America's Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Everyone is coming out with an awesome BEV but no one other than Tesla ship any volume.
Rivian shipped under 1000 in 2021. Chevy stopped basically all shipments due to cars exploding. In 2022 I think the new Cadallic Escalade is coming, which had rave reviews but I am suspecting will be < 10k units.
Almost doesn’t matter how good these EV alternatives are if they can’t ship 100k units in the US.
2) Millions of non-Tesla EVs are sold every year. Tesla is not the market leader in all regions.
3) The US is not the world's largest EV market. We're less important than Europe or China to car manufacturers when it comes to EVs.
4) GM EVs outsold Tesla EVs last year in China.
How long have GM had factories in China?
> "General Motors Co. traces its [Chinese] roots back to 1908. GM has 10 joint ventures, two wholly owned foreign enterprises and more than 58,000 employees in China." - From their website
It's in the link I already provided. Here's another source:
https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/giga-shanghai-november-2021...
Your original comment that GM pumped out more EVs than Tesla in China is obvious since Tesla has just begun their production volume out of Shanghai with any scale, so not sure the point you were trying to make. With Berlin coming online soon too, Tesla is going to have a much bigger footprint in the EU/Asia combined.
I assume you mean in units sold rather than revenue acquired via EV sales? Because what GM is selling in China is just one step above a golf cart and can’t bring much money in. Also, I wonder if the product is more SAIC than GM, these are still Chinese majority owned JVs after all.
You are looking at totally different markets. The model 3 is going to big cities, replacing ICE Toyotas and Hondas, fairly big cars for a middle class that wouldn't tolerate driving around in a golf cart (nor would such cars probably be allowed in those cities). Then we have small towns and rural areas where the $6k car is targeted. They wouldn't be interested in a model 3 either, nor would they be interested in an ICE Toyota Camry.
That's technically true but very misleading. GM owns a 44% stake in SAIC-GM-Wuling[1] which manufactures the Hongguang Mini EV. The Hongguang Mini costs $4,162-$5,607, seats four people, has a 17.4hp motor, and 75-106 miles of range. Its top speed is 62mph. It does not support fast charging so it can only add 12.5 miles of range per hour.
The Hongguang Mini is too unsafe to be sold in the US. It has no airbags and performs horribly in crash tests.[2] The battery pack also has minimal safety features[3] and no thermal management, meaning it will degrade quickly in hot climates and can be destroyed by below-freezing temperatures.
In short: A company that GM partially owns sold more roided-up golf carts than Tesla sold cars.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-coIUMHp4g
3. https://www.winackbattery.com/news/Internal-Structure-of-SGM...
Rivian is basically a startup, they shouldn't be lumped in with everyone else's capabilities. As for the existing brands, I don't think it's because they're not capable. They're still printing money from their current vehicles so they're slowly rolling over engineering resources and funding to the EV side of things. The EV truck market is basically non-existent. Rivian is realistically the only manufacturer who has to worry about competition for the next few years. The F-Series generated $42 billion in revenue for 2019[1] without any EV powertrains offered. If Ford put 100% of their engineering manpower and funds towards EV's tomorrow they would cripple themselves.
[1]https://thenewswheel.com/ford-f-series-42-billion-revenue-20...
The US EV market is one third the size of the European and Chinese EV markets:
https://www.ev-volumes.com/country/total-world-plug-in-vehic...
And December sales Tesla is still #1 https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/01/Europe-Electric-Vehi...
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/15-of-auto-sales-in-eur...
https://eu-evs.com/bestSellers/ALL/Groups/Year/2021
Volkswagen owns many automative brands (VW, Audi, Skoda, SEAT, Porsche, etc.) so sales are split across more brands and models:
The volume issues with Tesla in its initial days are well known.
I think Ford can step up.
About those 200k reservations-- I wonder if all those people have assessed their garage space. I've owned an F150, they are huge.
[1] https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
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.
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.
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.
