet this will kill the old F150 in a moose (or child!) test.
* The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.
* The electric motors are able to respond with torque far faster (in ms) than an ICE engine, so traction and stability control are more effective. Again good for things like the moose test.
* Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.
The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive. It's simply a test of whether the occupants will survive hitting a moose. I would wager anything that is designed to pass the moose test will kill anything that it hits that is below the moose's center of gravity. So actually the vehicle is way less safe for pedestrians than a vehicle that would fail the moose test.
But if all that matters is the safety of the occupant I guess this is okay.
> * The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.
The kind of "crumple zone" that enhances pedestrian and cyclist safety is more like a beer can. Again, the crumple zones in this vehicle are designed to keep the occupants safe but not designed to keep any other road user safe.
The moose test is about safely dodging around a moose that wanders out onto the road without wrecking the vehicle.
Why did you write this long comment as if you were an expert on the moose test if you don't even know what the moose test is? That's an incredibly disingenuous thing to do.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv9Oo5TMiWw
Tall SUVs typically fare worse at this because of their higher centre of gravity causing instability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test
Completely wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test
The car fails the test (at that speed) if the "moose" is hit at all (or it skids, turns or tips over).
These zones are explicitly designed with pedestrian safety in mind, as it is a specific area of testing for roadworthiness certifications: https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...
> Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.
Do you (or anyone) have order-of-magnitude estimates for either/both of these figures? I mean, electrification in general is great, but the F150 cannot take credit for all of it. I am interested in reduced pollution deaths/QALYs that can be attributed to F150 electrification specifically -- that's the topic of this article and thread.
Edit: Here's relevant data to the other side: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/10/vehicle-... https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...
https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM?t=355
On average in the US, the CO2 output required to power an electric vehicle is 1/3 of an ICE vehicle. So theoretically this would translate to less deaths as bb123 suggests, but hard to compare to direct pedestrian deaths. (Yes there are some logical gaps as ICE C02 output is a very low percentage of total fossil fuel output).
Source: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129478_lifetime-carbon...
Electricity only accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, but it also enables industry (20%) and transportation (15%) to decarbonize too, by allowing them to replace their fuel with electricity.
A 50% reduction is already massive, but electrification of both vehicles and the industrial processes creating the vehicle will eventually let that number go to zero which should be our goal.
Crumple zones don't help pedestrians.
The new F-150 will be bigger and heavier than the absurdly huge early-00s Hummers. The hood is so tall and long that they're talking about putting forward-facing cameras inside the cab because you can't see anything in front of you shorter than 6" tall out the windshield.
If Ford was interested in safety, they would reduce the outrageous length and height of the front end which is now no longer even pretending to be necessary housing for an engine. Vehicles made to work prioritize visibility, Ford trucks are made to intimidate and kill.
Citation needed
New F-150 Lightning curb weight estimate is 6500 lbs.
H1 is 7200-7500 lbs.
H2 is 6400-6600 lbs.
The F-150 is a couple feet longer but both the H1 and H2 are wider and taller.
Use those numbers to make your own determination. F-150 specs are from here: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
See https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/28/vehicle-safety-standa...
And a Tesla Model 3 long range is heavier than a 2020 F-150.
Not the kind you're thinking of.
But the top half of the bulbous front end that basically every modern car has is mostly empty space and flimsy plastic to create what's basically a crumple zone for pedestrians.
The sizable majority of modern car pollution comes from particulates that come off asphalt, not emissions from engines. It's still important to go EV to reduce carbon, but that doesn't improve local air quality. Modern internal combustion engines have pretty minimal pollutants in their emissions.
Getting older cars off the road is the major way to improve emission pollutants. Beyond that, improving air quality to any significant degree requires either fewer cars on the road, or less heavy cars on the road. Asphalt particulates scales quadratically with the weight of the car.
this is important. It is an option they DID IGNORE! for marketing.
The thing that kills pedestrians (both physically and preventing vision) is the high trunk. They could have lowered it since there is no 9L engine or whatever inside. But they decided to keep it for "frunk" marketing.
If you get hit by any vehicle you're going to have a bad time. This vehicle is not an exception.
Instead, they kept the high nose and used the space as a trunk. After all, injuring fewer pedestrians sells no cars. Indeed, the market prefers an enormous, deliberately threatening-looking chariot that makes you feel big and virile.
Ford are behind this game in that they haven't given their truck an explicitly hostile name like “People Mulcher”.
https://youtu.be/PI_Jl5WFQkA
It's also why cities are taking back whole roads from cars when they can, as it's so hard to preserve a middle ground in a lot of areas.
