As to the Cybertruck it's both interesting and kind of ugly... repairability is another concern/issue as is pure cost...
I'm far more interested in the Slate[1] myself. It's probably closer to what a lot of consumers would want in an electric truck. It really feels like a spiritual successor to the OG Jeep (GP).
1. https://www.slate.auto/enDon't think that just because a billionaire is interested in the project that the funding will be easy. Billionaires don't like to spend their own money and can be easily distracted by newer and shinier projects.
When the cyber truck was announced we decided to buy a Super Duty instead. That was 5 years ago. It's now paid off and driven us and our RV all over the country, and still worth more than half it's purchase price with many more miles to go, and no issues at all (knock on wood).
A lightning, cyber truck, or even rivian can't do those things.
Instead of waiting for a slate just buy a little gas pickup and GO USE IT, live you life!!!
Other than all the CO2, CO, and NOx you've emitted over that time period.
The government should have started taxing barrels of oil in the 70s.
Individual states go back to 1919.
https://insideevs.com/news/719434/tesla-cybertruck-awd-vs-ra...
Also the power plants and diesel generators for the data centers... https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-mu...
8000 miles towing 10k lbs in a diesel super duty would be 30 stops at 15 mins each.
That's 70 hours vs 7.5 hours. Every 8000 miles
It's famous now...
If it's got a good level of repairability beyond the body/form, then the company collapsing may be a lot less of an issue. The way it's being done does remind me a lot of the original GP (General Purpose) vehicle. Though not necessarily fit for military/combat environments; As fuel is easier to transport than electricity to the middle of nowhere.
Does this really hold when Tesla has a considerably higher valuation?
Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
When you consider that Ford also makes many more models than Tesla (Tesla has like 8 core models incl the cybertruck [and the not-yet-for-sale semi...] , Ford has like 20+)
By all measures - Tesla should be considerably more aggressive with sales targets for a core model, and it seems pretty clear the cybertruck is just a slow rolling market failure.
The Cybertruck is kind of ugly and very expensive... not to mention that no EV truck really does towing well. The fact that the Lightning sold more than the Cybertruck doesn't make it a success.
The Cybertruck, imo, is not too different than a limited run sports car from a major car company... it's just a step above a concept car. The Lightning from Ford was an attempt to see if a market was really ready to shift to EV, it largely isn't. Even though I think it's probably a great option for a lot of work truck use, that doesn't include long distances or heavy towing, but then it likely prices itself out of that market segment too.
I'm not arguing that the F-150 lightning was a commercial success for Ford, I'm suggesting that the argument that Tesla should be held to a different standard on sales numbers feels pretty shaky.
Both of these are basically "concept cars", and neither company has really delivered.
Both are expensive to make, and have very high sticker prices with low/negative margins (Tesla claims cybertruck is profitable, but they're sitting on an absolutely insane inventory count, which they can't seem to sell... so again... my guess is they're deep in the red for this model if you look at total costs instead)
Ford didn't exactly expect the Ford GT to be a mass seller, which is probably closer to what Tesla expected of the Cybertruck, or not, who knows.
> Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
It almost holds BECAUSE of that. Tesla's valuation has been wildly detached from its sales numbers for years, so having a poorly-selling Cybertruck doesn't really matter.
But admitting that a high-end high-profile product was a big failure, on the other hand, might be much more undesirable for the company whose valuation depends on vibes vs sales.
("Should" that be true, though? Well, that's a different question. ;) )
I agree that Tesla has incentives to mislead with continued announcements about how great everything is (while the board/musk continue to dump their stock as fast as they legally can...).
But eventually... people are going to want their money out of this pie, and it clearly can't provide.
My personal opinion is that Tesla is now Enron 2.0 - and at some point we'll see a similar collapse, on a larger scale. But who knows if enough of the regulatory framework in the US will survive to actually slap them once it happens. I'm not super optimistic.
