Do you have data to back that up? 100 miles is pretty significant for a work truck, especially if youre assuming you wont be able to charge it at the turnaround point and get ~200 miles
Range will suffer greatly and non-Teslas have terrible charging infrastructure. Even Tesla owners have horror stories of trying to tow a trailer and not being able to make it no the next charger.[1]
MotorTrend tried towing a car with a Rivian R1T. It reduced the maximum range from 314 miles down to 175 miles.[2]
Both range and charging infrastructure will improve over time, but it's not quite there today.
Cities are really not that dense. Harrisburg to Pittsburg is over 200 miles along the highway. From Albuquerque you could only get to Santa Fe or vice-versa, and then you're stuck. You'd be trapped in Salt Lake City or Denver too.
Range is the problem. 100 mile range for a small tow, and with the lack of fast chargers… it’s not enough for a lot of use cases. We need trailers to start having batteries or something :)
Probably not cost effective. You need a lot more hardware than just a ball and hitch to ensure there is no jackknifing or other weird unpredictable behaviors. A lot of work goes into ensuring trailers almost never push forwards against their hitches (trailer brakes are in a large part a thing to solve just this problem)
I bet you could get a fifth wheel hitch to play nice though if the software was tuned correctly
... what proportion of american pickup truck drivers are hauling a fifth wheel camper or horse trailer across country where this wouldn't have practical range? Based on my observations it's a tiny fraction of pickups on the road.
Most people seem to be driving pickups empty 99.99% of the time, just so they can move furniture, some 4x8 sheets, or bags of sand/cement when the exceptional need arrives, all locally - which a BEV is perfect for.
>>pickup truck drivers are hauling a fifth wheel camper or horse trailer across country
You would not get a ICE F-150 for that anyway... you would get as F-250 or F-350 for that kind of hauling.
F-150 is for Utility hauling for small campers, or Utility trailers and general work, not for 5th wheels, and horses *except maybe one of the small single horse trailers.
Plenty of people use half ton trucks like that. Sure it's a little harder on equipment and you have to put up with internet commenters taking cheap swipes at you over safety (the heck is the point of having a tow rating if everything up to that rating isn't fair game?) but the trucks handle the job nicely enough.
It should be fantastic for towing heavy stuff relatively short distances (less than 150 miles). Electric motors make 100% of their torque from 0 RPM. This is why freight trains are powered by electric motors, with diesel engines merely generating electricity.
For all practical purposes a motor operating at full load under hundreds of RPM is stalled. Motors let out the smoke (or have to throttle back) if you do that too much. The operating speed range of a motor is not infinite. For really high torque applications that also demand high speed you are going to see 2spd gear boxes for the same reasons your power drill has a 2spd gearbox.
While this truck may or may not (I haven't looked at the specs) have a gearbox expect to see trucks with a gearbox (especially as we start seeing electric commercial vehicles). A simple gearbox consisting of two shafts, four gear and a dog clutch or one planetary and a dog clutch is going to be cheaper, lighter and offer less kludgy performance than over-specing the motor.
I’m in the Seattle suburbs and my farm truck is a 1999 full size Chevy van. Much easier to use in the rain and holds 8’ long lumber with 2’ to spare. The van has only 100,000 miles on it so I won’t be evaluating electrics anytime soon.
Besides, I don’t understand how the power grid can handle so many electric cars. As we saw in Texas last year, peak power usage can cause extreme problems.
The F-150 Lighting is walking on a knife's edge. It's trying to show it's capable for rural off-road users, but most of its market is suburban dwellers.
I think it's the opposite. The suburban F-150 user is the perfect market for this EV pickup with such a low range and it is obviously targeted there.
Most of the pickup trucks in the Lightning form factor (four door, short box, half ton) are bought by people living in suburbia because they make great family vehicles: comfortable passenger space, tons of storage for luggage and toys, good for the home renovation project, good in winter, can move a boat or jetski or ATV, ample power and braking for a comfortable drive.
Suburbia owners tend to only rarely combine cold weather travel with long distance travel. EVs can do each of those, but not both at the same time very well. Suburban owners don't tend to tow heavy often and usually not long distances (if they do they don't own an F-150, but rather something larger).
Rural and off-road users (which are distinct groups) need more range to handle inclement weather, longer average driving distance, more towing, rougher roads, and poor charging infrastructure. For example, many rural homes have electrical service that cannot be depended upon (outages are frequent and sometimes long) and may be weak (old houses may only have 65amp service). There may be no way to park the vehicle close enough to the house to access L2 charging. Parking a pickup truck in a garage is normally impossible.
The situation is Texas was a complex interplay of a lack of winterization and over-demand on the natural gas network. This electric F-150 appeals to me for a number of reasons but one of them is that I could have powered my house for three days off this truck assuming I purchase and install a cutover switch, rather than have no power for seven days like I did last February.
I do. That means increased load during the day, which means increased storage requirements at night. We don’t have much reserve at night in most places, especially those dependent on renewables. Germany is learning this the hard way.
Why would charging at night increase loads during the day? Given coal or nuclear, you can’t really ramp them down at night, and even hydro and gas (on demand), you still have to consider the grid’s finite capacity (overloading it during a hot summer during the day can cause fires).
20 and 10 percent respectively. Enough to create a decent surplus capacity for night time charging. Given Texas is a big believer in dynamic electricity rates based on supply and demand, you’d just need to check the night time rates.
Fair enough. Youre in a special situation. Seattle is close to refineries and the incoming alaska oil. Gas will still go over $10 a gallon in our lifetime and I bet your van smells like, well, burning fossil fuels.
Electric grids dont need to handle the load to charge cars if we all help support the grid (geothermal, solar, hydro, etc). Its possible, we just like the hand-wringing that goes along with 'its so hard'.
hydro and geot is only available certain places, solar is intermittent. not even close to be able to handle the need of all these cars coming online, futhermore the use of cobber in electric cars is many many many times a normal car. We will be in for a rude awakening with this misguided focus on unreliables.
