How the 2021 Ford F-150's onboard generator works
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It keeps us warm or cold. Powers everything. Has entertainment. Shelter. Carries all my supplies. Having a small SUV in the parking lot of the beach turns my morning trip into a whole day trip with my toddlers napping and taking a break in the shade.
It’s what gets me about the supercarriers. If warfare suddenly disappeared, you’ve got these mobile bases you can anchor off the coast of a disaster zone with massive capabilities for logistics, a nuclear power plant, water purifier, hospital, machine shops, etc. Etc.
So this F150 power generator thing resonates with me.
A "supercarrier" would be a lorry-sized one e.g. a monster like an EX70-HDQ[0]. A smaller BOO would be something like a maximog or a rally vehicle. There are also conversions for SUV-size chassis replacing the entire back half.
My 32' Winnebago sleeps me, wife, kids and dogs has a 4000w generator and 3000w inverter which runs off two golf cart batteries charged by shore, generator, alternator and 300w of solar.
It has 80 gallons of gas, 70 gallons of water, air conditioning, and giant awning and tons of storage. I carry just about all my tools.
It even has a built in desk in the passenger side dash which I can work remote from using the hotspot / router with external antenna.
I driven cross country multiple times towing my Jeep and taken it pretty far off the grid. Its not an off-road vehicle but you would be surprised.
There are a lot of choices in between mine and a Unicat as well, like a 4x4 Class B or Super C. Some of them are starting to do large 48v secondary alternators with lithium banks and no generator while still being able to run the A/C for up to 8 hours before recharging.
Its actually very hard to travel by normal car or air now, we just like taking the RV, the space, bathroom and kitchen while driving down the road, our own bed...
You really do need to be handy to own one at this point, it's like a 70's American car. Well the engine and transmission and chassis is fine but everything around it, wow. Luckily it is easy to work on and modify.
I have thought long and hard about trying to start a "Toyota of RVs", I think if you could make a solid, simple well made RV you could dominate the market.
Class A diesel RVs are designed for retired couples to drive around the country and live quite well. They plummet in price the first few years and if you're past 10 years old (usually harder to get a loan), the price drops more, often to 25% or less of the new price.
They have pretty beefy systems, with 7kw diesel generators quite common. The engine and chassis will be designed to flat tow a car (or a huge trailer).
And some have pretty interesting features, like tile floors, two bathrooms, in-floor heating, two bathrooms and washer/dryers.
but yeah, choose a good brand.
The sprinter type campervan setups are a little more practical but obviously trade for space.
Plus when the trailer falls apart, which they all do because they're built like crap, you can just replace it independent of the pickup.
But fifth wheel is an overkill for most:
For most of them you need F-250/350 instead of F-150. F-250 doesn’t drive as nice as F-150 when unloaded. Preferably you need long bed (not to hit the cab when backing up). With the crew cab this is the longest truck possible. Modern diesels are expensive to run and maintain, 7.3L Godzilla just shipped, you want to give it couple years to get proven...
Then fifth wheel is harder to hitch up and you loose huge portion of bed space. Also bed is nearly impossible to access when hitched up.
Basically, unless you really need the space, go with 25-30ft trailer and F-150 (with 6 1/2ft bed of course, not this short nonsense).
It's debatable whether the truck+trailer is easier to manage than the RV + small car. Though since we tend to take the RV to state parks and such where we don't need to drive after we park, we rarely take the car.
I can tell you its really nice having the RV be usable down the road for the bathroom and the space.
I tow a 4 door Jeep which is actually much better for getting around and exploring once we are at our destination than a full size truck due it its smaller size and off-road capability.
https://www.rvmobileinternet.com for cellular / internet connectivity.
If I'm taking a mobile home or... that thing... somewhere, it's generally a planned event. Whereas my "mobile base of operations" should be something that's always with me during my day-to-day, but also has a significant amount of resources I might need.
https://www.unicat.net/en/info/TC51hallround-MANLE142804x4CC...
I'm going to be building one based off an LMTV as soon as I can find a place to do it.