The air was co-opted by planes... should we turn that back over to avian only traffic?
For the main point was that roads weren’t built for cars - cars co-opted them from people. It doesn’t have to be that way.
If what you say is true, then cities should not have roads.
Don't hit anyone with your vehicle and you won't kill anyone. I've been hit by a truck bicycling, thankfully not too hard. But I don't really think it would have been better to have been hit by a low slung sleek car. It would have put all the force through my legs.
When designing mass manufactured items, it is a responsibility of manufacturers to ensure that their products are as safe as they can be.
Even HN cannot see past the perverse dangers and flaws of modern auto design responsible for the current vulnerable road user epidemic in America. [1] When it comes to cars - it's "personal responsibility". When it comes to treadmills - it's a "manufacturing flaw" [2]
[1] https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/06/28/suvs-killi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26846641
Ford trucks are the #1 killer of children and adults at crosswalks because drivers can't see what they're about to run over, vehicles of that front-end design account for 40% of all pedestrian traffic deaths.
Do you own a truck? I do. I've owned a truck for 15 years. Some of them lifted, and unless you are pretty much parked on top of a crosswalk, there is no problem seeing the crosswalk. Especially 3-4 foot objects in said crosswalk.
Edit: F150 is the most popular vehicle in the US. So, yeah, it stands to reason it will kill more people than any other vehicle, too
There is a such thing as good and bad design. If I sell a hammer that shoots a bullet whenever you swing it for no good reason, I'm responsible for people getting shot.
What I'm telling you is that you have an opinion that is different from mine and also probably an ignorant one since you didn't answer my question about whether you have ever owned a truck.
That's why professional models typically have cabover or sharply-sloped hood designs, not the enormous flattops that are marketed at suburbanites.
I have owned a truck, I drove a 1999 Chevy Silverado for ten years, it could haul just as much stuff as a 2020 F-150 but it also let me see the road.
"1999 Chevy Silverado for ten years, it could haul just as much stuff as a 2020 F-150 but it also let me see the road" - this is also utter nonsense. A 1999 Silverado 1500 is a 1/4 ton truck with a TC of about 4,000 pounds. A 2020 F-150 is a 1/2 ton truck with a TC of about 7,000 pounds.
So the more apt comparison would be with a Ford Ranger, which obviously sits lower to the ground than an F-150, but having owned both a 2500 Silverado and several F-250, the front visibility isn't much different.
https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0?t=68
What's an acceptable blind spot - where if someone hits a laying down/sitting kid in front of their car, it's the driver's fault and not the vehicle's?
Vehicle safety regulations aren't about "blame", ever. They're designed to save lives. If you can do that with better driver behavior, great. If you can do it with assistive technology, great. If you can do it with different vehicle designs, great. You do what you can, based on the techniques available and the costs involved.
To wit: if you start your safety analysis with "fuck the pedestrians, that's the driver's fault, not Ford's", then you're doing it wrong.
Most people with a truck are just trying to get their job done. They aren’t trying to look or feel anything.
No insult intended here: I assume people who have never had this thought have also never done things like replacing their kitchen cabinets or some other simple home improvement project. That's fine, but it's also quite relatable to many people, and it has nothing to do with penis.
I bought a truck for two reasons. Hauling the occasional thing around (having a home makes this happen more than I had initially thought) and it fits 6 (we just had our last child in January).
I WFH so it's lower fuel economy is a non-issue to us.
It has literally _nothing_ to do with "feeling big" or any compensation thing. I had no idea how much I'd use the utility until I bit the bullet and purchased one.
I'm incredibly excited for the F-150 Lightning because I am a perfect candidate for it.
I used to work at a horse racing track and every single jockey (really small dudes) had the hugest truck you have ever seen. We're talking Ford F-350 with a lift kit and bigger tires. The works. You needed to use a ladder to get in them.
There is definitely a thing that some people want bigger, taller vehicles because it makes them feel bigger and stronger. And there is definitely a thing that truck size becomes a pissing contest for some men where it's not just enough to have a big truck, you need to have the biggest one among your peers.
(And if you think nerds are immune to this phenomenon, perhaps take a more critical look at your gaming PC, boardgame collection, etc. We're a tribal species competing for mates using status symbols. Few of us are totally immune to this effect.)
At the same time, many truck owners are not motivated by that and painting them all with the same brush is uncharitable and unkind. I drive a pick-up. I absolutely love it. I have yet to kill any children, destroy the ozone layer, crush another car in a parking lot, or any of the other many moral crimes this thread seems to accuse most truck owners of.
