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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Right now automotive UI's and sw are in the equivalent of pre iphone era mobile phone jankyness, just good at one or two things with a ton of cruft that doesn't work well.

We all know BEVs are fast - even a 1960's UK electric milkfloat is amazingly speedy from standstill - but I'd say Ford are years away from their BEVs being viable and reliable, not least due to lack of charging network. The lousy towing performances on BEV trucks rings alarm bells too. https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect...

A little off topic but it appears Anne Heche's vehicle was a hybrid or BEV and caused a huge fire, one of my biggest BEV concerns - It took nearly 60 firefighters more than an hour to douse the flames.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...

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> not least due to lack of charging network

It's true that there need to be more fast chargers, but it's also true that this notion of "no charging network for CCS cars" is making less sense every month.

You can get across America and Canada on CCS chargers. For example on Petro-Canada or Electrify America (and there are more charging networks than just these two):

- https://www.electrifyamerica.com/locate-charger/

- https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/canadas-electri...

A Better Route Planner is a good tool to try out routes in various models of EV to see how easy or hard a given trip will be:

- https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

Europe sensibly standardized on CCS type 2 Combo so any brand of car can charge on any brand of charger. Even Tesla is finally opening their chargers to all brands in Europe:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ

Eventually Tesla will do the same in North America and that will make more CCS chargers available.

The lousy towing performance probably doesn't matter. 75% of truck owners tow one time a year or less. I've had my F-150 for 8 years 45,000 miles, and it's seen a trailer 3 times for a total of less than 400 miles. I'm close to being in the market for a new truck, and the biggest deal breaker for me with the lightning is the 5.5' box instead of the 6.5' box. Weighing over 6,000 lbs also means you can't register it as a passenger vehicle in NYS without capping it - meaning you can't drive on the parkways.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...

There were news articles that they revised this law for the rivian and presumably the f150ev. At first people ran into this weight / registration issue.

I want my next truck to be an EV, but towing does matter to me. I hope by the time I replace my 2007 Tundra there will be an EV truck that does tow well. I just broke 130k miles, and easily have another 100k, so I have some time.

Anecdotal, but I just drove my electric Ford from Sacramento to Seattle and back without any particular planning or problems. Just used the built-in nav to find chargers.

truck or car? loaded or empty?

Mustang Mach E. Full of stuff, but not too heavy.

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