I drive a Land Rover Defender 110 and camp in the back of it. If I was looking for something for long-term camping, or to take a family, I would just buy fifth wheel trailer and pull it behind my Ram 2500, where I have a reliable and strong Cummins turbo diesel.
Every option is about trade offs. For my use an LMTV makes sense.
Minor: piques anyone's interest.
Don't know why, but I've always loved cabover trucks.
It became kind of fashion thingie for those who don't understand cars, or basic physics. Soccer moms love them, since they often don't have good driving skills, it puts them higher so they have better overview of the road (while blocking any view of those behind). Pollution, higher maintenance costs, much higher danger of car rolling during accident (and break your neck) be damned.
Then there is category of these tiny 'SUV' (I think proper term is crossover), which are just bigger shopping carts, being a higher above ground. So from driving perspective, the worst combination - small, badly maneuverable car.
We still have big wagons for those who are numerous / carry around a lot of things. These I prefer - they drive well, trunk space is enormous. Compared to most SUV which look big on the outside, but not so much inside.
/rant
For a start, SUVs don't go off road. They are road vehicles. We had off-roaders for a long time in the form of Land Rovers etc. We called them 4x4s and they weren't really comfortable to drive on the road.
I like the idea of having the right vehicle for the right purpose. If I had to travel to work by car (which I've done before and don't want to do again), I would like to drive a Mercedes "Smart" or VW Up, or similar. These are crap, consumable, plastic cars, but they do the job just fine. For the weekends? A sports car or hot hatch would be fun. For long trips and camping? An SUV would be great.
SUVs and the much higher number of HGVs now also tear up the roads, which isn't great for your sports car. You'll have a better chance in an SUV yourself. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
The problem is that, in the UK at least, it's really only possible to run one car for various reasons (even if you could afford the depreciation on multiple cars). So the SUV becomes the default. Also I just want a reliable car. I don't want it to be a project and constant worry that my investment is going to fall apart. That means Honda or Toyota. But if I have to choose between the regular hatchback or SUV, I might as well go SUV because it will be more fun. There's the Civic Type-R. I owned one, but I don't really want one of the newer ones (I don't need 300+ bhp in a hatchback).
I rammed into the back of an Uber Cadillac SUV (who had hit someone in front of them) on the highway doing about ~50-60km/hr upon collision and my subcompact car completely crunched in while the SUV bumper barely had a scratch.
This almost makes me want an SUV rather than not. But I get what you're saying.
It's like wearing masks during COVID, it mainly only prevents you from getting others sick, not the other way around... but that's half the battle.
Typical SUVs (excluding more modern car-chassis based ones) use body on frame construction - the chassis of the car is a big and heavy steel ladder. It doesn't have the same crash performance - even though it may look less damaged, the accelerations experienced by the passengers are greater.
SUV are objectively safer due to size and mass. This comes at the cost of efficiency (fuel, space), and damage to other "softer" traffic participants (pedestrians, cyclists, smaller cars).
This effect is exaggerated by the fact that when braking or hitting something all cars lean forward and the nose goes down. So a small car crashing into the back of a SUV when both are braking (or the SUV just impacted someone in front) will definitely slide under the SUV and see a lot of damage. Also the back of a car is not designed to crumple as much as the front so it will see a lot less damage.
And because I see a wave of downvotes without an actual counter-argument, I will leave this here [0] and quote the essential:
> Research by the Highway Loss Data Institute shows that drivers and passengers in a hybrid are 25% less likely to be injured than those in the same model with a standard gasoline engine. And the death rate for drivers in hybrid crashes also was lower. The hybrid advantage is all about weight, it turns out.
Putting 2 and 2 together, between cars built to the same safety standards and level of quality, the heavier one is safer. I though this would be obvious for the technical crowd, especially the ones willing to get past reading just the first half a sentence from a comment.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/crash-test-hybrids-safer-than-o...
There are many small conveniences that come from having a personally owned vehicle, but I would ecstatically spend an hour or two loading/unloading my car every couple weeks when I go on a trip as long as it meant I didn’t have to sit in traffic for hours every morning because everyone wants to have their own personal aircraft carrier sitting outside their office for whatever reason.