The kind of trucks that landscapers are still using, that are beat to shit, and have three features, cheap, load carrying, reliable by way of simplicity.
The F150 lightning was always going to be a tough sell for die hard truck customers but it at least has all the fit and finish that those customers expect, with access to the F-series aftermarket.
I sometimes wonder about a world where those trucks managed to hit their $40,000 price points. For the Cybertruck it was clear that Elon demanded way too much (four wheel seering? Come on) to ever get close to it, but for the F150 it seems more like the price was due to Ford halfassing the production.
To which I would ask: Is it "bias" because they simply report on Tesla frequently? Would it be "less biased" if they ignored Tesla? Obviously Electrek can't simply invent positive press for Tesla to report on.
Putting that aside though. The Cybertruck by all measures has been an abject failure. Its production run was so limited that insurance companies refused to cover it [1] and the NHTSA took something like two years just to crash test the thing due to how few of them there were on the road.
Combine that with 10 fucking recalls for absolutely horrific safety issues [2] and the company making the batteries taking a 99% slash in its $2.8 billion dollar contract [3] the thing is a complete travesty
[1] https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/insurance...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/home/electric-vehicles/every-tesla-cybe...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/tesla-cyb...
That's what triggered the beef. Fred sold all shares, took down all the pro-tesla articles, and posts nearly exclusively only negative tesla articles since.
Seems both parties were/are within legal rights, but it is clearly bias.
However, short of going to places like Reddit's "Tesla Lounge" or "Cyber Truck Owners Forum" I have yet to see many (any?) places that cover Tesla/Elon positively. Not because "every website is biased against him" but simply because they're reporting on events that've happened
Speaking of not super affordable. When's that "affordable Tesla" coming. Or did Elmo turn on the 'full self driving' and it drove itself into a ditch along the way?
Same reason they shot the Volt in the back before it even hit the production floor.
They want you to get made fun of by your foreman for driving it,
so they sell very few,
and they can shrug at the government, or whoever, and say “See? Toldja nobody wants any.”
If anything the vehicle was designed more for aesthetics than for practicality. There is no engine up front. There's no need for all of that space in front of the driver. It's entirely possible to engineer crash resistance without needing 4 goddamn feet of crumple zone. They could have had both a crew cab and a full size bed. Or the short bed but a more practical size.
That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
That and also it's just a bad product.
>That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it.
A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
edit: agree there's a market for the raptor off-road tremor package thing, but it wasn't ford's first and they've been selling commerical trucks for 75 years. A true tesla f150 competitor would have sold like crazy, I think
I don't think this is actually true, most pickup trucks aren't designed for maximum utility. They're designed to sell a lifestyle.
Pickups are a little bit interesting in this regard. For any given model (eg: Tacoma, Frontier, etc.) the more premium the truck, the worse it is at being a truck. Each feature you add reduces its payload, and in the case of the Frontier, you could drop from a 6' bed with ~1,600 lbs of payload on the base model all the way down to a 5' bed with ~900 lbs of payload for the most premium offroad model.
What makes you say this? The F-150 series has a pretty serviceable option in their XL trim. 8ft bed, 4x4, "dumb" interior (maybe not, looking at their site looks like the most recent is iPad screen, sigh) - but what else would you look for to call it utilitarian?
You're right that each feature is further limiting, but I would argue premium and utilitarian are reaching for opposite goals.
The Slate is utilitarian, but remains to be seen if it actually ships. https://www.slate.auto/en
No way does the length check out though. I haul lumber in a similar size car and 8ft is basically trunk to dash so there's no way he's hauling an 8ft by 4ft sheet without it conflicting with the driver's seat if not torso.
Individual boards should fit in just about anything though.
Truck works well for those role because it can do so much. It isn't the best for most of those, but it can do them.
Jokes aside I could purchase a new hatchback and a small old Kei truck for a fraction of the cost of something like an f150
Quieter than the other way around.
However, the most likely place to rent a pickup from (U-Haul) does not allow this.
