My friend who’s in landscaping drives a basic F150 with an 8-ft bed. The payload capacity on his truck is less than the base Lightning. Usually he’s bringing a bunch of tools back there, and depending on the job might be carrying plants, mulch etc.

In cases where he has to haul more (eg. clearing out a huge amount of overgrown plants) he might rent a utility trailer to tow. Which the Lightning is also perfectly capable of handling.

For the truly heavy-duty job requiring several yards of rock, he’s going to pay someone with a dump truck to deliver it.

Since all of his clients, suppliers, and the dump are local, he’ll never need to tow anything 100 miles. This is the only edge case where he’d need to wait around at a charger during a job.

If there are used Lightnings for sale at a competitive price when we needs to replace his truck, he might buy one.

It's actually quite hard to exceed the payload capacity of an F150 unless you're hauling bricks, and even then you could probably mostly fill it up.

How easy is it to supercharge a F150 electric while towing a 20 foot trailer? The way I see most Tesla superchargers oriented, it seems like it would be a pain in the ass.

But also, depending on where landscaping jobs take you, you might be well out of range of a supercharger when you need it most. You might need to finish 5 jobs in an afternoon, and make 3 hauls to the dump and two stops at a supply store and then get to the other side of town as quickly as possible or lose a job. A gas car can be refilled in 3 minutes. You can get another 100 miles of range from 5 gallons, which you can even carry with you for emergencies.

Price is also a disqualifier, imo. A battery replacement on a Lightning is $30k and the battery is warrantied for 8 years or 100K miles. How long the batteries last after the warranty expires I think will have a big impact on an already more expensive truck.

The reason I bought a Tacoma was because I have six feet of bed area, ~7k lbs towing, and 4x4. The general utility of the truck meant it could tackle most things I needed to do.

> The way I see most Tesla superchargers oriented, it seems like it would be a pain in the ass.

Most superchargers have one stall oriented so that you can pull in to it (with the charger on the left side of the stall), with the rest of the stalls designed to be backed into.

You can't compare an EV pick up and an ICE truck like that, unless you specify what you call 'doing actual pickup truck work'. Plenty of companies don't put more than 100 miles on a truck every day and that means that their workload is a good match for an F150 Lightning even if it is hauling. Landscapers, city fleets and so on tend to move to a spot, stay there all day and then drive back and it's probably possible to charge them on either end of that trip. And they're never going to be further away than 100 miles from their home base.

>while hauling with ice trucks do not

?????????

My truck does 12l/100km highway without hailing, 30-35l/100km while hauling.

Ice trucks definitely feel it.

The article I linked shows the Lightning gets close to 100 miles per charge when hauling near the limit. My MPG certainly takes a hit, but not that big and my truck is about half the price and size of the Lightning.

Modern “truck things” are Costco runs and taking the kids to soccer practice. Maybe towing the ski boat to the lake twice a year.

Real work gets done with utility vans or 15 year old trucks the size of a modern midsize suv.

I disagree. I have a Tacoma that definitely gets treated as a truck. The bed gets filled with stuff, I use the 4x4 every time I go through the Cascades, mountain passes, or washed out roads, and I've hauled closed to the limit with it several times. Would a van do some of those things? Maybe, but certainly not all, nor for the same price point.

Wait until I no-true-scotsman the shit out of you.