But the car industry at large is so invested in this car-as-sanctuary idea that jumping into a random rental is often a frustrating experience. Pairing a phone for navigation or audio is a whole big thing. Finding a place that can rent a companion bike rack or other accessory like that for an outdoor trip is difficult, and supplying your own is usually forbidden - if you even feel comfortable betting on a generic enough model. Those 1% of activities where I really benefit from a car can be really difficult without the aid of a friend who owns their own personal vehicle, and it feels like that is by design a lot of the time.
With subways like BART allowing bicycles, going around traffic jams and being economical and somewhat social, basically cars, taxis/Uber and public transit are fundamentally different services that strongly overlap.
Which means no one is going to be happy eliminating any of these and that makes it even harder for any self-driving taxi system since it would have to indefinitely navigate human filled roads and would add-to, not replace, all the traffic that exists now, threatening considerable congestion.
Ha! Part of my family owns an auto shop that I used to work at many years ago. I always thought of vehicles as "mobile trash cans" as it is actually quite common for us to be working on a car that has garbage that is level with both front and back seats. Even sometimes with trucks/vans, only with the higher seats that means the garbage is 2 ft deep. Perhaps it is just like their "living room".
The irony is we don't really mind these customers. They are not the ones that try to sue us for getting grease on their seats or scratching their windows. Yes we actually had someone complain that we scratched their window, as if our mechanics just walk around with diamond tipped drill bits putting .5" scratches on random glass.
> Presumably, with power and fresh water, the flight deck could be converted into a rather sizable garden. It even has access to sunlight and protection from pests.
You'd need dirt too, and lots of it.
In such a scenario, it'd probably most practical just to anchor or dock the ship somewhere safe near land, and use its facilities to jump-start a settlement. I'm guessing with the maintenance possible in such a scenario, all the ship's systems would break down within a decade or so (and it'd need to be refueled with enriched uranium at about that point, too), so you really wouldn't want to stay dependent on it for too long.
You could do hydro/aeroponics. You have plenty of fertalizer in the form of human waste, fish waste, and other things.
What vehicles are you driving/living by? Vehicles made in the past 10 years have virtually no smell once the engines are warmed up unless something's wrong with the catalytic converter.
However, even a single diesel vehicle can make the air in a half-block radius harder to breathe for minutes after it passes, even relatively recent ones. It is really shocking to me that such vehicles are legal, even if only by grandfathering in. Maybe I'm uniquely sensitive to them or something.
But even the fumes from my hybrid are a noticeable bummer if I’m out of the vehicle.
I once made a pickup like this for a big camping road trip by putting 100W of solar panels on the canopy roof rails of a 1990s truck. An extra car battery went in the back, and it worked fantastically.
I could keep all of my stuff charged while camping, which let me stick around longer in the forests and parks. And it could buffer enough energy to keep a Switch or laptop charged for the occasional stretch of inclement weather.
Of course, 100W of panels did not generate enough power to run climate control or a refrigerator, but compared to a traditional generator, I thought the silence was worth that tradeoff.
Putting a beefier and smarter generator in passenger cars makes a ton of sense. There's already an alternator anyways, which my '90s donor car manual actually refers to as a "generator". And I think the newer Prius cars, at least the V models, can run climate control off the battery and automatically turn on the engine to recharge it when necessary.
Also, this trend might make thickly-settled campgrounds more palatable. It would be nice if they didn't always turn into a susurration of ancient sputtering generators at sunset.
Oh, and the idea of using the outlets to charge electric dirt bikes? Now that is exciting.
I wasn't on a supercarrier but I did render humanitarian aid in Indonesia from an LHD. This is absolutely one of the missions these ships are capable of.
But imagine if you could retool these ships with a singular primary goal of disaster relief. Imagine if every carrier group was some internationally funded disaster response team.
This isn’t just idle fantasizing; I actually use these capabilities all the time. It’s hard to imagine how much flexibility a well-equipped vehicle gives you when you’re living in a dense urban center without a car (which is how I often live a few years at a time).