Paraphrasing Freud, sometimes a truck is just a truck.
Trucks designed for work have low frontends for maximum visibility. I drove a 1999 Silverado for 10 years, went offroading often, it had just as much horsepower as last year's F-150, but with a front-end that was basically indistinguishable from a sedan's, instead of the new ones that are so tall they have to put cameras in the cab so that you can see what's in front of you.
The frontends of modern trucks are for intimidation, not work.
This in turn has actual effects on their behavior, including but not limited to making certain purchases more likely. Obsessing about power and speed and commanding the road definitely has an impact on how people drive - especially younger folks.
Car choice influence an incredible array of things up to how cities are built. Car commercial are omnipresent and include product placement in movies as well as, apparently, US presidents gunning it in a new truck, which is the topic of this whole thread.
The trend that they need to be an everyday vehicle for anyone is something that should be looked at. What is the psychology and intentional planning that's caused this shift? What subtle population engineering has lead to this without people realizing it?
The cost premium of hiring someone for home improvement jobs vs. DIY seems to have gone up. And the difficulty of finding someone qualified, reputable and with available capacity seems to have become exponentially higher.
"So I guess I need a truck" is what I've recently been thinking.
Vans are nice and in the used market often cheaper. I used to rent/borrow a friends full size van before having a truck. Still, the roof creates limitations. Can't transport a fridge or water heater upright, for example.
And for towing as mentioned, a van is limited to a bumper pull trailer whereas a pickup can pull a fifth wheel or gooseneck.
There is another group that doesn't need any of things but is convinced that they might some day. They are aspirational requirements. Why are those people convinced they need these things? The same reason anyone is convinced they need anything in the modern world. Advertising. Truck ads tell you that the Ford F150 is a tough truck for men who are tough (or want to be) and don't take nothin' from nobody (once they get out of this crappy job) and are masters of nature (or surely would be if they didn't live in the suburbs).
They buy product placement in all the badass movies, their commercials look like b-roll from a transformers movie, and the trucks themselves get more comfortable and less utilitarian every year.
Ford is not in the business of selling (light) trucks - they are in the business of selling an aspirational lifestyle to a population that thinks they might one day become an action hero. The F150 is, and has been for a long time, a consumer toy and not a serious work vehicle.
Could you ever see yourself buying a panel van? Why or why not?
However for my truck in particular I got a somewhat luxury trim with 50k miles for only $20k, so it was a good mix of things I would want in a vehicle generally as well as the utility. Panel vans aren’t really offered in that configuration, and I probably wouldn’t get one now because I plan on just keeping this truck as a secondary vehicle long after it’s paid off and I eventually get a smaller daily driver.
All that being said the one thing that could make me change my mind is an electric van with extensive usage of solar panels. That has a rather unique value proposition so if it existed in the future I’d be interested in it at least.
There are a good number of legitimate uses and legitimate users for these vehicles (I know a lot of legitimate users), but the vast majority of the giant vehicles on the road have only 1 visible occupant and no visible cargo.
And although I am doubtless projecting, I can't help but envision a fresh hot latte in their cupholder, which the driver is on their way back from procuring.
I can't speak to the more general, aspirational subculture to which you refer, but the aggravation of multiple vehicles is in some ways the first stop on this tour.
I think the attitude of “you don’t need a truck unless you’re a blue collar worker” is pretty elitist and ignorant, honestly. As if the decision to buy a truck is somehow invalid because white collar workers don’t see the need for one.
A sedan with the rear seats folded down will likely hold as much as you can get in a Costco run.
Or two bikes you throw in there.
I know because mine does both of these things.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of current truck owners 1) don't own boats 2) rarely, if ever, haul furniture 3) use the space in the rear on a regular basis.
Against this we have the known statistics of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities due to the obstructions to visibility provided by the very high front grille and very high ride height (plus wide A-pillars, etc.)
So it's therefore not only a waste of gas but a public health hazard, and making that claim is not "elitist", it's merely "rational" and "empirical" (and allow me to add, "humane")
https://smartgrowthamerica.org/bigger-vehicles-are-directly-...
"Recent research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found the share of pedestrian deaths involving trucks, vans, and SUVs has increased from 22 to 44 percent since the mid-1980s. More SUVs and trucks in the fleet = more pedestrian injuries becoming deaths instead."
https://www.outsideonline.com/2411345/suvs-trucks-deadly-cyc...
Most sedans have a max payload < 1000lbs including all passengers.
An F-150 has a payload over 3000lbs and can tow up to 14,000lbs.
