> The price isn't right for small businesses. These trucks are quite expensive
So are RAM trucks and I don't think they're hurting for customers.
I think there are two fundamental issues. One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US - i.e., if you're progressive, you're supposed to hate them and see them as the symbol of the gun-totting macho redneck culture, and if you're conservative, you're supposed to love them because they're gas-guzzling freedom machines that "own the libs". An electric pickup straddles these political choices in a hard-to-market way.
The other problem is that electric pickups don't really solve any pressing problem for the buyer. They're more expensive up front, more expensive to keep running (unless you also invest a lot of $$$ into solar), and harder to repair, but they don't boast better specs... well, except for acceleration, which isn't a huge selling point for trucks.
> One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US
Based on my personal experience traveling, there's a more practical reason for the political divide.
I spend a good portion of my life in rural parts of the US these days, where most of the residents are pretty conservative. But these are also parts of the country where I get nervous when I'm on 1/4 tank of gas. If you're routinely out in places where the nearest gas station might be > 50 miles away, you also see a dip in e-vehicles for very practical reasons.
When I'm at home in a city, it makes perfect sense to own an e-vehicle: typically I'm only driving a few miles a day, and the car spends most of it's time at my house or in a parking garage. When I'm out on business, and driving across hundreds of miles of barely inhabited land, I cannot imagine the stress of having an electric truck. It's not just about being 50 miles from a gas station, it's about the time it takes to charge on top of that.
In rural parts of the country, especially when you're out working, you can easily be putting on mileage combined with being far enough away from a charger that it just doesn't make sense to have an e-vehicle.
I do know someone who bought a Tesla after debating it for a long time. And it was only after getting comfortable with the range for a mostly weekly drive into the country.
The vast majority of truck owners do not live in these sparse / long distance situations. There just aren’t that many people as a % of the population that live that rural. Whilst a real factor for some, that is not the main reason behind the political divide over trucks.
What do you think constitutes “many”? The US Census says 20% (e.g. 60 million) are rural, and places like where I live (a small city of 50k surrounded by lots of farm land) don’t count, but it’s very rural when it comes to things like Superchargers.
i tried to find some data that isnt chatgpt. [1] & [2] show that about 60-65% of pickups are owned by people living in urban/suburban settings. of the rest, its kind of hard to find a breakdown for situations like your own, but lets guess that roughly half live in towns that are big enough to get superchargers in the near term. That makes, ~80% of pickups sold in places where you can expect to have charging infrastructure either now or soon.
Try this map: https://supercharge.info/map , it has a feature called "range circles". If you set it to 50 miles, you'll see that most of the country is well within 50 miles of the nearest supercharger. Including almost all of Texas.
At 100 miles of range, you only have a couple of blank spots.
With third party chargers, there's really only one blank spot in Montana. At this point, the range is already a solved problem.
Earlier this year, I did experiments with placing stations manually on the map and using the US road networks to calculate the isolines. With just about 70 more stations, you can make any point on the public road network in the entire contiguous US lie within 50 miles of the nearest charger.
So the charging availability is likely going to be solved completely even during the current shitty admin.
> It's not just about being 50 miles from a gas station, it's about the time it takes to charge on top of that.
At 325kW charge rate (common on recent chargers), you're looking for maybe 20 minutes to get enough charge to reach your destination.
The kinds of situations that drive range consideration for things like trucks is that your planned route suddenly becomes unavailable after you've already burned most of your range. Range anxiety isn't about the ideal case.
I've had several situations in the Mountain West when roads suddenly closed <25 miles away from my final destination (and fuel). Some of these required upwards of 100 mile detour on rural roads with almost no civilization. That detour was not part of the original range calculation. For an EV the detour may not even be an option, you have to go backwards to a major highway to find a charging station that may be in range.
Hell, I've nearly come up short in an ICE vehicle a couple times. I try to keep 150-200 miles of spare range on my vehicle when I am in that kind of country. That is hard to do on a typical EV.
I just drove 100mi in freezing temps (around 25F) at mostly interstate speeds (70+) mph. I completed my trip around 95% of EPA. Maybe a function of the quality of your EV.