And, of course, having a high-quality SUV makes the logistics of my equipment-heavy interests way easier. I often have to lug around scuba gear, ski gear, big rifles, power tools, etc., and often on extremely shitty roads (muddy, potholed, iced, you name it). This would be completely infeasible with a non-“aircraft carrier” commuter vehicle.
As an additional side note, many of the spaceships in the series are sentient and have interesting names, two of which SpaceX used to name their own drone ships.
I actually don't think solar panels are really needed today unless you're doing stationary vanlife, like setting up an aid camp in Africa. It's just so much simpler to charge your battery from your alternator while you drive.
Anyway, me weekend vehicle is a VW T5 Transporter and you can pry it’s dirt spewing 2.5L turbo diesel from my cold. dead. hands. It’s a massive piece of shit with regard to anything bolted to the engine, like the whole rest of the car, but it handles like a dream and uses fuckall diesel.
I’ve owned vans for two decades now. There’s no going back.
I wonder if you could use it to power your house during an outage, given pg&e was trigger happy with turning off northern California's power last year this could be a great use case.
The reason you can't find such a cord at Home Depot is that it's dangerous and a generator should only be connected to a home electrical panel through a transfer switch that prevents paralleling it with the utility supply.
It would also be more economical to install a stationary generator or battery system for emergency power.
Even the 5+1 apartments that are disliked for their uniform aesthetics are a big step up on quality/price than the approaches of decades past.
Interesting that Ford is coming out with a truck with a power supply so closely after Tesla's. Too close I suspect for it to be a copy-cat move. Which leaves 'great minds think alike' and 'someone got tipped off.'
Having a "second aux battery" would be a nice factory option, so you don't worry about draining the starter. There are mods you can do to vehicles to make this work.
I'd like it in an SUV, and I'm willing to bet if offered, folks would jump on it, but I agree it's a lot less likely it'd be heavily used.
Re: Adding another battery, I've considered (and done some napkin math) adding solar panels and a second battery to my car to power the computer I run onboard. But it's something I don't have the time or money to play with right now.
Get the specs of you generator and you can see how much you can sustain while your engine is running. The inverters do usually create a square voltage "wave" rather than a good sine one, but it has never been a problem in my experience.
Under good conditions and direct sunlight, the total power that reaches the earth's surface is about 1000 watts per square meter. The best (commercialized) solar panels right now top out right around 20% efficiency. Ignoring losses due to conversion, you're looking at about 200 watts tops.
Over an entire day of ideal summer conditions you'll maybe get enough power out of it to make a quick pot of coffee.
Not affiliated with them, I just think it's dope and I wish I had a place to plug it in and an excuse to spend that much money.
For example my 2016 vehicle, left undriven, will completely drain the battery after just two weeks thanks to a timed flush and an always on LTE connection. Plus it refuses to run the alternator on any road slower than 35 MpH, even if the battery is almost depleted. Even while idle at a traffic light, it would rather just waste the energy than charge the battery.
So this sounds fantastic, I'm just glad they're thinking about electrical power AT ALL.
> The generator system is completely separated from the rest of the vehicle's electrical system, adding a layer of safety and ensuring that any Pro Power system problems will not impact the drivability of the truck.
This is a double edge sword though. While obviously you don't want your tools draining your starter battery, it also means that any issue with your starter battery cannot be immediately resolved by the two additional 12-volts you already have (at least without tools to physically move them).
Essentially you could get left stranded, even while having a completely working 24-volt system. So while the goal is admirable, being able to jump the vehicle from 24-volt would have been a function I would have wanted.
Keep in mind that this is already sort of a thing for cars with manual transmissions. In this case, the proposed supercapacitor is replaced by the kinetic energy you are pushing into the car.
I would like to know if putting my Mazda in Park at a traffic light and revving the engine to 2000 rpm charges the battery. Same question for city driving in "sport" mode (2000 rpm at 30mph). I'm guessing it should work, but I could also just be wasting gas.
I upgraded the battery from factory to a larger capacity, hybrid deep cycle, and that has increased idle discharge time by a couple of additional weeks.
