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(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, wit
by 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.
- jdhn 5y ago>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
- Syonyk 5y agoI 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.