Ugh, Seattle has really expensive gasoline and we get squeezed by refinery shutdowns all the time. I’m not even sure most of the oil we refine still even comes from Alaska anymore, their production has been tanking for awhile now while oil sands production from Canada has been increasing.
Washington state has plenty of hydro, but it’s a west coast market for the energy produced (surpluses can easily go to California) so our electricity prices are increasingly normal. A lot of wind production along the Columbia river, however.
The power grid will have to adapt the same way we spent trillions to build offshore oil rigs and refineries and tankers and thousands of gas stations.
by comparison beefing up the grid should be easy, especially since it is easy to incentivize off peak car charging which drastically reduces how hard this is to do
(Not the person this is in response to, but relevant to my interests/lifestyle as well)
My current truck is a '97 F350, Crew Cab/Long Bed, 4x4, 7.3 diesel, with few enough miles that it ought to last the rest of my life. It's a truck, not a daily driver - I'll occasionally make an empty trip with it due to bad weather conditions keeping me off other options if the car (Chevy Volt, dirt cheap to run) is in use by someone else in the house, but mostly it's for hauling. I'm picking up a couple tons of solar panels tomorrow to redistribute locally on a flatbed, I run lumber with it, tow a car trailer with an antique car in it, etc.
I'll start with the worst: The Cybertruck. It seems like the sort of cartoonish vehicle designed by a Silicon Valley firm who thinks that trucks are things you drive from your suburban home to your SV office, wearing shiny cowboy boots and a hat that's never seen real sun. From my point of view, it's a truck that is almost entirely pointless as a truck. The bed is weird enough shaped that you're unlikely to be able to get a ladder rack or anything on it, you can't put a work back on it (service trucks and such would be a great use for electrics, they tend to be short on miles and long on overnight charging, and can run all sorts of great tools while on site without any range issues), and the tow rating of 14k is cute, but pointless without the ability to put a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch in the bed - I wouldn't tow 14k on a receiver any distance, and none of the people I know with big trailers that can get up to 14k have anything but a 5th wheel or gooseneck. Having that sort of tongue weight (you'd want about 2k lbs on the tongue for that trailer weight) behind the rear axle is just a bad idea when you can get it on or slightly in front of the rear axle. Plus, far easier to twist around into tight spaces. I've seen guys with gooseneck rigs do some crazy stuff getting a trailer into somewhere tight.
The Rivian looks more like an offroading lifestyle truck, which it will probably be decent at, but has no overlap with my interests (I'd take an old Jeep into the mountains if I was doing anything serious), so I'm not too familiar with it. It's probably going to be decent, but I'd never consider a first run, low volume product from a startup, so of no interest to me.
The F150? Ford knows how to make trucks, and has good experience with other electrics. It's not an F350 class truck, but it's likely to be a very, very good "half ton" type truck. The various inverter output options are really useful as well.
It bugs me that nobody is making a PHEV type F250 class service truck. That would be amazing for a huge number of use cases, and businesses are very TCO-sensitive, so if it's cheaper than a gas or diesel, they'll line up to buy it.
>It bugs me that nobody is making a PHEV type F250 class service truck.
The market that the F-250 plays in is a completely different market from the F-150 market, despite the fact that the model numbering is very similar. People who buy half and three quarter ton trucks are much more likely to use them for actual truck work such as hauling and towing. As the amount that you tow is a bragging right, manufacturers aren't going to look at a PHEV because the addition of the battery will lower your towing capacity. I'm willing to bet that once battery capacity improves, you'll see half/three quarter ton market truck jump right to EVs, unlike the F-150 which went from ICE only to PHEV/ICE, and now to ICE/PHEV/EV
I think you're off by one. The F150 is a "half ton" class truck, often used for passenger service duty. The F250/F350 ("three quarter ton" and "full ton") are more often used for serious truck work, being towing, service truck chassis, etc.
But "towing as bragging rights" really only applies to individual truck ownership. There are certainly plenty of those (I'm one), but that sort of thing doesn't matter to fleet owners who care about TCO and if it will do what they need. A 30k tow rating on a company truck that spends the week towing an 8000 lb construction trailer around doesn't matter, and any sane company won't bother with an obscene tow rating if a lower one is fine. That doesn't mean you should be towing at the rating, but a 12k tow rating for an 8k trailer is totally fine. If, in the deal, you get lower operating costs and site power, so much the better.
But I just don't think a 3/4 or full ton BEV makes much sense. The range hit you take towing a large trailer (especially a 5th wheel RV) is substantial, and subject to a lot of things you don't have much control over, like winds. A stiff headwind or even a crosswind can make a huge difference in range on a tank of fuel.
Putting something like a 200hp diesel (rated for continuous operation) in with a 50-80kWh battery pack for a truck like that gets you an awful lot of nice things. No, it won't be cheap, but trucks aren't cheap anyway.
If you had something like a full ton class truck, 50 or 80 kWh battery pack, 150-200hp diesel, 240V/50A out from an inverter when stopped, you've built something that will do just about every work truck duty out there, as well as being exceedingly appealing to the RVers, because now they have a full hookup anywhere they are - and if the battery is low, oh well, the engine kicks on to charge things for a while. $100k, $120k for such a thing, with a decent interior, isn't at all unreasonable. It just has to be able to take a 5th wheel hitch.
I live in Iowa on what I call a small farm (we do raise animals and crops, but nowhere near enough for it to be our primary source of income), but which my neighbors who actually make a living farming would laugh at. But I can tell you that every farm here has at least two pickup trucks. Generally they are larger than the F-150. F-250 or equivalent are common, 350s not at all uncommon. The trucks frequently haul heavy loads, generally in gooseneck, fifth-wheel type trailers. A pickup hauling 12 1800lb hay bales on such a rig isn't at all unusual. 32' or larger livestock trailers are also common.
What I can say for certain though is that farm trucks rarely travel over 200 miles in a day. Hauling stuff is mostly an adjunct activity for farmers. They don't generally spend 10 hours a day doing it.