So a low quality OEM battery compounded the issue, but either way the electrical system leaves a lot to be desired.
I noticed this in my 2017 Subaru Outback when I went to jump my wife's car. The car was running, but the battery voltage was only sitting at 12.6v or so. I'm used to a battery putting out 14v or so when the vehicle is running. The extra voltage seems to help a lot when jumping another vehicle. I understand why they did it, but it seems odd. Perhaps it's why my battery died after 3 years, when most others I've had last close to 5.
After I got my license as a teenager my first vehicle was an old Ford cargo van. I installed a 1200W inverter and an extra battery, through a low voltage disconnect to avoid accidentally draining the main car battery. Designed a bracket for it, carefully cut out all the metal bits with a cutoff disc on a cheap tablesaw, took it to a local autoshop and begged them to spot weld it together for me. Got home and realized it was assembled backwards (d'oh!). More work with the tablesaw and some bolts. Went a little overkill on wire gauge the size of my thumb to connect it all (it was fun to fish that under the rockers).
It worked great - I could easily run handtools like hammer drills (this was before they came with batteries) and even managed to power that tablesaw. Toward the end of highschool we built a bunch of theatre sets in the parking lot running off it.
Girls got a kick out of making hot chocolate while we were out in the country stargazing, and loved being able to plug in a hairdryer.
As the van got older and crankier, it was handy being able to flip on the second battery to give it some extra starting juice on cold winter mornings (-35°C).
I did wear out an alternator prematurely but the replacement one lasted the remaining life of the vehicle.
I wasn't planning to buy a new truck but this feature could actually draw me in.
I would say Ford should develop some emergency home power kit, but all you would really need to do is have a transfer switch and a panel installed for accepting the 220v plug. None of that is proprietary and could be installed by any licensed electrician.
The way this is being marketed leads me to believe they have engineered it for fairly extreme use cases. Specifically, the mention of air compressors (i.e. a heavy reactive load) gives me confidence that this can handle other similar devices.
I do expect the duty cycle's going to end up on the high end of the scale for consumer level generators if it's on Ford's warranty liability. 80% would be awesome, anything under 60% is going to be a headache for everyone.
This is probably even a bit better because you have an inverter decoupling the mechanical load compared to needing to have a large enough flywheel to overcome big surges in usage.
In the gulf coast area, you do not get a standby generator because a random thunderstorm takes your power out for 2 hours at a time. You get a standby because a hurricane might deprive you of basic comfort for 7+ days at at a time. There is absolutely no living in this region after a tropical storm blows through unless you have functioning HVAC. 100% humidity at 90F+ for days and days. Even for natives it is too much to bear. If you got any water in your home during one of those storms, having functioning AC is the best way to make sure your house doesnt turn into a mold factory.
At some point you have to assume responsibility for yourself and your own safety. Neither Ford nor some arbitrary electrician can ever be held accountable for whatever fucked-up combination of things I choose to engage with relative to their respective components in this scenario.
Battery operated tools are DC already. They just need a plug to charge and run at the same time. An optional AC adapter too.
I'd be a little surprised if the new truck doesn't just have an outlet built-in.
https://www.instructables.com/id/Run-AC-Tools-on-Batteries-D...
As an aside, I'm really excited for this truck, not because I want one (I don't), but it's a nice, easy way for truck customers to be eased into the idea that hybrid, and eventually all electric trucks can be a viable alternative to ICE trucks. I've said it here before and I'll say it again, once hybrid/BEV trucks outsell pure ICE trucks, that's how you know that electric vehicles are seen as a "mainstream" thing.
Once they get the $$$ from selling only 3.5 hybrids, I hope they offer the hybrid in the 2.7 - and then they'll most likely see a huge jump in hybrid sales.
Putting a generator on it is such an obviously good idea I'm now surprised they didn't do this decades ago.
Even a 2.5kw generator is pretty big: 2'x1.5'x1.5', weighing 80-100lbs. This takes up a significant chunk of space in the back of a pickup truck, plus requires two people to load/unload if necessary. Having power so conveniently available is pretty compelling, especially if it doesn't mean giving up 1/6 of your bed space, and only having the (I assume) significantly quieter truck engine as noise.
