I think the ford electric pickup is like $100k though.
Looks like 200k preorders for F150 Lightning vs 1.5 million for Cybertruck. As always, who knows what happens, but as always, it’s important to remember that Elon Musk is good at business (or if this is more palatable, good at grift-hawking trash to his legions of adoring incel fans), so there’s probably not a correct one-line argument that proves Cybertruck will be a failure.
Pretty sure those “pre orders” are literally $100 deposits. Also his incel fans don’t have $50k+, his actual customers are the bougie libs he’s currently alienating.
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Yes, but it’s the same for Ford:
When it unveiled the electric pickup, the automaker started taking reservations with a $100 refundable deposit for the electric pickup truck that’s coming in mid-2022.
Saw that a family (in Canada?) ran home essentials off their Lightning truck for 2 days with plenty to spare during the recent outage.
Most contractors and people who need trucks will be fine with a charger at their house. F150 will be a success. $100k is a lot but a lot of them buy the $80k trim models anyways, and they all put $5k a year into the gas pump.
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I’d be willing to bet a lot of that the 200,000th Lightning will be sold and delivered before the 200,000th Cybertruck. Mostly likely also before the 20,000th Cybertruck and potentially before the 2,000th.
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People should think in terms of energy required to run their household versus energy they spend transporting themselves, to better see how absolutely ridiculous it is for society to needlessly require that much energy to get to your job and shopping and whatever
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The most common USA tractor trailer setup: 46,000 pounds net transported at 7 mpg diesel
The most common USA commuter setup: 200 pounds net transported at 25 mpg gasoline
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Trucks powering electrical tools and then powering houses during storms/outages, will be a selling point for a lot of people.
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It really is complete insanity, and we’ve built our entire society around the 200lbs payload/25mpg setup. And there’s not an easy “invest in public transit” or “walk to more stuff” or “build more walkable communities” option that doesn’t cause a shit ton more emissions and impact and/or is mostly just a solution for rich people anyways.
Unfortunately, electric cars and renewables are really our only way out. Fortunately, I think we’re only just starting to flirt with the grid benefits of EVs, which could be transformative.
My brother, who works on a farm and has owned trucks his whole life, got to test drive the Lightning and loved it. He put a deposit down. I think it will do well amongst the conservative truck-driving set.
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That’s the selling point for me, but it only works with a hybrid. It doesn’t do me any good to drive out to a job site and run my tools all day only to get stuck there afterwards with a dead battery.
EVs are a lot more sophisticated than iPhones in terms of battery management. All consumers will have this exact concern and I’d be surprised if Ford didn’t engineer a way around it (ie car stops giving portable power at x miles of range).
Also a small generator is roughly 4,000 watts. Running this much power off the F150 (with 100% utilization) for 8 hours would burn off around a third of the battery.
Running your tools all day is the tiniest drop in the bucket for an EV’s battery. The battery in a Rivian pick-up would run a big ass chop saw continuously for 100 hours. You could probably run your electric tools for a year on a single EV charge.
(I’m sure I wasn’t as heavy a user, but I used to run all mine with a small solar panel and a hobby battery the size of a motorcycle battery)
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Depends hugely on the tools. An F150 Lightning could run a hair dryer for around 100 hours.
But, yes, when you have a 4,000 watt gas-powered generator, you’re usually only using a fraction of the generator’s capacity.
Anything running on 240V+ would deplete the battery quickly but I’m guessing the car only puts out 110V.
I can see having rechargeable tools with battery banks in the truck. Not even running off the truck power for all the handhelds. Maybe some big items need the truck battery.
Just don’t try to run the microwave and toaster oven at the same time off your hybrid truck.
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Most tools for building a house are used for short periods. Something that uses a lot of power for a sustained period is often already connected to an internal combustion engine, but maybe a few things (medium sized electric powered concrete mixer?) would make you wonder if your truck battery had enough charge and it probably still would unless you were stretching your travel range to get to the site.
I agree with you—it shouldn’t be a problem. Running a hair dryer for 100 hours is a lot of juice.
Also, in my experience the guy with the $80k truck isn’t parking on a single jobsite all day long—they’re managing multiple projects. They’ll just occasionally plug stuff in at different projects, but the ones who show up at 6am and stay until 4 will still be using a $400 generator.
For the actual owner, I would say it’s more about the convenience of knowing they’ve always got a 110V power source wherever they go not having to lug around a generator (which is everyone’s favorite thing to steal), rather than a calculated need for a given amount of power each day. In other words, it would be a pretty big selling point.
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