Do you need that for your groceries? No, but if you don't live in the heart of the city the F-150 enables you do many many things that a sedan can't do around yard work, home ownership, agriculture, hauling gear, etc..
A sedan is about the worst car design anyway.. you'd have more of a leg to stand on if you had argued for a hatch or a minivan.
I've never owned a truck, but they have their uses.
it's also hard to find anything smaller than a truck with 4WD. if you live outside the city/suburbs, this can be a pretty important feature by itself.
The mystery to me is how very occasionally that seems to be, at least anecdotally. Perhaps >95% of pickup trucks I see are not hauling anything bigger than groceries. Yet, they’re hauling around their own ridiculously giant metal frame and emitting huge amounts of fossil fuels in the process. Those occasional boat trips are very net expensive in atmospheric carbon! Thankfully electric pickups will partially mitigate that problem although pickups will be hogging space in commuter parking garages for many decades hence I’m sure.
I mean, it sounds like your real reservation about trucks is not that they emit carbon, but that they are hogging up space and inconveniencing you, which is not a very persuasive argument.
I didn't mention rural truck drivers and made no comment that could reasonably be interpreted as such. If you have to deal with corrugated dirt roads and hauling materials etc on a daily basis then it's perfectly understandable you won't exactly be driving a hatchback.
> I mean, it sounds like your real reservation about trucks is not that they emit carbon, but that they are hogging up space and inconveniencing you, which is not a very persuasive argument.
Or, numerous city and urban commuting giant truck drivers is an effective image of the ridiculous excess they represent in the vast majority of their uses whereas carbon is a less visible but extremely negative externality from that excess.
/s But yes, those that point out this are the real problem.
The F150 has fuel economy close to that of wagons sold in the US. The F150 is less efficient, but it has way more than half the fuel economy of a wagon. Examples:
A base E-Class Wagon gets 24 mpg (22 city, 28 highway). A 4WD V6 F150 (which I think is the most popular) gets 21 mpg (19 city, 24 highway). The most efficient F150 available (the 2WD Hybrid) gets 25 mpg (25 city, 26 highway).
Wagons aren't super popular in the US so there aren't that many on the market. Here is a comparison of the fuel economies of the F150 vs several wagons available in the US: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=43464&...
Of course the E450 is going to get atrocious mileage, it’s a V6 turbocharged luxury car
It’s crazy that the choice is so limited in the US. I can understand why the Prius was so popular with you guys, despite handling like a whale on wheels.. there are nearly no options in the big hatchback segment .
I'd argue there is a societal disadvantage regarding the emissions these trucks kick out.
Americans want it because everyone else has one. Down here in TX, the number of pristine trucks that have never seen a speck of dirt, never had anything in the bed, and that are parked on their 1/8 acre lots in the city is staggering.
An EV truck presumably can be any size, but there's no current small truck platform to build on.
My dad had a Ranger in 97 that was just about the perfect truck for day-to-day use. It fit 2 adults comfortably, had a tiny 4 cylinder engine, got great gas milage, and could be used to pull a small trailer. He was crushed when Ford got rid of the Ranger. And what they've released now is basically the size of the old F-150 from the 90s
You're right that CAFE is literally designed to favor trucks. And the definition is so vague that even vehicles like the PT Cruiser are considered Light Trucks for the purposes of CAFE. It is also designed to hurt small cars, because vehicles with footprints (wheelbase * wheel wide) smaller than a Mustang (literally, to the square inch) have to face ever-more-strict CAFE standards.
As a result, cars like the Fit are might face a CAFE penalty while a base F150 does a-okay despite getting like half the fuel economy. And that's not even getting into BS like flex fuel credits (basically, being flex fuel capable is like adding ~5mpg to the vehicle CAFE score).
This is exactly why every small vehicle is a crossover anymore (they are light trucks for CAFE purposes), and why cars like the Civic get are today, the size an Accord was in 2005 (CAFE is less strict the larger the vehicle is).
Which seems pretty crazy if the net effect is that any car manufacturer has to produce a full line if they want to build any inefficient cars.
Huh? The shorter/narrower wheel base is better in any off-roading situation.
"The tariff affected any country (such as Japan) seeking to bring light trucks into the U.S. and effectively "squeezed smaller Asian truck companies out of the American pickup market."[16] Over the intervening years, Detroit lobbied to protect the light-truck tariff, thereby reducing pressure on Detroit to introduce vehicles that polluted less and that offered increased fuel economy.[15]"
Having a 40 mpg target for a small truck and a 25 mpg target for a big truck makes it pretty hard to build and sell a small truck.