They’re all 1500/150 >5L V8’s. The one with the best fuel economy had a carburetor. I would have bought a smaller engine, but the dealers don’t carry them (so they’re much more expensive after incentives) or a ecodiesel, but the EPA completely banned them from sale (dieselgate) the last year I bought a truck.
If the current truck died tomorrow, I might buy this truck for the generator, but the fuel economy is embarrassing. It probably doesn’t offset the embodied carbon of the batteries.
Other than that, screw Detroit. The cybertruck cannot arrive soon enough.
Did you opt for any of the trailer assistance features? Trailer Backup Assist was something I worked a lot on, and I would be interested to hear your thoughts.
Future me will likely have use for a “mere” 2.2KW generator though, and I’m really sick of lugging a > 200lb generator around.
This just replaces a free-standing generator strapped down in the back of the truck. Those tend to be noisy but they're relatively cheap. I doubt most jobsites care that much about the noise, but I suppose tailgaters might like it. On the other hand, tailgaters tend to prefer inverter generators which are very quiet and use very little gas.
In fact, thinking more about it, I wouldn't want to be at a tailgate with an F150 running all day spewing exhaust all over. A small portable generator and an extension cord can be located relatively far away from the gathering - that's a lot harder to do with the truck itself.
Agree with your points, however it is clear you have never used a Honda portable...
This is the one sentence that basically shows the two audiences this truck is going after. I know a couple of farmers who will be glad to ditch the generator. Might even save some effort given they won't have to bring two trucks out (one with the generator, one with the load).
A lot of people around the country don't realize that lots of commercials are tailored for Texas. A big part of those are pickup commercials, saying they're built "Texas tough" or whatever.
Can you imagine having this vehicle in an emergency where there is no power. It could power a refrigerator or a small space heater if necessary. It could help out camping for sure.
Pickup trucks are no longer just work or farmer trucks. They are as luxurious as a high end Lexus with just as much room or more. My brother has an F150 and it is just as comfortable as my wife's Lexus ES350 with a better view out the windshield. The gas mileage is pretty good these days also.
I daily drive a Tesla, but my wife daily drives our F150. It's a great do-everything truck. Hauls the kids and sometimes their friends. Fits their bikes in the back. Hauls bark dust, gravel, big things, etc, whenver we need. Tows our travel trailer a couple times a month. And it does all of this very comfortably.
It's really a great all around vehicle for a lot of families.
Here in Canada it's a great vehicle due to snow and rugged terrain. Even in small towns snow is on the ground 25% of the year but in some places nearly half the year.
I don't care if the truck is gas or diesel as long as it moves. But electric would be preferable for efficiency as long as it can haul a trailer or carry a load.
And let's face it -- cars in general are completely unused at least 95% of the time (EDIT: probably an exaggeration). And you could just as easily say that most of the seats in a car go unused most of the time, even when in use.
So it's really about the gas milage rather than the fact that it has an open bed. Sports cars and SUVs fall into the same category. It's just that a bunch of empty truck beds on the road are more visible than empty seats or over-powered engines.
Because they are the most versatile vehicle on the road, if you are not constrained artificially by narrow roads and heavily taxed fuel.
A similar cultural thing made wagons not cool in the US 30 years ago, and they didn't come back (Which is a shame).
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-make-a-tax-saving-d...
The options for me are a big SUV or a pickup truck. Right now it’s an SUV, but an F150 is looking pretty attractive.
"Cox Automotive data shows Middle America, with household incomes of $50,000 to $99,000, was the segment of buyers who stayed in-market mostly for new pickup trucks and SUVs, while upper- and lower-income buyers shied away,"
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32380257/first-month-ever...
For the First Month Ever, More People Bought Pickups Than Cars (That was May of this month)
Perhaps a couple bags of grass fertilizer.
Perhaps hauling the kids stuff to/from college.
That's about it. The rest of the time they struggle to park them in strip mall parking lots.