A sharp increase in the number of electric vehicles will pose a very heavy strain on the grid at night when they recharge.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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's not to like? Honest question.
Until these issues get sorted out, electric will remain niche. What I don’t understand is why all-electric gets all the hype, while hybrid avoids most of these issues while still polluting less. It’s similar to the hype around 100 percent self-driving, when lesser solutions like front-collision avoidance are proven and ready to go right now. They’re just not as sexy.
Not even remotely my experience with farms. Maybe you’re only visiting lifestyle farms and dude ranches or something.
Yeah, they usually are just hauling their goods up their dirt road to a stand on the side of a road, but they do occasionally make a long trip to sell some cows, pigs, or horses and I don't think they want to deal with midtrip charging.
I'm not sure what kind of farmer you imagine this is called, but these guys are just called farmers in my neck of the woods.
As a child my friend loved on a ranch. Multiple trucks and Jeeps.
Where I live now there's a lot of farm and ranch land near the city. Drive by any and you'll see multiple trucks.
Anecdotally, I'm highly suspicious of your data.
Does this really apply to farmers?
However for most folks and small businesses, a vehicle is far too expensive a capital asset to buy a brand new one with full knowledge that there are some situations in which it will be just useless. Trucks in particular are purchased for their versatility, and electric sacrifices that for…what exactly? So the buyer feels good about being green? That’s a good formula for a niche product.
But I get where you're coming from. This would be more attractive in the future when there are more charging stations (if they are fast).
Pulling a heavy trailer (say 8,000lbs) will take that down to 10mpg but the electric model might not even break 100 miles towing.
Adding weight to the bed has nearly zero aerodynamic penalty and so doesn't change mileage much at all as long as the road is level and is not start and go traffic.
Towing on a highway, is primarily an aerodynamic concern because most trailers have the aerodynamics of bricks and are (partially) outside the designed aerodynamic envelope of the rest of the vehicle.
ICE vehicles take a noticeable hit on range when towing, even considering ICEs become more efficient when under moderate loads. There's no reason to hope that EVs won't suffer at least as bad, and 50% range loss is normal in an ICE when towing something large like a camper.
Driving while towing will take the same amount of extra power, whether you have a gas engine or electric motor. Higher load on the motor = less range. I think cutting the range in half would be pretty surprising (in a good way).
In Australia, where the myth of vast commutes is awesomely loud, especially amongst farmers and tradies, when the stats on average drive per day are abundantly clear this isn't the predominant problem. Is it a problem? Yes. For a small but vocal minority of the future drivers of these EV.
Diesel isn't going to disappear overnight. Trucks are alive and well now, which will be there to be used, with ICE, for decades. The production might cease, but that hardly stopped the VW/Microbus from living beyond its expected lifetime, spare parts and all.
Point a farmer at an opportunistic cost saving and reliability improvement on a $750k+ piece of farm machinery and they'll go there when their first neighbour shows the bottom line difference. They're like penguins on the ice-floe, nobody wants to be the one finding the lurking leopard seal in the water. But once its clear a combine/thresher/header machine works better, cheaper by battery, and has lower TCO they'll be all over it like a rash. If you combine that with huge roof surface area on sheds and opportunistic cooling/shade from PV cells they'll be off-grid power advocates in seconds.
Will farmers north of 50 have problems with snow in winter? Sure! Oh damn, ok, lets tank the entire EV market because a cohort in the midwest with snow can't "win".. Thats basically what we're seeing here. Everyone assumes they are 'normal' and their 'normal' usage risks determine the entire market. The F150 sells internationally as well as domestically, its market includes a lot more than RV hunters in the forests, and people north of the snow line. Most of the world lives south, the vehicle will sell everywhere if the price is right.
We'll adapt.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/lightning-bottle-ford-f-15...
[2] https://www.mromagazine.com/features/ford-looks-for-lightnin...
[3] https://www.grainews.ca/news/a-look-at-the-all-electric-ford...
[4] https://www.worktruckonline.com/search/?q=ford+lightning
[5] https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/article/2021/0...
