Given US pricing of $6.50 diesel, the cyber truck with 11,000 lb towing capacity actually makes a lot of sense.

It just looks too weird.

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I've been seeing more and more JAC small pickups (I'm in Austin). They use small diesel engines. I kind of thought the era of small diesel engines was over (thanks VW), but maybe it's coming back?

People who are towing a lot may like the idea of electric. However they need range, and EVs when towing don't deliver. It is too bad, I'd like a electric truck, but when I tow I'm trying to get someplace and EVs don't deliver.

It doesn't help that nearly all chargers are arranged such that I'd block important parts of the parking lot for half an hour if I was towing when I needed a charge, then I have a complex back out (where something is behind me that I need to avoid). Most gas stations are designed so my trailer might block a pump from someone else using it but otherwise I'm not in the way.

The range loss on an EV is comparable to the 5 MPG you are going to get with a 3/4 ton truck towing anything 10k pounds as well

The only actual difference is time you need to charge. Pull through charging stalls are ubiquitous where I live

And I just don’t know…how often are people towing loads over 100 miles regularly for this to be a problem? Where I live I see pavement princesses towing the occasional boat or landscapers towing gear and rocks.

Neither of those is going to max out the range on an EV truck in an average day

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I know people with Rivians and F-150 Lightnings and they love them.

I always got the impression that the vast majority of the F150s are never used as trucks either. Americans just like really really big cars because fuel is cheap there and none of the cities are old enough that big cars are impractical.

No, the F150 has great sales numbers but this is mostly due to commercial/work use. And commercial buyers need trucks that can tow, haul, be fitted with large toolboxes, booms/cranes, winches, plows, etc. The F150 electric solved none of those problems.

You're dismissing a cultural aspect of the popularity of trucks in america. There is way more trucks in Texas than say in Indiana, or Massachusetts on the road. Texas is one of the only states where people still drive hummers. They're not all doing off-roads

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Yeah my neighbor has a Sierra EV truck and he claims 500 miles range towing a camper, which I doubt but he loves it. He's all-in on EVs, has a Volvo as well and solar on his roof to help charge them.

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You need a 250 or 350 class truck for a lot of those uses - plows or heavy loads for example.

Well that's true. Loads of F150s in service as work trucks though. Potentially many could be EVs but the added cost and need for charging infrastructure for a fleet works against that.

Obviously it doesn't affect the electric vehicles but light trucks being excluded from CAFE def did a lot to acculturate americans to always buying a big car

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUV#1980s_to_1990s

This seems to have kicked off a bit of an arms race. Smaller cars are more dangerous to drive as other cars get bigger.

Big cars are certainly impractical in SF, but it's more due to parking than anything else :)

Plenty of our cities predate cars. We were able to bulldoze walkable neighborhoods to build highways through them because of racism.

I have seen rivians being used as trucks pretty often in small towns.

Truck brained people are notoriously stubborn. If it isn’t like daddy’s old truck they simply can’t see past it

I live in the PNW and you see people not using their trucks as trucks every single time you go out on the road. This includes urban areas.

I’ve owned an F150 and an R1T and for camping, overlanding, snow trips, etc the Rivian is hands down the most capable vehicle I have ever driven. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a Ford

We recently had a guy drive 146 miles out of the cascades, to Oregon City, to get a replacement radiator for a Jeep after a trailside wreck. We don't know how to fix a Rivian when it breaks down, or where to get parts.

That sounds like a you problem.

Sounds like a problem for anybody who owns a rivian frankly.

Until people stop coming to them to get their vehicles fixed because there are more and more Rivians being bought but they dont know how to fix them.

Nobody is claiming to be a professional mechanic in this thread.

Parts availability for a new and/or low volume vehicle is always tough whether it's an EV or otherwise.

But process of replacing a radiator on a Rivian really isn't any different than replacing one on a Jeep.

Most people who work on any vehicle don't know what the fuck they're doing, there's plenty of people in Autozone buying their 3rd O2 sensor for their Jeep that's throwing a P0420 as well.

Truly terrible for pedestrians. Modern trucks are already death traps with their super high front grills, multiplying the weight compounds the problem.

Vehicle mass is a significant factor in collisions between vehicles because taking two thirds of the impact is a major increase over taking half of it. Heavier vehicles are much more dangerous to lighter vehicles.

It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by a freight train at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound vehicle at 39 MPH.

I was thinking of F = MA, where mass seems important here. Is this the wrong mental model?

You're solving for force when the thing that causes the damage is (very rapid) acceleration. The total acceleration is the initial difference in speed between the two things that collide and the proportion of the acceleration applied to each object is inversely proportional to their relative masses.