In 2019 I spent 1400$ on deliveries and truck rentals. If you own a property, not having to set a 60$ delivery on a 30$ load of bark becomes a major convenience.
My only wonder though, is where you plug in the electronics at the back of the truck bed is exactly where the exhaust is coming out. Seems like they could have at least moved it to a panel outside of the bed on side maybe, but a redirected exhaust would be a good upgrade I would think. Not so bad if youre running a long extension cord to some other place, but if youre trying to use the tailgate as a work surface, seems like that would get old quick.
https://www.ford.com/content/dam/vdm_ford/live/en_us/ford/na...
Makes me question all the other numbers for equipment I know nothing about.
Edit: I looked and apparently they do make 600 watt space heaters. I'm leaving the comment because I still think it's a bad example.
I see you edited it but the image in my head was too cute not to share.
Would be cool if they built a coolant line attachment to bypass the truck radiator and reject heat indoors instead.
https://www.fleetowner.com/news/article/21670162/gm-unveils-...
Where are you getting that from? I don't see any power figure quoted in the article.
As it happens, I worked on that truck while I was an engineer at GM. Its 110V outlets could provide up to 2400 Watts.
"Major defendants in large odometer fraud prosecutions have received prison terms of up to seven years under current Sentencing Guidelines which do not permit parole. Sentences in the 18 month to three year range are common." https://www.justice.gov/civil/case/federal-odometer-tamperin....
You're also assuming people take their cars to a dealer or licensed oil replacement facility.
e.g.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/OBDSTAR-X-100-PROS-Auto-Programmer-...
It's good to know this can be useful more than just figuring out your average speed in mph over the life of the vehicle.
I thought that much of the wear on an engine is load related, and non-linear, such that hours idling at low revs is utterly different from high revs at high power.
The odo reading is useful as an indication of wear on the drivetrain and suspension etcetera.
Hours is useful on a tractor/truck/boat because the engine is normally under load for a majority of the hours.
tl;dr: They took an old concept popular with car modders for ages, elevated it to mass production and will probably make well-deserved bank with construction workers.
edit: I see the Cummins diesel engines for Dodge trucks wasn't available until 1989.
Would other hybrids be able to have a similar feature? Even a Prius or Ford Escape?
This is possible on most hybrid/electric vehicles, e.g. https://pmarks.net/konapower
One of the benefits that is sort of mentioned is running lawn tools from it. This could be a real benefit for small gardening shops that replace their tools with battery/electric tools. Not are they lower maintenance but they are quieter as well so the neighbors are not as annoyed.
>That mobile [7.2kW] welding shop can run for 32 hours continuously on a full tank, making all-day, heavy-duty work possible.
F-150 has a few capacity options. Per a 2019 tech sheet[0], 23gal standard, 26gal on SuperCab or SuperCrew, and 36gal for extended range.
7.2kW for 32 hours is 230.4 kWh. Therefore it's either 10.0, 8.9, or 6.4 kWh/gal.
I would expect the efficiency to be a lot better than a two- or four-stroke portable generator, since the engine design is overall vastly superior.
The caveat is the 7.2kW system is only on the hybrid model, which presumably drains the hybrid battery before switching to generator power, which would imply there's a 7.2kW generator under the hood, which isn't even an option for the non-hybrid model...needless to say I think these are marketing wank numbers and probably have a big but associated with them.
[0] https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
I'd guess 7.2kW is the peak, not the continuous load it is capable of. At least that's usually how generators are marketed, by their peak load capability.
Less happy about the other 90% that will be running their gas guzzlers for hours on end beyond normal to power their camping lights or whatever.
I could be even more wasteful by purchasing a second vehicle and drive that one the rest of the time, but even a small commuter car takes up almost as much room on the highway, even more room at my house, and I doubt the pollution it would save from my truck outweighs the pollution used to create the second vehicle.
I might consider a motorcycle, but to follow the traffic laws, it would take up almost the same amount of room on the highway as a small commuter car.
Really though, it probably depends how long your commute is.