So if I have a vehicle with let's say 250 miles of range, you want me to let it get to 100 miles at least left to drive 100 miles to the charger, then drive 100 miles back, leaving me with 50 miles of range until I have to do it again?
I'm not really against electric anything, but not following the logic of the examples in this comment.
Being within range of a charging station doesn't mean you can charge, it means you can get there. So yes, in a crisis, it means you could charge without risk of being stranded. But looking at most of the places I've been on that map, it would require me to go out of my way, often times an 1hr or more, to charge.
For gas this isn't a problem because gas stations are not just within a certain radius of me, they are on my route. But in your map, one of the towns I'm frequently in would require a 75 mile detour to charge, which doesn't really work.
“There’s at least one spot within 100 miles where you can wait 20 minutes to get enough charge to get to the next charger” is not an argument that will convince someone to give up the convenience of the gas station.
The convenience argument works for a small segment of the population that road trips a few hundred miles at a time regularly. For the rest of us, EVs are far more convenient. I don't ever go to a gas station, and every day I start out with 320 miles of range. I stop at the EV equivalent of a gas station two or three times a year. I've saved a lot of time not having to get gas every week.
The changes are not limited. Gas pumps are everywhere. EV chargers are much more limited which means you have to stop where they are. You can make the trips, but sometimes it means you are stopping to charge in places you didn't want to be which can be a significant change. Worse the places you might want to be often don't have a charger so it can mean stop to charge in some gas station you don't want to spend half an hour at, then drive 10 minutes to the museum you want to be at. (even in the rare case there is transit at the gas station, they don't want you parking at the charger for 3 more hours after you are fully charged)
If you're up in Neah Bay, WA (and I have been out there in the past so this isn't a fantasy scenario) and suddenly realize you need to charge, you need to drive over an hour and ten minutes to Forks, WA. But they only have a 250kW charging station, so you're going to need to wait 30-40 minutes. Now if you need to get back to Neah Bay, you're going to spend a total of 3 hours.
And, for my case, Neah Bay, WA is closer to the nearest charging station than where I most typically am for work.
If you _live_ in Neah Bay, you likely use your home charger. There are also slow chargers in nearby hotels for tourists.
If you are traveling, through then you just plan to have enough charge to reach the next charger (50 miles away in Forks).
I know that area well, I travel through it every several months. It also does not have a lot of gas stations, and the existing ones are about $1.5 over the regular price per gallon.
F150 has a 130kWh battery, so heating is not an issue. Height changes are also not a problem. There are very few areas with large altitude changes, and even fewer ones that you'll likely need to pass through regularly.
This leaves mostly mountain passes around the Sierra mountains. And by some strange coincidence, they have plenty of superchargers in the vicinity.
The rest of the country can be, to the first order, considered flat. E.g. elevation change between Charlotte and Charleston is mere 300 meters.
It's mostly a wash, the efficiency on the descent balances the climb, and overall you get respectably close to the same range you'd have gotten on a flat route.
I rented a mach-e recently. Went up to Snoqualamie pass from seattle. I used over 60 miles range in 10 miles on the steep part at the end, 1/6th. Going the other way I got a maybe 20% boost in distance over flat. There were a few places I was able to regen-brake, but I never had the battery go up, only stay flat. And a few times I lost enough speed that I didn't handle an interim flat well. I was extremely disappointed.
It turns out friction and drag are still things. On a pure downhill you would be able to roll, but it's not as good as going down is bad.
I also found that the car did a lot worse rolling down hill than my mini-cooper manual when I just put the clutch in, which got up to hairy speeds. Heck vehicle seemed to have more inbuilt resistance to just rolling than the fire engine I've run down that hill.
Overall I got 90 total miles of range and hit the flat at 10% battery. I was able to get 290 miles driving in seattle with the same vehicle.
It might have been affected by the driving mode you were in?
For instance, one pedal modes (across manufacturers) tend to much highly favor regenerative breaking over friction brakes. Of the models I've driven such modes often seem to give you better feedback in the sweet spots of the pedal curve when you are just rolling and not braking/accelerating.
Additionally, in my experience rental cars are more likely to be in sports modes when you pick them up (I think some of the rental car places may even do this as policy to make customers happier when they rent them?), and down shifting them to more balanced energy modes (Ford's is called "Engage") can mean a huge difference in practical range.