It’s neither convenient nor cheap to rent a trailer in much of the US. Major cities have options, rural areas less so. Full disclosure I have a mid-sized pickup, but I recently looked into renting a trailer for a landscaping project that was above the weight limit for my truck. First issue I ran into was that there were not any trailers available for rent anywhere near my location. Second issue was that after factoring in driving distance + rental cost + dump fees, it was ~ the same price just to pay a junk company to haul the materials…and it was not cheap. Anecdotally, my pickup was cheaper than most other vehicle options at the time I bought it, my commute is short (so fuel economy is less an issue), and as a homeowner I use the bed to haul something at least once/month (Unfortunately kei trucks weren’t available at the time). So the cost/benefit/convenience factor of owning a truck over renting a trailer works for me. YMMV.
However, they are TINY inside. If you are taller 6'1" and/or heavier than 200lbs, it is a tight squeeze, especially for anything longer than 30 minutes. The "average American" can't fit it a kei truck.
Also, the weird manliness of the average American man would make this truck unsuccessful, simply because it is too small. Which is hilarious, because some of the most resourceful, strongest, reliable and adventurous men I have met drive kei trucks.
I guess finally, the big highways with longhaul trucks and fast speeds are not so good in a k-truck.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000...
wouldn't fly due to chicken tax + other safety and emissions. they plan on selling em in Mexico tho, so maybe we'll see some float up...
Any OEM will happily sell you a white vinyl floor half ton with your preferred cab/bed/engine/drivetrain configuration.
The GMC 4cyl 1500s were stupid cheap for awhile, because they shat out a bunch for CAFE and weren't selling so they were going for like 25-30k going into the new model year. I wanna say this was 2024 into 25, maybe 23 into 24, idk.
Ford Maverick seems to fit the bill for compact stuff though I suspect it may make the goalposts zip to "single cab option" and "body on frame"
I drive a wagon. Of course wagon owners talk about the utility. And yet, you can buy a wagon with a twin-turbo V8 engine. What's the "sportwagon" segment all about? Certainly not going to Home Depot to buy four toilets for the new house, it's about putting your $15,000 Cannondale Black Ink MTB on the roof and swanking up to the trailhead.
In reality ideal utility is likely found in the shape of a 2008 Toyota Camry and a U-Haul truck rental when necessary.
buy yourself a gently used 2019 Camry
Last weekend I hauled ~700lb of rebar on the roof (because they come in 20ft sticks so the wagon is the best choice). The number of dirty looks I got was off the charts. The same exact demographics that are in here shitting on pickups were judging me for not using one. Good thing I don't give a shit what anyone else thinks.
I also do not allow my lifted pickup and Model Y neighbours to choose my vehicle for me.
Yes, but that lifestyle can and sometimes does include actual needs for some of the utility. There is a great observation from Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington’s 3rd District in an NYT piece a couple of days ago. I included a perhaps too long quote in lieu of apologizing for the paywall.
> “Spreadsheets can contain a part of truth,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “But never all of truth.”
> Looking to illustrate this, I bought the recent book “White Rural Rage” and opened it more or less at random to a passage about rural pickup trucks. It cites a rich portfolio of data and even a scholarly expert on the psychology of truck purchasers, to make what might seem like an obvious point — that it’s inefficient and deluded for rural and suburban men to choose trucks as their daily driving vehicles. The passage never does explain, though, how you’re supposed to haul an elk carcass or pull a cargo trailer without one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/marie-gluesenkamp...
Everybody knows why you bought the katana. We know you have a story to tell yourself, it's just not convincing.
I don't think most people realize how expensive and time consuming tool rental is.
This is where things also get kind of messy in the US. In manicured suburbs you probably don't need a chainsaw. But in older growth and places with larger lots you really do need one. If you wait till you need one after a big storm, you may travel 100 miles out of the storm damage to find one to rent or have to wait for weeks as your driveway is blocked and contractors are booked up.