If they have the same mass then they each take half. If one of them is 19 times heavier then the other one takes 95% of the acceleration. If one of them is six hundred trillion times heavier then the other one takes ~100% of the acceleration, but this is still only <5% more than taking 95%.

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You think cutting the weight of the truck is going to make it safer for pedestrians?

This is the silliest argument against the Cybertruck, IMO. Its forward visibility is significantly better than other full-sized trucks, yet people continue to bring up pedestrian safety every time the Cybertruck is mentioned.

Sure, I meant htis for electric trucks in general, and I was wrong about the physics anyway.

F150 Lightning was ruined by the dealership network who had 0 interest or financial incentive to sell them. When they did sell them, they added huge markups.

The quality of the vehicle is actually quite high.

Most people driving trucks in the US don't use them as trucks, especially in cities. I think most people willing to take on a $1000/mo truck payment for their personal vehicle in the current economic climate are doing so for social reasons anyway. Whether the electric trucks on offer at the same price can compete on that front is a much more slippery question.

If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.

I've only ever heard positive things from every electric truck owner I know and this is coming from a market that's very truck-forward in terms of culture.

Indeed that target audience (people that actually need trucks) should be looking at a diesel vw passat from the 00's instead.

> Anybody who knows how people that actually need trucks use trucks saw this coming

I'm a current truck driver and very excited to swap out my ICE truck for a Slate next year. I need something that can haul my trash to the dump, grab a load of wood chips for the garden, and bring home the occasional sheet good from the home store.

I agree with your assessment as it applies to the Cybertruck or F150, but not the idea of an electric truck. Some people buy trucks because they need a light-duty hauling solution; unfortunately, the market seems to only want to sell luxury SUVs that happen to have truck beds.

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Not wrong. I combined my truck and SUV budget and bought a used X7 m50i. No joke it's the best pulling vehicle I have ever owned. Super heavy, super grippy, in trailer mode the torque comes on fast. It's brilliant. My old 03 Silverado sits even more now.

Trailers aren't a silver bullet. I own multiple trailers (one even has a crane on it) and will still use anything else given the chance because it's just such a hassle once the empty weight of your trailer gets above what's convenient to move around by hand (which it will if you want to beat what a half ton truck can do, not what's within the rating, but what it can do).

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Unless it's so small it roughly equals the utility capacity of a half ton truck a trailer is a big hassle. People choose to pay more for a truck because it "just works" with "no thinking" for a wide variety of stuff.

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I have a hitch for my current truck and honestly a dump trailer wouldn't be a bad idea anyway for some use cases, but even if I had one I'd probably only use it when I had to. The convenience factor just being able to hop in and drive, or having the truck bed with you when you didn't plan on moving something just wins out.

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Unlike electric cars, the price for a used F-150 lightning is still a substantial fraction of new price. There is still substantial demand.

Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.

The other aspect of work trucks is that their generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.

Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.

I definitely see them from time to time here in Austin loaded up with stuff being used as real work trucks. (But mostly not.)

In my observations it appears there are 3 kinds of truck drivers.

1. People who need to haul stuff in the bed

2. People who need to tow stuff behind them

3. People who buy them for some form of self expression.

Electrics are probably fine for people in 1 & 3. But for 2 I have yet to find one that both tows and gets range.

I would suggest there are 4 kinds:

1. People who need them for work. 2. People who need to carry bulky loads 3. People who need to tow. 4. People who buy them for some form of self-expression.

The only real use case for electric trucks, imho, is construction site supervisors who do most around-town driving but may occasionally need to haul stuff. Their towing range is absolutely abysmal (F150 Lightning range dropped to about 90 miles when towing a moderate trailer!).

Every contractor in my area has one and raves about it. Plumbers, electricians, framing guys, concrete guys.

They have a rack or canopy on the back, tow modestly and drive a few hundred km a day at most to and from the job site, the supply store, etc.

Every single one says they slashed their fuel bill by at least half, and they’re staggered how good they are.

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I see electric Silverados and Hummers (not a truck, but effectively the same vehicle as the electric Silverado) all the time, usually pulling landscaping utility trailers (flatbeds with huge commercial lawnmowers, etc.). I have no idea if this is economic or not (they definitely aren't cheap) but I've heard electric towing can't be beat for responsiveness, torque, etc.

It's pretty economical. Towing about halves your range. So you're still paying quite a low gallons/mile equivalent. However, that decreased range is a killer. So it makes sense why you'd see them doing lighter duty local work like landscaping.

An acquaintance saved thousands of dollars (over ten thousand, easily) by using his Cybertruck while building a cabin up in the mountains. All those trips to the hardware store and picking up random building materials add up very quickly when you are going up and down the mountain for materials and the big box hardware store is two hours away.

The BYD Shark is all the rage in Asia.

The use-a-truck-as-a-truck market seems too small to even address…