A modern version of, say, a Datsun 620 [3] or an 80's Ford Ranger [4] could be pretty popular. One might even be able to circumvent the chicken tax by importing the body/frame of a foreign-made truck and building an electric drive train in the U.S. or NAFTA country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datsun_Truck#/media/File:Datsu...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger#/media/File:1st-Fo...
Well, the third really; Ford made 1500 1998-2001 Ford Ranger EVs, and Chevrolet made a few hundred 1997-1998 S10 EVs. But yeah, one with modern batteries and drive trains and (therefore) decent capacity and range could sell a bunch.
But newer vehicles also have AEB with pedestrian detection. If these vehicles displace older existing vehicles without those safety systems we will see fewer fatalities overall. Most kids and pedestrians are hit at low speed, not at 60+ mph due to the driver not paying attention or not being able to see the pedestrian. While AEB can’t save all pedestrians that would otherwise be hit, we know that these systems lead to big reductions in preventable accidents [1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31381447/
The reason an entire car hide in front of the bumper, out of the driver's view is that it makes the truck look cooler. The window sills are also at a silly height, to make the truck feel bigger, but at least that doesn't create the same safety issues (for everyone outside the truck) with no real value.
"Compared with cars, buses were 11.85 times and motorcycles were 3.77 times more likely per mile to kill children 0–14 years old. Buses were 16.70 times more likely to kill adults age 85 or older than were cars."
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232
If you count crossovers as cars, trucks make up like 35% of auto sales and account for 39% of pedestrian deaths.
There is nothing to be concerned about.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276506/change-in-us-car-...
I’m not sure how much the weight really matters if you’re colliding with a cyclist or pedestrian anyway though.
Valid point about the height, but it’s no different than any other modern truck on the road today (all of which are too high if you ask me).
https://www.ford.com/is/image/content/dam/vdm_ford/live/en_u...
Go to 10:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4n5iPqxpaw
Just a mind bending and creative design all around.
1. https://www.motortrend.com/news/2021-ford-mustang-mach-e-ele...
https://i.imgur.com/Lw4GgNW.jpeg
Also night driving. I love low interior indicator lighting. The big screens inhibit night vision. The older we get, the worse this is.
https://i.imgur.com/anDbKgG.jpg
In general I prefer knob controls for things like temperature and volume, but the physical up/down is ok
I agree with the sentiment though. I think Mazda and Volvo have had sensible approaches.
On the Ram example though, how would I change what I'm listening to? Would I press:
- select source - favourites - for you - audio - categories - media - related - search - apps - tune - > arrow at top - < > CH arrows at bottom
All those buttons are present at the same time
I second that. This also applies to heater controls and lighting and almost everything else that i can't think of. The benefit of the tactility of physical buttons and switches is sadly being coldly ignored by those who design our cars.
A tangential question: Does anyone know why there is an AC button on older cars? I can turn the temp all the way down but that just does outside air temp. If i want real AC I need to hit a button to turn it on. In my ideal car turning the knob to the lowest temp would get me cold air no matter what.
The hot/cold adjustment is adjusting a baffle/mixer that can either let in "cold" outside air, or air that's been heated by the engine compartment into the car. Think of it like driving around on a sunny day in the fall - sun is heating up the inside of the car, but the outside air is cold enough it would be silly and a waste of gas to turn on the A/C compressor.
A/C also consumes some amount of power and fuel efficiency- you may want the coolest air you could possibly have without A/C.
https://www.google.com/search?q=2020+mustang+mach+e+interior
With the touchscreen cars I've rented or driven for work I'd have loved to have a little bluetooth or serial connected control cluster that sat near to hand with basic radio and climate controls. Something I could operate by feel. Seems like there are enough bad touchscreen consoles out there to make an aftermarket kit viable but maybe I underestimate the technical challenges.
Maybe I'll just keep driving my junkers until voice control gets good.
This often means a large knob that one can turn, use as a joystick (up down left right) and push in for selection. This knob is used for navigating the majority of the console. There are some unique buttons and knobs for things like volume, climate, etc.
> “Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,” said Matthew Valbuena, Mazda North America’s lead engineer for HMI and infotainment.
> “And of course with a touchscreen you have to be looking at the screen while you’re touching...so for that reason we were comfortable removing the touch-screen functionality,” he added.
In my humble opinion, It's superior to touch screen experiences, at least while driving the vehicle. That said, dedicated knobs (such as a knob for a/c) are still the best for some things.
Not FUD, as I have no dog in the fight and personally don't care if anyone else buys one, but its a make of automobile I avoid.
