All I want is the work truck equivalent. I don't want all the features. I want it to be cheap and just have basic features. It needs to be reasonably repairable too.
Edit- I've always missed the true small trucks like the 90's era rangers and b2000's. I feel like that's an excellent place for a new ev truck startup to begin. The new rangers and colorados are as big as the old f-150's.
Ford did make a 2000 era electric Ranger though. Perhaps success of an electric f-150 will enable electric trucks in general, and smaller trucks again.
I think solutions like this will be best for the near future for folks who want a car with an electric motor, rather than a cell phone you can rent to drive places.
It seems like every manufacturer is generally going higher and higher grade on feature set and (some) performance metrics, and saying "screw you" basically to maintenance, repairability and general comprehensibility concerns.
The cars I've owned from the 60's up through the 90's all had wiring diagrams that would fit on a few pages and could be maintained, largely, with a handful of tools in a normal suburban driveway. Newer cars seem more and more to require specialized tools or equipment and are harder to debug. Generally the maintenance / repair process is aimed at shops and professionals, not the end user. This specialization is brittle, and unlikely to survive any significant systemic shocks. We've been locking ourselves into this model for decades, and I don't see an easy way out.
I look forward to some high quality open source EV hardware becoming available eventually. That's probably when I'll get an electric car.
Yeah, my old 89 caprice had a computer, but the wiring wasn't too bad. Of course the self diagnostics were not very advanced which makes some troubleshooting more difficult. Ah, the days of bending a paperclip and sticking it into the OBD port...
I bet there's a market niche for what you're describing
I think price is the big issue. The batteries and motors are expensive in a variable cost way. Most of the features use relatively inexpensive sensors or components and have low variable cost. So a consumer sees all these features as justifying the high cost. Removing those features probably wont make it much cheaper (unless maybe you're a separate company that doesn't develop/engineer those features at all).