I wouldn't buy a mach-e to baby it and feather the pedal, like what's the point.
I have several fun to drive relatively fuel efficient cars that are sunk costs. I work from home, they're just getting old. I have a pickup to go do dirty things like duck hunting.
The ev seems great for driving to work (I work from home) or around town. I was very unimpressed with it's short trip range and efficiency on a hill (whole trip empg was 44). I spent half as much time at the charger as I did driving. I'm sure it'll get better. Much higher charging speed would help a lot (Mach-e is limited to 150). The extended range battery would help.
Any other sub 3.5s 0-60 under 70 evs out there? If you can't tell I don't care about pure efficiency, I care about a fun to drive car that's got better efficiency than an IC and a usable range.
The point of mentioning the driving modes is the reverse of "baby the pedal", let software do that for you. EVs are software-defined cars. They have modes that say "don't worry about efficiency, just waste as much energy as I want" and modes that say "balance efficiency with raw performance". In both you can pedal about the same and the car determines how to balance raw torque versus battery efficiency and regen breaking versus friction braking for you.
Many EVs are just as fun to drive in "balanced" modes as they are in "sport" modes, but your efficiency goes way up. Rental cars seem to think you want "sport" modes that are more inefficient because you want to rev that 0-60 more than you want better trip range. That's maybe a good way to sell the EV as fun to drive, but it's not a great way to sell the EV as useful for long trips.
The trick is the EVs already offer both experiences in their software (because they can, because that's how they work), you just unfortunately need to learn the manufacturer-specific ways to change driving modes to get the most of what you want out of a rental car rather than what the last customer wanted or what the rental company thinks you want without asking you. (If you want both experiences knowing how and when to change modes is even more critical.)
That's weird. Seattle-to-Yakima at 70 mph average speed and 85 mph peak speed is about 1.5x the normal energy use for me (260 Wh/m vs 350 Wh/m). Leaving me with 20% of charge when starting at 100% (260 miles): https://imgur.com/a/Dhs38kJ
And this was during the wintertime, so with a reasonable amount of heating.
A friend of mine lives in Yakima, and loves her electric vehicle. But her trips to Seattle have become much less common, because she has to wait 2+ hours at the halfway point to recharge.
Try looking at the bubble I live in around Martinsville VA. Fortunately if I had a BEV, most trips would be toward chargers though often not very conveniently. A common trip is to Meadows of Dan on 58W - where would you charge?
In general charger penetration appears slower on the East coast to me.
I know congestion can be an issue at some sites, but I have never waited in line to charge in seven years of EV ownership.
In addition, for superchargers, you can see real-time stall availability, so if a particular site was crowded, you could just opt for the next. (Easy enough to do since there are so many).
Unless you are going a long way, you charge at home. And rural areas have a lot of independent housing and outdoor power so it’s easier than for city dwellers.
The limited range and inability to refuel quickly and easily in the middle of nowhere remains a critical deficiency for EV trucks in many parts of the US. Range is something you have to be conscious of even with ICE trucks in some areas even though they have better and more reliable range. There are places where I'd start thinking about fuel once I hit half a tank.
Getting caught out in the middle of nowhere with a dead EV because conditions beyond your control changed the range requirements is a nightmare scenario. ICE trucks do much better in these situations.
Level 1 and 2 charging are something of an equivalent to siphoning gas, and maybe too easily overlooked. Carry a wall plug and dryer plug adapter and you can plug in just about anywhere. RV plug in the camping area of a national park. Utility plug on the back of a work shed in the middle of nowhere.
Won't charge you fast, sure, but can be the difference to charge you enough to make it to the next stop, in some cases.
Yeah, I meant siphon gas truck-to-truck, but it seems most worksites would be wired or have generation of some sort, so mobile charger should be able to do something in a pinch. I have had situations where a normal 1400W wasn’t enough to keep pace with keeping the battery warm enough to make any headway on an actual charge, though, but that remote AND cold is a another level.