The same is true for the other natural market for a truck like the lightning - which is contractors and construction/maintenance trades. An electrician or farm equipment repair technician isn't earning money when in their truck; they use them to get themselves (or their employees) and their stock-in-trade materials to and from worksites. Yes, those worksites might be scattered, and they may spend a couple or three hours a day getting around to various sites, but that's it. 200 mile days would kill their profitability.
Personally, I drive a Toyota Tacoma for farm work. Smaller than an F-150, but big enough for most of what I do. I'm very interested in the F-150 Lightning, and seriously considered putting a deposit on one, but as I only put about 1500 miles per year on my truck, I just couldn't justify the cost.
Way ahead… or way less experienced? I was a programmer for 35 years (still am) and I do not rely on this fine publication for knowledge about the tech world either. They are equally qualified on both topics.
Regardless of who's reporting on it, what do you think of the electric F-150? Looks like roughly the same towing capacity as the gas F-150 (for heavy loads, wouldn't you want a tractor anyway?), and by nature of being electric it's going to have way higher torque than basically all the current gasoline trucks.
That's fair -- looks like the base model F-150 starts at ~$30k and the base model electric F-150 starts at ~$42k. I didn't compare any features though.
Range of 320 miles. After that, how long do I have to sit to charge it? How is that going to work on a long road trip? Or even on a moderately short trip if where I am going has no chargers? What about if I am going somewhere away from home - now I have to make sure I can charge it? Gas stations are everywhere and after a few minutes pumping I have hundreds more miles.
Until these issues get sorted out, electric will remain niche. What I don’t understand is why all-electric gets all the hype, while hybrid avoids most of these issues while still polluting less. It’s similar to the hype around 100 percent self-driving, when lesser solutions like front-collision avoidance are proven and ready to go right now. They’re just not as sexy.
If 90% of the time, you're puttering on the farm, but 10% of the time, you need to haul your horses somewhere or you need to go buy and haul some equipment back, it negates the truck. It needs to work for all cases or you need two trucks.
Probably a regional difference but I grew up in rural North GA and the farmers that I lived near had tons of farming equipment like a tractor with a shitload of attachments (usually pretty old), a worktruck used for hauling, a fourwheeler or sidebyside for getting around on the farm, and a bunch of other odds and ends. They might have another truck that's really old that's for a project, but I'm imagining one of these guys buying a Ford lightning and I don't see it.
Yeah, they usually are just hauling their goods up their dirt road to a stand on the side of a road, but they do occasionally make a long trip to sell some cows, pigs, or horses and I don't think they want to deal with midtrip charging.
I'm not sure what kind of farmer you imagine this is called, but these guys are just called farmers in my neck of the woods.
Then you suddenly have to go to auction 200 miles away in cold weather or make an emergency vet visit 70 miles away when your range is down, or need to tow your backhoe 120 miles for service. It is in an immutable law of the universe that these things will not happen right after your car has been charged fully and there’s a charging station on the way back home.
Yeah, lots of people can't afford/don't have the space for multiple vehicles because their one vehicle no longer does everything they need. I find it such a dumb argument. A plug in hybrid which is primarily an EV is a much better idea for these situations.
I understand the idea here, and I treat computers that way. I have multiple ones around.
However for most folks and small businesses, a vehicle is far too expensive a capital asset to buy a brand new one with full knowledge that there are some situations in which it will be just useless. Trucks in particular are purchased for their versatility, and electric sacrifices that for…what exactly? So the buyer feels good about being green? That’s a good formula for a niche product.
Every farm or ranch or estate I’ve visited has like six different trucks already, with most never leaving the estate and could easily be charged overnight.
Yeah, it looks like range is the biggest complaint. That's fair. I don't use my truck for long trips because of poor gas mileage. I just use it for hauling things like wood, and I'm fortunate enough to have a good mill and multiple hardware stores within 20 miles of me, so range is basically a non-issue.
But I get where you're coming from. This would be more attractive in the future when there are more charging stations (if they are fast).
I have had a lot of people explain how stuff like this is a problem but it just hasn’t actually been a problem. Not with a Tesla in Texas anyway. Charges quickly, chargers are pretty plentiful and in a pinch you can plug into any rv site or regular wall outlet
Hasn’t happened to me yet, and also you have to remember that the occasional road trip hassle is offset by about 30+ gas station trips you don’t make every year, because you usually just charge at home
Ford said that their range estimates were all made with a bunch of stuff in the bed, of course that’s not comparable to towing but I’m willing to bet that it’s not going to be as bad as 100 miles.
More specifically, when it comes to cargo on highways, weight almost doesn't matter at all with respect to fuel economy.
Adding weight to the bed has nearly zero aerodynamic penalty and so doesn't change mileage much at all as long as the road is level and is not start and go traffic.
Towing on a highway, is primarily an aerodynamic concern because most trailers have the aerodynamics of bricks and are (partially) outside the designed aerodynamic envelope of the rest of the vehicle.
ICE vehicles take a noticeable hit on range when towing, even considering ICEs become more efficient when under moderate loads. There's no reason to hope that EVs won't suffer at least as bad, and 50% range loss is normal in an ICE when towing something large like a camper.
Bed weight isn't remotely close to the same weight range as towing capacity- rather than engine strength, the limiting factor is suspension.
Driving while towing will take the same amount of extra power, whether you have a gas engine or electric motor. Higher load on the motor = less range. I think cutting the range in half would be pretty surprising (in a good way).
Not to diminish the substance of the range/torque questions, I think there's a mass distortion effect at play here. These trucks are bought by a huge number of people and everyone assumes they're median for the range and pull. It's very likely the significant but none the less smaller cohort at the extreme range and pulling end exist, and have need to voice concern. Most of the buyers will never stretch this problem.
In Australia, where the myth of vast commutes is awesomely loud, especially amongst farmers and tradies, when the stats on average drive per day are abundantly clear this isn't the predominant problem. Is it a problem? Yes. For a small but vocal minority of the future drivers of these EV.
Diesel isn't going to disappear overnight. Trucks are alive and well now, which will be there to be used, with ICE, for decades. The production might cease, but that hardly stopped the VW/Microbus from living beyond its expected lifetime, spare parts and all.
