Ford Lightning Towing Test Shows Serious Problems
motorious.com
motorious.com
The good thing about battery estimation models is that they seem to adjust live. It would totally suck to have a battery life model which kept saying "you have 100k to go" when it's down to 20k or less. I know thats a tiny drop of good in a bitter pill of reality, but at least they got told the truth, once the load was applied.
The EV supporting webs are all pretty good about highlighting the gap between the estimated range models used for certification, and 'real life' experience. I think they've realised over-stating it isn't helpful.
In one of the video reviews, they even showed that the car would let you plan a route and give you stopping points customized per load.
Given that towing was never a core capacity of the Lightning (Ford themselves probably wouldn't have even recommended the ICE version of this car without a towing package) this still works surprisingly well as "something to take my boat to the lake" vehicle.
100 miles towing a modern empty trailer
But it wasn't a test of comparable vehicles. The Sierra has the EV equivalent of an 808 kWh battery vs 131 kwh in the Lightning. And the starting range of the GMC (when not towing) is theoretically more than double that of the Lighting.
So the Lightning could never have won this test. Which, based on scrolling through the types of stories that website posts, was kind of the point.
Because if not, then this is simply a real world comparison. Not some sort of physics demonstration.
But my point was that it's not a real world comparison, since they're comparing a full-size pickup truck against a compact pickup EV. The proper comparison would be to a compact pickup truck like the GMC Canyon. The ICE vehicle would still win, but but not by as much.
> Truck owners might protest that they are slightly less likely than owners of other categories to use their vehicle as primary transport (83% vs. 95%), limiting the miles and gallons. And they might also protest that trucks provide capabilities that other vehicles lack. But, as it turns out, a significant portion of truck owners never use their trucks for these capabilities. According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
> So what do people actually like about trucks? According to Edwards, the answer is counterintuitive. Truck drivers use their trucks very much like other car owners: for commuting to and from work, presumably alone. The thing that most distinguishes truck owners from those of other vehicles is their sheer love of driving. “The highest indexed use among truck owners is pleasure driving,” says Edwards. Truck drivers use their vehicles this way fully twice as often as the industry average. “This is the freedom that trucks offer,” says Edwards.
> “When asked for attributes that are important to them,” Edwards says, “truck owners oversample in ones like: the ability to outperform others, to look good while driving, to present a tough image, to have their car act as extension of their personality, and to stand out in a crowd.” Trucks deliver on all of that. At a price.
You also added a bunch of other text unrelated to your claim.
Dislike of something does not turn opinion into fact.
If they want to keep paying current petroleum prices to drive their combustion trucks, by all means, proceed. Not my household budget.
The proliferation of 3-row SUVs for 2-child households and fullsize trucks for people who haul a bag of mulch is pretty much a direct result of the fact that for a long time people of a certain bent have hand wrung real hard every time they saw someone trying to get 11/10ths out of a vehicle the one time every few months they had the need.
If you want to see people buy the car they "need" then you (you specifically, but also plurally, there's a ton of people here who need to hear this) need to have the self control to hold your tongue when you see kids double buckled, someone at the home improvement store loading a stupid amount of bricks into a car, small SUVs and trucks towing big things, and all those other rare but not that rare edge case that people base their vehicle purchasing decisions around wanting to have enough vehicle for. The reason people who can afford to by more vehicle than they need is because you have stigmatized pressing a vehicle into occasional service doing things that it is uncomfortably small for.
In this test, however, towing or hauling long highway distances eliminates regen, severely handicapping EV range. I'm a big EV fan, but this is a legitimate torture test. Internal combustion simply wins this contest for now. We will have to wait for 2x-3x battery density to mount a proper challenge.
i keep thinking absolute figures inform & if any thing illuminate what wonderful efficiency we do get from electric vehicles.