This has nothing to do with your random friends hating Ford lol
Our 2011 F150 has been very reliable, mechanically, but the audio wiring is broken in interesting ways. My buddy's older F150 has exactly the same issue. Otherwise it's been trouble free.
#1 - How long has this engine design been used?
#2 - How long has this transmission design been used?
Accessory / electrical problems are annoying, but fixable. Powertrain problems are... the vehicle itself.
That's rip-out-every-wire-in-the-truck labor totals.
What were the symptoms?
I'm really happy to see Ford step up in the EV field. The Mach-E looks fantastic, as does the F-150. I have no ill-will towards them and I want them to succeed. But there just isn't anyway I can get over the sour taste in my mouth from owning my Ford Fusion and it is hard to take a leap of faith with them when they are new at the EV game.
It has the ability to pull the trailer with ease, but most preliminary estimates are that range would be two digits with that sort of load. In my current vehicle I do stop for gas midway, but it would be an entirely different situation hoping for a charger spot (with connected trailer) and then the time to charge.
Still a great truck, though. For a huge range of uses, including more local towing situations (the vast majority of commercial uses), it could be brilliant.
And eventually they can market a super-range battery you can tow. I kid...or do I?
They're appealing to people who tow stuff currently and aspirationally (e.g. people who don't currently tow trailers, but like to imagine that one day they will. "What if" scenarios).
Eventually the charging infrastructure will be there, including for towing vehicles, and it would be a case of scheduling a lunch around a charge.
I can't imagine that the F150 would be good for long haul trailers... just so much energy involved moving weight around.
For example, I had a Dodge Durango which got pretty much 16mpg no matter what, whether driving empty or towing a car on a flatbed trailer at highway speeds, still 16mpg. Next vehicle was a used manual transmission BMW X5, got 22-24mpg empty on the highway, but just towing an empty flat trailer would drop that to 17mpg, and a car on it would be 16, and the same towing a small U-Hual box trailer, just instantly drop to 16. So, one was highly stable and the other highly variable with different weight/aero loads.
The problem is that an EV is so inherently efficient to begin with that towing a big hollow brick behind you makes a tremendous difference in how much fuel it takes to pull it. Contrast that with a pickup that is already getting mid-teens fuel economy, the change in efficiency is much less pronounced. And with the easy filling ability of the ICE pickup, it's going to be the go-to choice for a number of years until batteries get significantly more capacity, denser, and cheaper.
A very typical pickup/travel trailer combo will get 10mpg. Maybe a couple more for a diesel. You can find outliers, but I've been towing RVs for a while and the topic comes up for discussion periodically, 10mpg is by far the most common experience. Trying to cram enough capacity into a battery for this kind of terrible efficiency is going to be tough for a while.
I meant it for all these car manufacturers pushing new EVs.
Tesla deserves a lot of credit for pushing the industry forward, but they are going to have a lot of competition in the next 5 years.
Which sounds like some city-slicker talking down to the cheap seats, except, I grew up in a town named Farmington. (Go Farmers.) I know pickups. I know the people who drive pickups. My dad sneers at fancy new pickups because he used to shove a good 700 pounds of mink pelts in a pickup, and he thinks all that leather would get stained by the blood nowadays. And pickup truck buyers love their macho trucks. They like the burble of the engines and the swagger and that it’s not some little penalty box of a green car.
An electric pickup? Sure, sounds rational, especially with that torque. But does it trigger the libs enough?
-
Something that might help, though: that price.
“but rather its price because the 2022 F-150 Lightning will start at just $39,974 before any government rebates.”
Given the just eye-watering prices of pickups these days: that’s cheap, relatively.
That helps with the overcompensation buyer.
There's a couple classes of 'Truck guys'. The Truck guys that just want power, yeah they'll probably go for this.
The Truck guys that like throwing turbodiesels in to get HP/Torque numbers like what we see in the lightning, I would say it depends on whether Ford makes it 'Moddable' or not.
My concern with the Lightning (and EVs in general) is range anxiety. I can fill up my F150 in what 3-4 minutes. How long before I can go 400 miles on a charge? What happens during an extended power outage, can I carry 100 miles worth of range in a portable container that's as easy to handle as 5 gallons of gas?
None of these concerns have anything to do with this vehicle making me feel more manly ;)
For those infrequent long trips I stop every 3 hours/350km and charge for 30 mins. Watch some Netflix, use laptop, or have a short nap and move on. Works out ok.
Ford's marketing department knows what they're doing, they're marketing this truck as tough and powerful. I like it.
If the world turns Mad Max, someone with an electric truck and a few solar panels won't have to worry about the gasoline gangs.
