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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Unless they significantly improve battery capacity when hauling and towing, I doubt many farmers will be interested in it at any price.

This seems aimed at suburban buyers instead of farmers to me.

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In my experience most farmers have solar panels and spend thousands per month on fuel. The thought of "free fuel" will have farmers salivating.

Also, they're heavily self-reliant, so reducing their dependencies on regular fuel deliveries will also be highly appealing.

No, most farmers don't have solar panels. But nevermind free fuel, they have practical work to do. Most farmers are using diesel F350 or similar class pickups because they need 20K to 30K pounds of towing capacity. The F150 lightning or regular gasoline F150 even cannot compete with a diesel engine for doing work.

Farming must be extremely different in America. Here in New Zealand, where agriculture is our primary industry, those massive trucks are extremely rare. The biggest selling cars for farmers are, by a massive margin, the Ford Ranger and the Toyota Hilux.

Yup. Just like in America, construction needs those huge pickups, while around here everyone just uses a van.

In America a lot of our farmers need to haul things like livestock, feed, and hay bales in trailers. The F-150 is very poorly suited to this.

Umm farmers over here also need to haul things lol do you think we're using donkeys?

F150 towing capabilities are far higher now than they used to be. The use case for the 250/350 versions is slimmer as a result.

Isn't the usual line about diesel that CI engines provide superior torque vs. IC? Electric engines are insanely torquey, though, right?

On our farm we pulled trailers containing hay, trash, or a couple of farm animals. Most other stuff (like bags of feed or fertilizer) fit in the bed and didn't need a trailer. A plain 1/2 ton truck is perfectly fine for this kind of work.

In my experience farmers have proper vehicles for towing: a class 8 truck and several agricultural tractors.

And they all also have a light duty truck for chores.

Most of the farmers I know definitely use their pickups for hauling trailers.

A class 8 truck would imply a very large operation, not a typical rural family farm.

As I said, "in my experience". Which is Saskatchewan, where a typical rural family farm is 5000 acres. That's too small to support any employees.

And yes, they use light duty trucks to haul trailers for chores, but those are 5-10,000 pound utility trailers with a bumper mount hitch, not the 20-30,000 pounders with a (presumed) goose neck hitch like you're talking about.

I think you're wrong about this. I grew up on a farm and most of our daily truck trips were 50 miles or less. Given the awesome towing capacity of this beast and roughly 1/4 the cost of fuel per mile, we'd have bought an F-150 Lightning in a heartbeat.

You might have been disappointed with the towing capacity…

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect...

I have no illusions about pulling RV trailers with an EV. I know about the range hit trailers cause.

But for utility trailer towing for short trips (which is what my comment was about) that's irrelevant. I haul utility trailers with my Model Y all the time. Range doesn't matter because they're all short trips.

I dunno; a farm-use electric with range for a day or two of work plus a trip to town is probably a slam dunk for many working farmers, especially with the other electric benefits.

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