Point a farmer at an opportunistic cost saving and reliability improvement on a $750k+ piece of farm machinery and they'll go there when their first neighbour shows the bottom line difference. They're like penguins on the ice-floe, nobody wants to be the one finding the lurking leopard seal in the water. But once its clear a combine/thresher/header machine works better, cheaper by battery, and has lower TCO they'll be all over it like a rash. If you combine that with huge roof surface area on sheds and opportunistic cooling/shade from PV cells they'll be off-grid power advocates in seconds.
Will farmers north of 50 have problems with snow in winter? Sure! Oh damn, ok, lets tank the entire EV market because a cohort in the midwest with snow can't "win".. Thats basically what we're seeing here. Everyone assumes they are 'normal' and their 'normal' usage risks determine the entire market. The F150 sells internationally as well as domestically, its market includes a lot more than RV hunters in the forests, and people north of the snow line. Most of the world lives south, the vehicle will sell everywhere if the price is right.
Most of the world lives in the Northern hemisphere. Right now I'm learning to use. every. trick. that. exists. to keep frost off my plug-in hybrid windows. It's not easy, but cars are for moving around. You learn to live with their quirks, and their main quirk has been an externality for too long.
They do indeed but I remain convinced the bulk lives closer to
Mediterranian than Arctic climes. Enough people have ice in their lives it has to be dealt with, at least some part of the year but we'd be mythologising heat engines to say they have significant upsides in this. It's one dimension. For part of the year, for some people.
It looks absolutely amazing, of course. Seems like a ridiculously good work truck for a contractor. I think the $70,000 model with the generator and all that looks like tremendous fun. Someday when my van dies at the 300,000 mile mark and I don’t feel bad about recycling it I will almost certainly get a monster like th F-150, assuming the power grid issues have been worked out.
How about the Sierra Club[1], Maintenance Reliability and Operations magazine[2], Grain News[3], Worktruck Exchange[4], Progressive Farmer[5], Farm Journal/AgWeb[6], or Grit[7]?
As a farmer, what breaking news do you come to HN for? I keep hearing vague murmurs from past colleagues about how agtech is the next big thing so I'm genuinely curious.
The primary market for the F150 is suburban passenger use. I realize a pickup is useful for agriculture, but suburban drivers simply outnumber farmers.
Regardless of where you stand on whether this is the ideal truck for your particular use case, it's worth noting that Ford really nailed the general market aspect of this truck. It filled all 200,000 preorders in a few months, and has so much proven demand that they're expanding production lines. Hats off to Ford for taking a proven platform and electrifying it at a reasonable price without trying to be edgy (Cybertruck) or cater to a luxury niche (Rivian).
Everyone is coming out with an awesome BEV but no one other than Tesla ship any volume.
Rivian shipped under 1000 in 2021. Chevy stopped basically all shipments due to cars exploding. In 2022 I think the new Cadallic Escalade is coming, which had rave reviews but I am suspecting will be < 10k units.
Almost doesn’t matter how good these EV alternatives are if they can’t ship 100k units in the US.
Highest theoretical production rate, they literally just started pumping out vehicles with any volume within the past year. Fremont has the highest production rate, where are you getting your information?
How long have GM had factories in China?
> "General Motors Co. traces its [Chinese] roots back to 1908. GM has 10 joint ventures, two wholly owned foreign enterprises and more than 58,000 employees in China." - From their website
Highest annualized rate, aka if they are operating at peak efficiency then it's the highest production plant. Fremont is still outpacing Shanghai in terms of volume total.
Your original comment that GM pumped out more EVs than Tesla in China is obvious since Tesla has just begun their production volume out of Shanghai with any scale, so not sure the point you were trying to make. With Berlin coming online soon too, Tesla is going to have a much bigger footprint in the EU/Asia combined.
Matt (parent) is a Tesla employee. It's strange how you weren't aware of your employer's largest factory existing upthread, but think its production numbers are also "obvious" to everyone.
I assume you mean in units sold rather than revenue acquired via EV sales? Because what GM is selling in China is just one step above a golf cart and can’t bring much money in. Also, I wonder if the product is more SAIC than GM, these are still Chinese majority owned JVs after all.
In what sense isn't it relevant? I still feel this is too focused on business and revenue against real value to society. Is a US$ 40-50k Model 3 more valuable to society, as a whole, than 10 simpler EV the size of a golf cart being used by people who can't afford a US$ 40-50k car?
> than 10 simpler EV the size of a golf cart being used by people who can't afford a US$ 40-50k car
You are looking at totally different markets. The model 3 is going to big cities, replacing ICE Toyotas and Hondas, fairly big cars for a middle class that wouldn't tolerate driving around in a golf cart (nor would such cars probably be allowed in those cities). Then we have small towns and rural areas where the $6k car is targeted. They wouldn't be interested in a model 3 either, nor would they be interested in an ICE Toyota Camry.
That's technically true but very misleading. GM owns a 44% stake in SAIC-GM-Wuling[1] which manufactures the Hongguang Mini EV. The Hongguang Mini costs $4,162-$5,607, seats four people, has a 17.4hp motor, and 75-106 miles of range. Its top speed is 62mph. It does not support fast charging so it can only add 12.5 miles of range per hour.
The Hongguang Mini is too unsafe to be sold in the US. It has no airbags and performs horribly in crash tests.[2] The battery pack also has minimal safety features[3] and no thermal management, meaning it will degrade quickly in hot climates and can be destroyed by below-freezing temperatures.
In short: A company that GM partially owns sold more roided-up golf carts than Tesla sold cars.
>Almost doesn’t matter how good these EV alternatives are if they can’t ship 100k units in the US.
Rivian is basically a startup, they shouldn't be lumped in with everyone else's capabilities. As for the existing brands, I don't think it's because they're not capable. They're still printing money from their current vehicles so they're slowly rolling over engineering resources and funding to the EV side of things. The EV truck market is basically non-existent. Rivian is realistically the only manufacturer who has to worry about competition for the next few years. The F-Series generated $42 billion in revenue for 2019[1] without any EV powertrains offered. If Ford put 100% of their engineering manpower and funds towards EV's tomorrow they would cripple themselves.