It sort of made sense (or I could at least convince myself it did) when I had a 30-45 minute commute every day. But once I stopped commuting and started traveling a lot, the insurance, registration, state inspection--plus the fact that it meant I really needed to optimize storage in my garage in the winter--it increasingly didn't make sense for the modest number of miles I drove it. Plus it was 20 years old and I didn't really trust it on longer trips.
I, along with OP, am free to be vehemently opposed to the idea that the "default choice" is to drive around, alone, in increasingly-larger vehicles that consume rapidly-depleting fossil fuels and foul up the air for miles. I'm also free to try to jostle, within our political, societal, and governmental frameworks, for changes to those modes being the default or preferred or inexpensive.
Acceptance of the freedom of society does not require understanding nor approval. I grant neither of those things to people who choose to tote around far more vehicle and energy use.
A democratic and diverse society that's structured such that the costs of the negative externalities that result from individual choices are born by the broader community and not the individual. In this particular case, the most immediate and obvious examples include air pollution and associated consequences, as well as additional wear and tear on public roadways.
Of course, the solution to negative externalities is always the same: tax the behaviour (in this case, fuel taxes, taxes on large vehicles, and tax breaks for car pooling, transit, and other similarly less damaging choices) so that the costs are born by the person engaging in said behaviour.
Naturally, whenever folks are asked to pay for these externalities, the reaction is an immediate and passionate rejection of "big government" curtailing "freedoms"--in this case, the freedom to make everyone else pay for the consequences of their choices. Why? Because people want to engage in the behaviour without having to also own the consequences. While that's a form of freedom, it's an irresponsible one, born of a uniquely self-centered conception of "freedom" that bears a striking resemblance to narcissism.
Pity the lack of basic economic education prevents people from understanding that they're free riding on the rest of us by failing to pay for their damaging behaviours.
It's especially ironic since these same objections are often associated with individuals who would decry the welfare state, which similarly involves society bearing the costs to support individual behaviours; it's just much more honest about it.
But this particular life choice has massive, civilization-changing externalities that aren't priced in, and is then additionally subsidized on top of that.
Over a 200 year window starting in 1900 or so, the personal vehicle is probably one of the two or three most destructive developments.
NB: Not being critical of anyone's personal choice, but of the market/system that enables those choices by failing to properly price carbon and road infra. In particular, I've been known to drive my SUV to work.
This is not “I enjoy having my house painted orange but my neighbors don’t like it.”
https://www.harborfreight.com/8750-watt-max-starting-gas-pow...
However, it weighs over 200lbs, and is really noisy.
It runs 9 hours at idle. I wonder how long the ford will run at low wattages, and how the gallons per hour compares between the two. (Presumably the hybrid truck does much better at low wattage than the generator or the conventional truck).
Per the article, ~85 hours
For anyone else having trouble accessing the page.
Digital maintenance logs
Seriously, how useful would that be? A simple onboard SQLite database (or even text file) you can add stuff to via a phone app. That way, when someone asks "when was the last time this car had an oil change?" you can simply check the logs. You can check when your wiper blades were last replaced, etc. If it's standard enough, Jiffy Lube can update it with whatever work they did.
For now I just settle for a paper logbook in the glove compartment...
This is pretty cool too.
This is how Ford responds to climate crisis!
Damn these fools.
Using every little thing as a reason to interject “What about the climate crisis!?!”, no matter how irrelevant it may be to the actual problem, is just going to lead to exhaustion and make it more likely that people will ignore the issue entirely in domains where it actually does matter.
BTW, How do you quantify "little"?
Fine for occasional use but you'd be better with a real generator if it was regularly required. Also, for bonus points the power doesn't go out when someone needs to go pickup an extra sheet of ply.
And to your second point, they'll just have to buy two Ford trucks!
I worked as a SWE intern one summer for Daimler (Mercedes) and we were doing some testing one day where we drew the batteries down on our 24V bus that we were working on. My boss was skeptical of my idea that we use both of the 12V support cars we had to jump the 24V bus. I eventually prevailed and we jumped the bus without incident.
That's two whole Mac Pros!