One of the reasons I like Tesla vehicles is that while they look decent they don’t try to overly differentiate themselves. They look like standard mid-market cars.
I would think that if Rivian is targeting the truck/full-size SUV crowd then they would lean on a more traditional look?
The pickup truck is the new SUV, but come on. At least let me pretend to consider if I can fit a sheet of drywall in there.
Also, I hate,hate,hate the trend of putting the spare under the bed floor, instead of under the frame. Clearly a design decision by someone that doesn't use their pickup bed for picking things up...
To be fair, this is the vast majority of truck drivers. Exceedingly few trucks sold today will ever be asked to do something that requires a truck, most are commuter vehicles driver for social status reasons. A few occasionally might tow a boat.
Kind of like all of the "never been off-road" "off-road vehicles"?
In a sign that the universe has a sense of irony, the F-150 factory promptly caught on fire when they announced this.
A F-150 was sold in 2018 every 35 seconds. They sold 450,000 of the things in 2018, and that’s not even counting any other truck made by Ford or anyone else. I guarantee you a huge percentage of those do nothing but commute.
And that’s not how status symbols work. It would be more accurate to say that luxury trucks are status symbols, not trucks. Nobody buys a truck as a status symbol, but maybe they buy a nice truck as one. The same statement applies to cars.
Truck owners are buying trucks largely for the feeling of self sufficiency, a fake one given the sheer amount of resources required to operate a modern vehicle, which is what makes it a status symbol. Its exactly the same as someone who “needs” a Jeep because it occasionally snows, even though their neighbor’s Honda Civic is doing just fine in the same conditions.
Also, the idea that a truck is a good snow vehicle makes me giggle. My Subaru always outperformed them in snowy conditions.
But if you want to attack my vehicle choices; I ditched the Subaru when I left Colorado, a location where it was useful, and switched to a small sedan when I moved to LA. More reasonable, more efficient, and cheaper to operate.
Seems like a reasonable engineering trade-off for an EV to me; unless you can figure out an equally aerodynamic solution with the spare under the frame. You want to maximize range all the time (by reducing drag), but you only rarely need to access the spare.
If you badly need access to spare all the time and you're willing to sacrifice range 24/7 for it, I'm sure there will be after-market solutions, similar to bike-racks.
Same reason purses don't NEED logos all over them. A lot of buyers of EVs aren't doing it to save the environment - they are doing it to let everyone know they are saving the environment. If your car just looks like a Ford Focus, you lose that.
See http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/21/conspicuous-conservation-... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_conservation.
In a way, they do. [0]
- it is new
- it is gonna to replace the old
- it has better karma / feng-shui
- it has some improvements in user experience - even if there are disadvantages
- there is this "want have" feeling
The Leaf looked awesome, it was the best looking car I ever owned.
The Gen-II Prius ('04-09) was smoother and looked more uniquely-Prius, but it still had pretty normal headlights and stuff. I think it was the most normal of the bunch.
The Gen-III Prius ('10-14) took the Kammback profile even more seriously but still doesn't look totally alien. Unmistakably Prius, though.
The Gen-IV Prius ('15-present) is where the design went completely off the rails, jarring slashy features on an otherwise-watermelon-seed-shaped car.
Oddly they are both beaten by the Audi A4 sedan and several others.
The Chevy Bolt is a wonderful vehicle, but it looks almost exactly like a legacy gasoline car. A regular person could easily mistake it for the current Chevy Spark. Similarly, the Chevy Volt looks almost exactly like a Chevy Malibu. And a Nissan Leaf looks fairly similar to a Nissan Note.
I'm aware that they don't want the car to look too "scary" or unusual, and it's a huge cost savings to re-purpose existing parts/designs. But just as a personal preference, I wish the more EV-focused concept-car-styled designs could actually make it to market.