Clean technica agrees that VW ships more. VW has more brands and models. Tesla model 3 may be the top seller, but it's one of only 2 models that Tesla has with significant volume. For instance Audi is a VW group company too. Together they have ~5 of the top 20 EVs.
In fact it appears that Ford is the one assessing garage spaces. The 4x4 Supercrew will fit in a standard American-sized single garage door [1]. The only question is length. I measured my garage and have talked to many F150 owners. The 5.5’ bed leaves inches to space in the average garage, and people set up a system to park them - tennis ball hanging from ceiling, parking block on the ground, etc. My own garage has a ceiling-mounted, motion-activated adjustable laser pointer above each parking space, which seems incredibly ridiculous, but hey, I’m a newcomer to this whole suburbs thing.
In my old house (built in 98) I had a 2000 F150. It fit in the garage, but barely. Garage was 20 foot deep, with a cement ledge of a couple feet where it attached to the house. I had to back the truck in, the back tires would bump against the ledge, and there was about 1 inch clearance on the back and front bumpers.
I agree it's a great feature, but how many people who would be served by a backup battery don't already have a backup generator for when their power goes out?
I would love to not have to put a generator in my truck and just run stuff off the battery. It wouldn't replace it in all circumstances, but I would switch from always lugging around a generator to pulling it out when I need it.
It’s still a good selling feature. Do I want to spend X on a home generator, or put that money into a truck that can also provide backup power?
I can’t imagine that the backup power from a truck is truly a replacement for a generator. More of a “nice to have because you can” rather than something you’d depend on. If you’re really worried about backup power, you’d have a generator in place.
Most of those home generators that run on natural gas have to be serviced extremely frequently. My grandmother has one for her house that was built 2 years ago and the service interval is something like every 100 hours. If she could bridge the frequent 2-4 hour power outages with a battery or truck instead of having the generator kick on every time, she'd be getting some serious convenience out of it.
When I used to live out in the sticks, I lost power at least once a week, maybe more. Usually for less than an hour, but sometimes for half the day. I'd wager over the course of the year I didn't have power for maybe 300-400 hours of it.
I suspect as fullsize trucks become electric we're going to see a lot of "highfalutin commuter car" + "highfalutin SUV/minivan/compact truck" driveways turn into "single electric fullsize truck" driveways since the electric aspect projects a totally different image making these vehicles an acceptable solution for these people.
I'm quite interested in an electric truck (for camping/kayaking/skiing/off-roading/etc. trips). However, I'm quite wary of the range. I was talking to my dad about this a few weeks ago, and I'd be a little nervous to take a truck in the wilderness with "only" a ~350mi range (in perfectly ideal conditions). Your vehicle is your lifeline out there and if you run out of power, it can turn into a life-or-death situation (especially in the winter or at high altitudes).
I'm not sure how a Rivian or the new F-150 Lightning would compare to a more typical rugged off-roading vehicle (e.g. Raptor, a TRX, or a Rubicon), let alone a truly heavy-duty one (Land Rover Defender, H1, or G-Class).
Maybe bringing some gas + a generator would be a viable contingency? At the expense of some weight, of course.
I'm having a hard time imagining the scenario you're worried about. You can run out of gas just as easily in the wilderness as electric; in either case you have a fuel meter in your truck telling you how much is left so that you don't run out. If roadside assistance can reach you to deliver gas, they can also reach you to tow you to a charging station. If you're stuck in a blizzard while low on gas, that's much worse than being stuck while low on electric: a gallon of gas will only idle the engine to provide heat for 1-2 hours, while a 5% charge in an F-150 Lightning can run a cabin heater and charge your phones for about 21 hours (and no risk of CO poisoning).
>if roadside assistance can reach you to deliver gas, they can also reach you to tow you to a charging station.
That's a little bit of a stretch. You can walk a 5gal tank all sorts of places roadside assistance won't go, though that's largely a reflection of corporate policy than physical inability.
Also it's way harder to get someone to give you a charge if you run out due to circumstance in the middle of nowhere whereas pretty much anyone will give you a gallon of fuel if you're truly out.
> You can run out of gas just as easily in the wilderness
Not really. You can count on a gas pump existing within some distance of a sparse population. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find an outdoor "public" power outlet when you need one.
Not to mention that just about every offroading trip I've been on, everyone brings at least one NATO jerry can, just in case. Can't really bring an "extra battery" along with you when it comes to electric trucks.
I have a 2016 F-150 that I only use for getting around and recreation (software eng that works from home that likes to fish/hunt/camp/hike/paddle/snowshoe). It has the 36 gallon tank and has a range of around 650 miles (+- 40 based on weather and type of driving). I use it in the north woods of New England and the Adirondacks. It's not uncommon for me to wake up at 5am, drive 200 miles, top off at the last gas station before entering the woods, and then drive 50+ miles on logging roads to wherever I'm going for a couple of days.
Having that number on the dash saying 600 miles left as I enter into remote-ish areas is so comforting. So much so that I've already ruled out upgrading to the Lightning and instead am targeting the Powerboost, which keeps my range, increases my fuel efficiency (though not by a ton) and has a world of possibilities for utilizing the battery for heating a camper or a toy hauler -- I don't have one of those but if I had a Powerboost I might consider one for snowmobile camping or ATV camping.
I wonder what the range would be like with a 9.6kW Harbor Freight generator strapped into the bed plugged into the truck's power inlet. They probably have some safety check to prevent this, and I get that this negates the whole zero emissions, safety issues, blah blah, but I am curious. I would love to have this as a daily driver, but then have something to augment it for the long haul. It is why I liked the Chevy Volt concept, but all hackiness set aside, this is more modular since you have a bed and aren't tied to any specific generator in the bed, or a generator at all for that matter.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadFor many people towing their boat to the launch it will work excellently.
Towing trailer full of junk to the disposal, same thing. Also pulling the wood chipper to the dump. Heavy, but not going far.
Picking up lumber in town, just fine. Excellent for picking up steel for the shop.