In the case of societal collapse you're probably not going far with your truck so taking a week to charge is probably OK.
But of course it's not about what you really need, it's all about perception. In that race, trucks and guns are the most important.
I give them six months of survival.
Those are weasel words unless you can back them up with data. Ford sells over a million pickups a year, and they're just a third of that market. There's no way to get an audience this large by going for machismo, pickups sell because they have broad appeal.
At any rate, what exactly would objective supporting data look like here?
I don't know, which is why I wouldn't stereotype such a large group of the population. To a reasonable approximation, everyone in America is a truck customer. It's way too broad to have a common defining characteristic.
I agree that there is a subgroup (think of them perhaps as the 'brodozer' crowd, I guess) that seem to be who you're thinking of. They mostly don't drive F150s, they're more likely to go for a diesel HD pickup. And even then they are just a niche of that market. I know lots of superduty owners that want nothing to do with those folks.
So while there might be pushback from the "salt of the earth"-type, I suspect a lot of urban truck owners are very far removed from that. The gas/long bed/bench seat base model may continue to sell for the rest of my life to farmers and construction crews, but most people buying a truck likely don't need a truck: It is just a utilitarian general vehicle that may haul gardening supplies, camping gear, and dump runs every so often.
So you likely are correct, it just may not matter for the more common demography for trucks in 2021+.
I hope ford's got a plan for making millions of battery packs for these things.
I wonder if "backfeed from the EVSE" is going to be a regular / standardized feature of some vehicle chargers in the future?
Combine this with time-of-use awareness and auto-auction mechanisms to backfeed the grid when power's necessary (and turn off back-feeding to not kill linemen repairing wires) it seems like a pretty good extension to car charging.
Elevator pitch:
Public charging installed on streets; charges 3 prices -- "I need power now", "I need this much power before this time" and "I need this much power by this time and you may draw power out of my battery between now and then so long as I have this much charge by this time".
Then you network interconnect these chargers and make a distributed peaker power plant and also make subscription / power deliver fees.
https://www.indra.co.uk/
― Henry Ford
The people answering your survey probably weren't aware they could power an entire jobsite with just a truck. Killer features such as this will be how electric vehicles penetrate the holdouts.
ref: https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/ (see bottom)
I do a similar thing with my ICE car. We don't get a lot of snow here, but every few years we'll get a storm that leaves up to a foot on the ground. Significant snow like that is rare enough that the cities and county don't keep a large fleet of snow removal equipment, so they only clear the bigger streets.
I'm on a long dead end street that won't get plowed for quite a while, if at all. People with the bigger trucks and SUVs can still get through, and there are enough of those further up the street from me that usually in a day they'll have made enough trips that my smaller SUV can get out.
When it looks like we might get one of those storms, I top off my car. If I lose power, and my house cools off enough that even with a sweater and jacket it gets too cold to stay in, I can move to my car. A full tank of gas will run the engine idling just enough to power the heater and radio and phone charger for about 24 hours.
Power would almost certainly be restored by the time I'd be running out of gas.
Grid power is so damn reliable in most places that any backup solution is going to have limited use. I guess I see this feature of the F-150 as icing on the cake, not something that would sway my purchase decision.
And for most scenarios it works - having some energy is always better than none. eg. The fridge will stay cold enough while you go shop for more food or whatever.
There's a lot of $10k-$15k natgas whole house generators going in around my neighborhood.
Your view of electricity reliability depends on where you live.
It is interesting to me that this is phrased as a negative thing. If you are at the point where you are choosing between transportation and powering your home, at least you _have_ the choice and it is not made for you.
If that's the case, other than hauling very tall objects, why get a truck? A minivan with the 2nd and 3rd rows folded is already longer than most truck beds.
Curious to hear thoughts on this. I know culturally a van would never beat a truck, but I'm curious more mechanically/technically.
Another thing I'm curious about with a truck in particular is if a custom fit gasoline tank could be placed in the bed of a truck that has an inverter that could charge the car, so even if your battery was dead you could effectively use the car as a gas one, in a pinch.
---
As an aside I'm willing to bet within a decade this will outsell the gasoline version. A F-150 used frequently requires a lot of maintenance. I imagine this will be significantly easier to maintain.
I suspect the first is rarely used. The second is paraded as a feature, for reasons which escape me.
Based on utility, most minivans beat all SUVs in tasks not involving going off-road. Minivans definitely beat pickup trucks for moving people, and often for moving stuff -- but not always.
Purchasing a vehicle in the USA is only partially based on function, for most people. Price and culture figure in a lot more.