V2V (vehicle to vehicle) charging is a standard option supported by CCS and NACS. So far implementations are limited, with most of the current focus on V2H (vehicle to home) or maybe V2G (vehicle to grid). The Ford F-150 Lightning supports V2H but not V2V today. (Interestingly, the Tesla Cybertruck does support V2V.)
That is almost literally the entirety of it. If we could do that, EV would be lit. EV is honestly better for remote environments in most other regards.
Or you know, PUT A FUCKING GAS GENERATOR IN A GIANT BED THAT YOU HAVE OUT BACK.
Im legit suprised this isn't a thing yet. I saw the Rivian gear tunnel when it got first announced, and I was almost sure that they are gonna offer a generator+fuel tank to fit into there for range extension.
You can do an efficient diesel or multi gas 1 Cyl engine, and you can make a system where you can put one or 2 of them in the bed along with any aftermarket gas tank, and now you have something that is "mission configurable".
If you need a truck for work, you're probably going to be towing in it. Now, some of those guys who are hauling are gonna need a 250 or a 350, but a lot of them will do just fine with the 150.
Even if your job isn't hauling, per se, if you work on job sites you wanna be able to haul stuff. Imagine if you showed up to your new Tech Lead job with an 8 year old Chromebook. You'd look a little bit silly.
In addition, it's 2 hours to the nearest big city. So as a practical matter, you're adding an hour to your trip every time you go into town. I like Teslas a lot, but gave you ever been on a road trip in one? It's pretty brutal.
Plus, I feel like, aesthetically, there is a weird block. I would have no problem dumping a load of sheetrock trash in the bed of a new gas truck. For a brand new electric truck? It kind of feels wrong, don't you think? Maybe that is just me being a Luddite, but I really don't have a sense of an electric car as a tool, the way a good truck is.
I think EVs are great as a recreational car, or a useful commuter in the city. I've never seen a Rivian doing blue collar anything.
Interestingly, I live in rural Vermont, and there are a surprising number of Rivians around me - including those set up for contractors, complete with scaffolding in the bed with tools and ladders on them.
That said, we have an F250. I'd love to have an electric truck, but I use mine for towing almost exclusively. If I'm hauling a trailer hours away, I really don't need to deal with the hassle of stopping along the way to charge. I've yet to see a charging station set up for conveniently charging an electric vehicle with a trailer.
When we lived the Bay Area a decade ago, we had a Nissan Leaf, one of the early ones. It only got 95 miles to a charge if you were lucky, but for commuting in the South Bay we absolutely loved it.
Here in Vermont? F250 and a Subaru. I'd love to make the second an electric, but no one actually makes a good AWD electric Crosstrek equivalent that's actually designed for dirt roads and not the city.
Interesting! I lived in Illinois, where they are manufactured, and they were everywhere, but they were a luxury vehicle, I never once saw one as a work truck. I'm a little surprised but it isn't that strange.
My general impression is the product class of a Rivian / 150L is probably closer to a Ford Raptor than it is to a work truck. But interesting to hear that may be changing!
If you're buying a Raptor, that's a luxury purchase for sure. But I do know people who use Raptors to haul, so that kind of makes sense.
With the exception of the most ridiculous of chromosomemobiles, I think most people make a very rational calculation about what they will do with their vehicle, even if it's just being able to help somebody move a couch that one time. Usually it's more than that. And towing is a huge part of that equation.
> I like Teslas a lot, but gave you ever been on a road trip in one?
Not a Tesla but a different EV. I've taken it on about a dozen road trips over the years. It's been fine. I pull off the highway, plug in, go grab a quick snack, get back in the car and go on my way. On a several hour drive it adds an extra 20 minutes assuming I'm not stopping at all in the ICE, not that big of a deal. And honestly I should be doing that stretch break, and I'm often stopping for a meal anyways.
It takes however long I need to charge it to reach my next destination, whether that be the final destination or the next charging stop. Maybe I'm charging for 10 minutes, maybe I'm charging for 20. When I'm on a road trip, there's rarely a reason to charge for more than 20 minutes at any given stop.
The rate of charging is a curve, where at a low state of charge you can dump a lot of energy into very rapidly. When its nearly full, you can't charge it as fast without risking damaging the battery.