[6] https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/ford-wires-it...
[7] https://www.grit.com/tools/machinery/electric-pickup-trucks-...
Always good to see that other fields have their own weirdly specific industry rags, too :)
it will likely make some people money though
Bull semen, certainly, but never cow sperm.
If this works as advertised, this could be a huge selling point for a lot of rural areas.
I can’t imagine that the backup power from a truck is truly a replacement for a generator. More of a “nice to have because you can” rather than something you’d depend on. If you’re really worried about backup power, you’d have a generator in place.
When I used to live out in the sticks, I lost power at least once a week, maybe more. Usually for less than an hour, but sometimes for half the day. I'd wager over the course of the year I didn't have power for maybe 300-400 hours of it.
I'm not sure how a Rivian or the new F-150 Lightning would compare to a more typical rugged off-roading vehicle (e.g. Raptor, a TRX, or a Rubicon), let alone a truly heavy-duty one (Land Rover Defender, H1, or G-Class).
Maybe bringing some gas + a generator would be a viable contingency? At the expense of some weight, of course.
That's a little bit of a stretch. You can walk a 5gal tank all sorts of places roadside assistance won't go, though that's largely a reflection of corporate policy than physical inability.
Also it's way harder to get someone to give you a charge if you run out due to circumstance in the middle of nowhere whereas pretty much anyone will give you a gallon of fuel if you're truly out.
Not really. You can count on a gas pump existing within some distance of a sparse population. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find an outdoor "public" power outlet when you need one.
Having that number on the dash saying 600 miles left as I enter into remote-ish areas is so comforting. So much so that I've already ruled out upgrading to the Lightning and instead am targeting the Powerboost, which keeps my range, increases my fuel efficiency (though not by a ton) and has a world of possibilities for utilizing the battery for heating a camper or a toy hauler -- I don't have one of those but if I had a Powerboost I might consider one for snowmobile camping or ATV camping.
For many people towing their boat to the launch it will work excellently.
Towing trailer full of junk to the disposal, same thing. Also pulling the wood chipper to the dump. Heavy, but not going far.
Picking up lumber in town, just fine. Excellent for picking up steel for the shop.
It would be more accurate to claim it will do poorly in cross country towing. For the towing I do, it would be just fine.
1/3 the range when towing is still a 100 miles.
100 miles is a very, very short round trip in most of the US.
an electric truck can tow big stuff no problem, but not very far.
so whether it is good for towing depends on how far you tow.
It has the same 10,000lb towing capacity as the standard v6 model. Not sure what you're referring to here.
MotorTrend tried towing a car with a Rivian R1T. It reduced the maximum range from 314 miles down to 175 miles.[2]
Both range and charging infrastructure will improve over time, but it's not quite there today.
1. https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1376947773967372292
2. https://www.motortrend.com/features/how-far-can-you-tow-with...
charging every 120 miles (see the recent rivian test) is not great
and even if you find chargers, having to take a break to wait for charging that often is double not great
Which would be an interesting concept,
I bet you could get a fifth wheel hitch to play nice though if the software was tuned correctly
Would just need the hitch to include a power cable, to send power back to the car.
Most people seem to be driving pickups empty 99.99% of the time, just so they can move furniture, some 4x8 sheets, or bags of sand/cement when the exceptional need arrives, all locally - which a BEV is perfect for.
You would not get a ICE F-150 for that anyway... you would get as F-250 or F-350 for that kind of hauling.
F-150 is for Utility hauling for small campers, or Utility trailers and general work, not for 5th wheels, and horses *except maybe one of the small single horse trailers.
Many people exceed the tow rating, and rightfully get ridiculed online for it
While this truck may or may not (I haven't looked at the specs) have a gearbox expect to see trucks with a gearbox (especially as we start seeing electric commercial vehicles). A simple gearbox consisting of two shafts, four gear and a dog clutch or one planetary and a dog clutch is going to be cheaper, lighter and offer less kludgy performance than over-specing the motor.