My minivan is a Chrysler with the stow'n'go fold-down seats; in about 5 minutes I can fold all the passenger seats down into the floor and have 8' x 4' cargo space, which is more than most pickup beds.
Pickups have the advantage of height, as pointed out previously; if you need to move a refrigerator or a Harley, probably a pickup is better. Also, pickups can tow trailers & RV's.
But for taking my family on holiday, or when transporting a sound system, musical instruments, and 2 other musicians all in one vehicle, the minivan works best for me :)
It’s a good thing for consumers that the two vehicle types have so much overlap in utility.
Technically my wife's van could carry that engine very easily but the process would almost certainly destroy the carpet and leather seats and maybe some windows and the bumper cover etc.
My buddy had hoists on each end of the trip to insert and remove the junkyard engine. This is widely understood in industry and construction in general and using a crane with a pickup truck is no big deal. With a van I guess you could use a forklift and pray the inevitable damage to the interior doesn't turn the vehicle into an instant insurance writeoff, but ...
Imagine for example how easy it would be to wipe out the stereo speakers or the wiring for the GPS in the back of a van vs a seemingly indestructible truck bed. The older the truck the tougher they were built and the more likely the owner doesn't care if its beat up, so you can toss bricks into trucks and similar behavior that would not be tolerated with a van.
I will say the best way to haul 1000+ pounds of yard landscape rock is to pay home depot $59.99 to have truck delivery with a forklift drop the pallet within inches of where I asked. I could have bought a $75K pickup truck and loaded and unloaded all that rock myself by hand, but sixty bucks sounds like a better deal LOL. If I had a full time landscaper job the numbers would be different...
EVs may tilt the equation, but one thing Big Three US automakers have absolutely perfected for their trucks over the last 40 years is maintainability. Go on autotrader.com, search "Ford F-150" or "Dodge Ram 1500" and sort mileage high to low - can a 20 year old minivan travel roughly the same distance as the moon and back?
source: https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...
The initial models have a far smaller packs than the F150, however, given that most of these will be for business use locally, not distance hauling. If Ford were to make a model of the transit with a large pack, you'd have the much larger bed space along with towing. This would likely be a hit with the van-life community.
Much less futzing w/ the truck I'm sure.
It pains me. They are cool. Anyone who thinks they aren’t needs to test drive a Chrysler Pacifica with powered stow-and-go seats.
I am hoping that the E-transit is a sleeper hit and I can someday pick it up in a nice passenger configuration.
Ground clearance is another issue in a lot of places. Our Rendezvous is higher than most minivans, but I've still scraped the bottom before, and have had to turn back from a water crossing on a dirt road.
Generally my experience has been that the Rendezvous can do most of the same things my old Ranger did, but not as easily and with a lot more anxiety about breaking things. Ohh and come to think of it, it actually gets worse gas mileage.
Length. The size of trailer you can pull behind a tow vehicle is very dependent on the stability of the tow vehicle, and a lot of that comes down to wheelbase. As long as people want to tow 30+ foot long RVs, they will have to have tow vehicles the size of HD pickups.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27218029
cyber truck is for affluent city people who probably never had or wanted a truck before but like the design.
f150 is more for normal people who actually just want a normal truck that’s electric
Why? Does the look of the truck make it more practical? The Cybertruck does not have any paint, and can sustain far more scratch/shock that the F150.
Cybertruck seems like it would require special versions of these kind of things. One of the reasons people buy pickups is versatility, and you lose some of that with Cybertruck because of its different shape.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_camper
The design looks avante-guard from a consumer perspective, but its a result of making it more functional and easier to manufacture which is hard to argue with when your using for business even if you think its hideous. I think the f150 will compete for sure but its traditional branding and smaller bed will probably attract more consumer oriented existing pick-up owners. City people will continue to buy model Y because they have to run errands in tight spaces.
We'll see how the F150 pans out, but I'm more hesitant in Ford's ability to deliver than Tesla continuing to deliver.
[1] https://www.ford.com/is/image/content/dam/vdm_ford/live/en_u...
Here's a picture: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dTXcXTNslbGIJam0Wy9BRhk_I80=...
I understand they did not integrate the motors and batteries into a new frame built specifically to accommodate them like Tesla did but rather added them on top the existing frame. I really like that Tesla is a ground up design and something about this F150 annoys me for carrying on all of the institutional inertia of a 100 year old company.
Also, I read Ford is planning on 40k of these and their Transit van each year and marketing them toward fleets.
Ford sold 787,000 F-150’s in 2020 and about 1 million F-series trucks in total.