It would be more accurate to claim it will do poorly in cross country towing. For the towing I do, it would be just fine.
1/3 the range when towing is still a 100 miles.
100 miles is a very, very short round trip in most of the US.
an electric truck can tow big stuff no problem, but not very far.
so whether it is good for towing depends on how far you tow.
It has the same 10,000lb towing capacity as the standard v6 model. Not sure what you're referring to here.
MotorTrend tried towing a car with a Rivian R1T. It reduced the maximum range from 314 miles down to 175 miles.[2]
Both range and charging infrastructure will improve over time, but it's not quite there today.
1. https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1376947773967372292
2. https://www.motortrend.com/features/how-far-can-you-tow-with...
charging every 120 miles (see the recent rivian test) is not great
and even if you find chargers, having to take a break to wait for charging that often is double not great
Which would be an interesting concept,
I bet you could get a fifth wheel hitch to play nice though if the software was tuned correctly
Would just need the hitch to include a power cable, to send power back to the car.
Most people seem to be driving pickups empty 99.99% of the time, just so they can move furniture, some 4x8 sheets, or bags of sand/cement when the exceptional need arrives, all locally - which a BEV is perfect for.
You would not get a ICE F-150 for that anyway... you would get as F-250 or F-350 for that kind of hauling.
F-150 is for Utility hauling for small campers, or Utility trailers and general work, not for 5th wheels, and horses *except maybe one of the small single horse trailers.
Many people exceed the tow rating, and rightfully get ridiculed online for it
While this truck may or may not (I haven't looked at the specs) have a gearbox expect to see trucks with a gearbox (especially as we start seeing electric commercial vehicles). A simple gearbox consisting of two shafts, four gear and a dog clutch or one planetary and a dog clutch is going to be cheaper, lighter and offer less kludgy performance than over-specing the motor.
Besides, I don’t understand how the power grid can handle so many electric cars. As we saw in Texas last year, peak power usage can cause extreme problems.
Probably not what the new F-150 is aimed at then. I think they’re trying to show they can break into a rural off-road user. Not suburbia.
Most of the pickup trucks in the Lightning form factor (four door, short box, half ton) are bought by people living in suburbia because they make great family vehicles: comfortable passenger space, tons of storage for luggage and toys, good for the home renovation project, good in winter, can move a boat or jetski or ATV, ample power and braking for a comfortable drive.
Suburbia owners tend to only rarely combine cold weather travel with long distance travel. EVs can do each of those, but not both at the same time very well. Suburban owners don't tend to tow heavy often and usually not long distances (if they do they don't own an F-150, but rather something larger).
Rural and off-road users (which are distinct groups) need more range to handle inclement weather, longer average driving distance, more towing, rougher roads, and poor charging infrastructure. For example, many rural homes have electrical service that cannot be depended upon (outages are frequent and sometimes long) and may be weak (old houses may only have 65amp service). There may be no way to park the vehicle close enough to the house to access L2 charging. Parking a pickup truck in a garage is normally impossible.
A sharp increase in the number of electric vehicles will pose a very heavy strain on the grid at night when they recharge.
Washington state has plenty of hydro, but it’s a west coast market for the energy produced (surpluses can easily go to California) so our electricity prices are increasingly normal. A lot of wind production along the Columbia river, however.
by comparison beefing up the grid should be easy, especially since it is easy to incentivize off peak car charging which drastically reduces how hard this is to do
My current truck is a '97 F350, Crew Cab/Long Bed, 4x4, 7.3 diesel, with few enough miles that it ought to last the rest of my life. It's a truck, not a daily driver - I'll occasionally make an empty trip with it due to bad weather conditions keeping me off other options if the car (Chevy Volt, dirt cheap to run) is in use by someone else in the house, but mostly it's for hauling. I'm picking up a couple tons of solar panels tomorrow to redistribute locally on a flatbed, I run lumber with it, tow a car trailer with an antique car in it, etc.
I'll start with the worst: The Cybertruck. It seems like the sort of cartoonish vehicle designed by a Silicon Valley firm who thinks that trucks are things you drive from your suburban home to your SV office, wearing shiny cowboy boots and a hat that's never seen real sun. From my point of view, it's a truck that is almost entirely pointless as a truck. The bed is weird enough shaped that you're unlikely to be able to get a ladder rack or anything on it, you can't put a work back on it (service trucks and such would be a great use for electrics, they tend to be short on miles and long on overnight charging, and can run all sorts of great tools while on site without any range issues), and the tow rating of 14k is cute, but pointless without the ability to put a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch in the bed - I wouldn't tow 14k on a receiver any distance, and none of the people I know with big trailers that can get up to 14k have anything but a 5th wheel or gooseneck. Having that sort of tongue weight (you'd want about 2k lbs on the tongue for that trailer weight) behind the rear axle is just a bad idea when you can get it on or slightly in front of the rear axle. Plus, far easier to twist around into tight spaces. I've seen guys with gooseneck rigs do some crazy stuff getting a trailer into somewhere tight.
The Rivian looks more like an offroading lifestyle truck, which it will probably be decent at, but has no overlap with my interests (I'd take an old Jeep into the mountains if I was doing anything serious), so I'm not too familiar with it. It's probably going to be decent, but I'd never consider a first run, low volume product from a startup, so of no interest to me.
The F150? Ford knows how to make trucks, and has good experience with other electrics. It's not an F350 class truck, but it's likely to be a very, very good "half ton" type truck. The various inverter output options are really useful as well.
It bugs me that nobody is making a PHEV type F250 class service truck. That would be amazing for a huge number of use cases, and businesses are very TCO-sensitive, so if it's cheaper than a gas or diesel, they'll line up to buy it.
