5 ms·

What kind of truck do you currently have? What's your thought on F150 lighting, Rivian, and Cyber truck?

by pcurve 5y ago

tomcam 5y ago
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.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > I’m in the Seattle suburbs 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.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Ford stats show a very wide demographic range? https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2020/06/22/The-Great-American-Truck-Survey-2020.pdf https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
  - philistine 5y ago
    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.
  - travisb 5y ago
    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.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  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.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Many states are having severe problems with their grids. In California, for example, brownouts happen hundreds of times a year. A sharp increase in the number of electric vehicles will pose a very heavy strain on the grid at night when they recharge.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      You realize that they only charge at night currently because that's when there's lots of extra grid capacity. Right?
      - tomcam 5y ago
        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.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        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).
        tomcam 5y ago
        Agreed. Does Texas have a lot of coal and nuclear?
- thghtihadanacct 5y ago
  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'.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    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.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    My van smells deliciously of cedar
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    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.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  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
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    The ROI on that was many many many times higer than on electric trucks, just wait til it gets cold and you will see people start complaining.
Syonyk 5y ago
(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.
walnutclosefarm 5y ago
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.

What kind of truck do you currently have? What's your thought on F150 lighting, Rivian, and Cyber truck?

by pcurve 5y ago

What kind of truck do you currently have? What's your thought on F150 lighting, Rivian, and Cyber truck?

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.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> I’m in the Seattle suburbs 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.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Ford stats show a very wide demographic range? https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2020/06/22/The-Great-American-Truck-Survey-2020.pdf https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
- philistine 5y ago
  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.
- travisb 5y ago
  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.
wavefunction 5y ago
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.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Many states are having severe problems with their grids. In California, for example, brownouts happen hundreds of times a year. A sharp increase in the number of electric vehicles will pose a very heavy strain on the grid at night when they recharge.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    You realize that they only charge at night currently because that's when there's lots of extra grid capacity. Right?
    - tomcam 5y ago
      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.
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        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).
        tomcam 5y ago
        Agreed. Does Texas have a lot of coal and nuclear?
thghtihadanacct 5y ago
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'.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  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.
- tomcam 5y ago
  My van smells deliciously of cedar
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  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.
gameswithgo 5y ago
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
- ThomPete 5y ago
  The ROI on that was many many many times higer than on electric trucks, just wait til it gets cold and you will see people start complaining.

Syonyk 5y ago

(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.

walnutclosefarm 5y ago

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.