This is a massive simplification and not quite what's really going on, but think of the battery having a lot of holes to stick electrons in. If the electrons you're pumping in don't smoothly find a hole, it might damage the battery. When the battery is low, there's lots of holes, electrons can just fly in and they'll probably hit an empty spot. When its nearly full, you have to carefully put the electrons into the holes or else you'll damage it. This is kind of what's going on with charging speeds.
So you probably see these charging times of over an hour or whatever to go 0-100%, but the more important stat to look at is the 0-80% charge time which is often like 20 minutes. That 0-80% time will often be like 20min but the 80-100% can often be another hour or more on top of that.
When I stop to charge the car on a road trip the time I take is usually like 10-20 minutes. There's no reason to spend more time than that, because the charging speed drops dramatically that its not usually worth it unless I really need that last 20% of range. Which I usually don't, because there's usually other spots to charge. And then I get where I'm going and the car will be sitting for a few hours and can charge at whatever speed it wants, I'm not needing it.
FWIW though, I spend way more time in my life pumping gas in my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, even including the time I've spent on road trips on the EV. This is even with my EV having significantly more miles on it over the past few years. Its a question of if I spend an extra 15 minutes a few times a year or more than five minutes every other week.
> Even if your job isn't hauling, per se, if you work on job sites you wanna be able to haul stuff. Imagine if you showed up to your new Tech Lead job with an 8 year old Chromebook. You'd look a little bit silly.
Hey now, my 8 year-old Pixelbook still has 2 more years before it's out of support.
They take about the same time as with an ICE. I stop and charge for 20m whenever I need a restroom break or some food (every couple hours or so). My car generally goes longer without stopping than I do.
If you're stopping often or long, something is wrong with your setup.
> Imagine if you showed up to your new Tech Lead job with an 8 year old Chromebook
But that's like rich people. Nouveau rich sport designer fashion to show off how much money they have, but true wealth doesn't need to show off like that. If the tech lead came in with a battle hardens Chromebook running a distro they created on crostini, I would respect them more, not less.
"More expensive to keep running" might depend on where you live. My wife and I both have EVs and we drive about 2000 miles/month. At just over $.06/kWh our EV charger tells us that we pay about $30/month for "fuel".
The first tire rotation on my car was free, and the next two were about $60 total. The first tire rotation on my wife's car was free. We're both going to need another rotation in a couple of months. Other that that, the original wipers on my car were squeaky and I replaced them for about $40. Oh! And I replaced the cabin air filters myself at the 7500-mile service intervals.
When we lived in a much bigger city, there were time-of-day rates and assistance with the cost of putting in a charger offered by the local for-profit utility. The kWh rate was just over 3X what we're paying now and even that is cheap compared to some regions.
Insurance doesn't seem cheap but we moved from Farmers to Amica and there are a bunch of discounts for having cars with lane departure warning, collision avoidance, etc.
I expect to replace the tires at 40,000 - 50,000 miles based on what other people report they get with their original tires. I do get sad little postcards from the dealer about having our cars serviced because there's no oil changes, the brakes should last forever because of regenerative braking, there's not a catalytic converter to steal, etc.
I'm guessing you're often either towing or you're doing a bunch of shortish drives for construction, etc. purposes--neither of which are a great match for electric.
Indeed, a bunch of short drives would be ideal. My next door neighbor owns a small construction company and he switched from a gas truck to electric, went from filling the truck twice a week to charging at home. More than paid for the truck.
The details matter but just doesn't buy you a lot, especially if you have a second vehicle to drive a handful of miles a week. Per sibling comment, a couple of fillups a week really is a fair bit of driving.
So are RAM trucks and I don't think they're hurting for customers.
I think there are two fundamental issues. One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US - i.e., if you're progressive, you're supposed to hate them and see them as the symbol of the gun-totting macho redneck culture, and if you're conservative, you're supposed to love them because they're gas-guzzling freedom machines that "own the libs". An electric pickup straddles these political choices in a hard-to-market way.
The other problem is that electric pickups don't really solve any pressing problem for the buyer. They're more expensive up front, more expensive to keep running (unless you also invest a lot of $$$ into solar), and harder to repair, but they don't boast better specs... well, except for acceleration, which isn't a huge selling point for trucks.