The market that the F-250 plays in is a completely different market from the F-150 market, despite the fact that the model numbering is very similar. People who buy half and three quarter ton trucks are much more likely to use them for actual truck work such as hauling and towing. As the amount that you tow is a bragging right, manufacturers aren't going to look at a PHEV because the addition of the battery will lower your towing capacity. I'm willing to bet that once battery capacity improves, you'll see half/three quarter ton market truck jump right to EVs, unlike the F-150 which went from ICE only to PHEV/ICE, and now to ICE/PHEV/EV
But "towing as bragging rights" really only applies to individual truck ownership. There are certainly plenty of those (I'm one), but that sort of thing doesn't matter to fleet owners who care about TCO and if it will do what they need. A 30k tow rating on a company truck that spends the week towing an 8000 lb construction trailer around doesn't matter, and any sane company won't bother with an obscene tow rating if a lower one is fine. That doesn't mean you should be towing at the rating, but a 12k tow rating for an 8k trailer is totally fine. If, in the deal, you get lower operating costs and site power, so much the better.
But I just don't think a 3/4 or full ton BEV makes much sense. The range hit you take towing a large trailer (especially a 5th wheel RV) is substantial, and subject to a lot of things you don't have much control over, like winds. A stiff headwind or even a crosswind can make a huge difference in range on a tank of fuel.
Putting something like a 200hp diesel (rated for continuous operation) in with a 50-80kWh battery pack for a truck like that gets you an awful lot of nice things. No, it won't be cheap, but trucks aren't cheap anyway.
If you had something like a full ton class truck, 50 or 80 kWh battery pack, 150-200hp diesel, 240V/50A out from an inverter when stopped, you've built something that will do just about every work truck duty out there, as well as being exceedingly appealing to the RVers, because now they have a full hookup anywhere they are - and if the battery is low, oh well, the engine kicks on to charge things for a while. $100k, $120k for such a thing, with a decent interior, isn't at all unreasonable. It just has to be able to take a 5th wheel hitch.
What I can say for certain though is that farm trucks rarely travel over 200 miles in a day. Hauling stuff is mostly an adjunct activity for farmers. They don't generally spend 10 hours a day doing it.
The same is true for the other natural market for a truck like the lightning - which is contractors and construction/maintenance trades. An electrician or farm equipment repair technician isn't earning money when in their truck; they use them to get themselves (or their employees) and their stock-in-trade materials to and from worksites. Yes, those worksites might be scattered, and they may spend a couple or three hours a day getting around to various sites, but that's it. 200 mile days would kill their profitability.
Personally, I drive a Toyota Tacoma for farm work. Smaller than an F-150, but big enough for most of what I do. I'm very interested in the F-150 Lightning, and seriously considered putting a deposit on one, but as I only put about 1500 miles per year on my truck, I just couldn't justify the cost.
What's not to like? Honest question.
Until these issues get sorted out, electric will remain niche. What I don’t understand is why all-electric gets all the hype, while hybrid avoids most of these issues while still polluting less. It’s similar to the hype around 100 percent self-driving, when lesser solutions like front-collision avoidance are proven and ready to go right now. They’re just not as sexy.
Not even remotely my experience with farms. Maybe you’re only visiting lifestyle farms and dude ranches or something.
Yeah, they usually are just hauling their goods up their dirt road to a stand on the side of a road, but they do occasionally make a long trip to sell some cows, pigs, or horses and I don't think they want to deal with midtrip charging.
I'm not sure what kind of farmer you imagine this is called, but these guys are just called farmers in my neck of the woods.
As a child my friend loved on a ranch. Multiple trucks and Jeeps.
Where I live now there's a lot of farm and ranch land near the city. Drive by any and you'll see multiple trucks.
Anecdotally, I'm highly suspicious of your data.
Does this really apply to farmers?
However for most folks and small businesses, a vehicle is far too expensive a capital asset to buy a brand new one with full knowledge that there are some situations in which it will be just useless. Trucks in particular are purchased for their versatility, and electric sacrifices that for…what exactly? So the buyer feels good about being green? That’s a good formula for a niche product.
But I get where you're coming from. This would be more attractive in the future when there are more charging stations (if they are fast).
Pulling a heavy trailer (say 8,000lbs) will take that down to 10mpg but the electric model might not even break 100 miles towing.
Adding weight to the bed has nearly zero aerodynamic penalty and so doesn't change mileage much at all as long as the road is level and is not start and go traffic.
Towing on a highway, is primarily an aerodynamic concern because most trailers have the aerodynamics of bricks and are (partially) outside the designed aerodynamic envelope of the rest of the vehicle.
ICE vehicles take a noticeable hit on range when towing, even considering ICEs become more efficient when under moderate loads. There's no reason to hope that EVs won't suffer at least as bad, and 50% range loss is normal in an ICE when towing something large like a camper.
Driving while towing will take the same amount of extra power, whether you have a gas engine or electric motor. Higher load on the motor = less range. I think cutting the range in half would be pretty surprising (in a good way).
In Australia, where the myth of vast commutes is awesomely loud, especially amongst farmers and tradies, when the stats on average drive per day are abundantly clear this isn't the predominant problem. Is it a problem? Yes. For a small but vocal minority of the future drivers of these EV.
Diesel isn't going to disappear overnight. Trucks are alive and well now, which will be there to be used, with ICE, for decades. The production might cease, but that hardly stopped the VW/Microbus from living beyond its expected lifetime, spare parts and all.
Point a farmer at an opportunistic cost saving and reliability improvement on a $750k+ piece of farm machinery and they'll go there when their first neighbour shows the bottom line difference. They're like penguins on the ice-floe, nobody wants to be the one finding the lurking leopard seal in the water. But once its clear a combine/thresher/header machine works better, cheaper by battery, and has lower TCO they'll be all over it like a rash. If you combine that with huge roof surface area on sheds and opportunistic cooling/shade from PV cells they'll be off-grid power advocates in seconds.
Will farmers north of 50 have problems with snow in winter? Sure! Oh damn, ok, lets tank the entire EV market because a cohort in the midwest with snow can't "win".. Thats basically what we're seeing here. Everyone assumes they are 'normal' and their 'normal' usage risks determine the entire market. The F150 sells internationally as well as domestically, its market includes a lot more than RV hunters in the forests, and people north of the snow line. Most of the world lives south, the vehicle will sell everywhere if the price is right.
We'll adapt.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/lightning-bottle-ford-f-15...
[2] https://www.mromagazine.com/features/ford-looks-for-lightnin...
[3] https://www.grainews.ca/news/a-look-at-the-all-electric-ford...
[4] https://www.worktruckonline.com/search/?q=ford+lightning
[5] https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/article/2021/0...
[6] https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/ford-wires-it...
[7] https://www.grit.com/tools/machinery/electric-pickup-trucks-...
Always good to see that other fields have their own weirdly specific industry rags, too :)
it will likely make some people money though
Bull semen, certainly, but never cow sperm.
Everyone is coming out with an awesome BEV but no one other than Tesla ship any volume.
Rivian shipped under 1000 in 2021. Chevy stopped basically all shipments due to cars exploding. In 2022 I think the new Cadallic Escalade is coming, which had rave reviews but I am suspecting will be < 10k units.
Almost doesn’t matter how good these EV alternatives are if they can’t ship 100k units in the US.
2) Millions of non-Tesla EVs are sold every year. Tesla is not the market leader in all regions.
3) The US is not the world's largest EV market. We're less important than Europe or China to car manufacturers when it comes to EVs.
4) GM EVs outsold Tesla EVs last year in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Shanghai
How long have GM had factories in China?
> "General Motors Co. traces its [Chinese] roots back to 1908. GM has 10 joint ventures, two wholly owned foreign enterprises and more than 58,000 employees in China." - From their website
It's in the link I already provided. Here's another source:
https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/giga-shanghai-november-2021...
Your original comment that GM pumped out more EVs than Tesla in China is obvious since Tesla has just begun their production volume out of Shanghai with any scale, so not sure the point you were trying to make. With Berlin coming online soon too, Tesla is going to have a much bigger footprint in the EU/Asia combined.
I assume you mean in units sold rather than revenue acquired via EV sales? Because what GM is selling in China is just one step above a golf cart and can’t bring much money in. Also, I wonder if the product is more SAIC than GM, these are still Chinese majority owned JVs after all.
You are looking at totally different markets. The model 3 is going to big cities, replacing ICE Toyotas and Hondas, fairly big cars for a middle class that wouldn't tolerate driving around in a golf cart (nor would such cars probably be allowed in those cities). Then we have small towns and rural areas where the $6k car is targeted. They wouldn't be interested in a model 3 either, nor would they be interested in an ICE Toyota Camry.
That's technically true but very misleading. GM owns a 44% stake in SAIC-GM-Wuling[1] which manufactures the Hongguang Mini EV. The Hongguang Mini costs $4,162-$5,607, seats four people, has a 17.4hp motor, and 75-106 miles of range. Its top speed is 62mph. It does not support fast charging so it can only add 12.5 miles of range per hour.
The Hongguang Mini is too unsafe to be sold in the US. It has no airbags and performs horribly in crash tests.[2] The battery pack also has minimal safety features[3] and no thermal management, meaning it will degrade quickly in hot climates and can be destroyed by below-freezing temperatures.
In short: A company that GM partially owns sold more roided-up golf carts than Tesla sold cars.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-coIUMHp4g
3. https://www.winackbattery.com/news/Internal-Structure-of-SGM...
Rivian is basically a startup, they shouldn't be lumped in with everyone else's capabilities. As for the existing brands, I don't think it's because they're not capable. They're still printing money from their current vehicles so they're slowly rolling over engineering resources and funding to the EV side of things. The EV truck market is basically non-existent. Rivian is realistically the only manufacturer who has to worry about competition for the next few years. The F-Series generated $42 billion in revenue for 2019[1] without any EV powertrains offered. If Ford put 100% of their engineering manpower and funds towards EV's tomorrow they would cripple themselves.
[1]https://thenewswheel.com/ford-f-series-42-billion-revenue-20...
The US EV market is one third the size of the European and Chinese EV markets:
https://www.ev-volumes.com/country/total-world-plug-in-vehic...
And December sales Tesla is still #1 https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/01/Europe-Electric-Vehi...
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/15-of-auto-sales-in-eur...
https://eu-evs.com/bestSellers/ALL/Groups/Year/2021
Volkswagen owns many automative brands (VW, Audi, Skoda, SEAT, Porsche, etc.) so sales are split across more brands and models:
https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/group.html
The volume issues with Tesla in its initial days are well known.
I think Ford can step up.
About those 200k reservations-- I wonder if all those people have assessed their garage space. I've owned an F150, they are huge.
[1] https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
If this works as advertised, this could be a huge selling point for a lot of rural areas.
I can’t imagine that the backup power from a truck is truly a replacement for a generator. More of a “nice to have because you can” rather than something you’d depend on. If you’re really worried about backup power, you’d have a generator in place.
When I used to live out in the sticks, I lost power at least once a week, maybe more. Usually for less than an hour, but sometimes for half the day. I'd wager over the course of the year I didn't have power for maybe 300-400 hours of it.
I'm not sure how a Rivian or the new F-150 Lightning would compare to a more typical rugged off-roading vehicle (e.g. Raptor, a TRX, or a Rubicon), let alone a truly heavy-duty one (Land Rover Defender, H1, or G-Class).
Maybe bringing some gas + a generator would be a viable contingency? At the expense of some weight, of course.
That's a little bit of a stretch. You can walk a 5gal tank all sorts of places roadside assistance won't go, though that's largely a reflection of corporate policy than physical inability.
Also it's way harder to get someone to give you a charge if you run out due to circumstance in the middle of nowhere whereas pretty much anyone will give you a gallon of fuel if you're truly out.
Not really. You can count on a gas pump existing within some distance of a sparse population. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find an outdoor "public" power outlet when you need one.
Having that number on the dash saying 600 miles left as I enter into remote-ish areas is so comforting. So much so that I've already ruled out upgrading to the Lightning and instead am targeting the Powerboost, which keeps my range, increases my fuel efficiency (though not by a ton) and has a world of possibilities for utilizing the battery for heating a camper or a toy hauler -- I don't have one of those but if I had a Powerboost I might consider one for snowmobile camping or ATV camping.