For me the utility function is somewhere in between a car and a truck, hence why I have an SUV. I can carry the large boxes/items I seem to have at a regular basis. When I need something bigger I can rent a trailer to hook to it. Trucks themselves are way too expensive now, and I don't need that much capacity. A car would have me constantly renting or borrowing one from someone else (which I did when I owned a car and it was a pain in the ass).
The big box store in our town doesn't rent tools or vehicles. You have to drive 45-60 minutes to get to a store that does. This means the 4 hour rental prices (which for something like a wood chipper or chain saw might be sufficient for a lot of jobs) become nearly non-viable or highly stressful rushing through unfamiliar power equipment that really shouldn't be rushed.
A full day tool rental is often 1/3 to 1/2 of the price of a new mass market version of the tool. A week rental is almost always more. The tools are rarely in great shape. You are almost always way better off going to an estate sale or local marketplace and buying a used tool. If there is a job you end up doing 2-3 times or need for more than a week its even cost effective to just buy new ones. You save so much on labor doing things yourself that even with new tools you basically always come out ahead.
The best case is that you have a community run tool library that lets you check stuff out cheaply for a week and can have a relationship with the folks that run it. Similarly, getting to know the neighbors and being able to swap/borrow stuff. For vehicles this is a little more dicey because of liability & insurance issues.
We've definitely struggled with the vehicle for long and sheet goods. We really don't need a pickup truck and it would honestly be a hazard on skinny mountain roads... but we do need to move lumber, sheet goods, appliance sized things just enough that it's a pain without one. We settled on a midsized SUV with passable towing power (as an aside, EV power and control makes towing a breeze as long as your round trip fits in one charge). Renting a trailer is still annoying, but at least can be done close by. For larger orders delivery can sometimes be cost effective (vs renting a vehicle or buying and maintaining a truck) especially because places often subsidize delivery to win business.
For sure. I had to dig some post holes in limestone that was very hard. Rental was going to be $200 for a tool that would do it in a day.
Instead I went to harbor freight and bought a tool closer to $100 even though it took me a bit longer, and I get to keep the tool which is still working to this day.
Heh, and labor costs in the Austin area are off the hook. I did a project for around $5000 that a neighbor had a similar but smaller in scope project quoted for $21,000.
Same with truck rentals.
I’ve wasted so much time trying to track down which location near me has one available on the exact day I want to do major yard work. Often I have to reschedule my work or plan out super far in advance. Or take a day off during the week because everyone else also wants to rent trucks on the weekend. Then I’m running against the clock the whole time.
An extra $100-$200 a month car payment to have a truck instead of a crossover is totally worth it.
A working truck should be max utility. Around the core market of "working trucks," there are various wannabe truck products that do not have to be max utility. For example, a Subaru Brat or a Hyundai Santa Fe. Niche products compared to an F-150, but they had/have their fans.
I personally can't stand the design, but the idea of an impractical "halo vehicle" that appeals to a niche audience but burnishes the brand as "forward-looking" is not a bad one. It's just the execution of this particular halo vehicle that I would have a problem with were I in the market for a lifestyle look-at-me vehicle.
A *working* truck should be max utility.
And there's also wear on the road, noise, and damage to property and people when accidents happen (physics is a bitch).
I think more sports cars are burning out, revving loudly (or getting modified to take out their mufflers), and the damage from going a lot faster creates more damage.
Sports cars sure do have negative externalities. I live next to a custom car mod shop in the boonies. People hoon around here like there's no one else alive. They put my life and the lives of my family at risk on the regular. That is most definitely a negative externality.
I was in the market for a pickup recently. I had wanted to like the Cybertruck, but ... too damn ugly, too version 0.3, too many dweebs driving them, too many teething issues even for a first cut. Plus it's as heavy as an F-250. There's almost no actual reason to grab one besides it being electric. Since I drive so little, I'd never pay back the embedded energy it takes to make the thing - so even that isn't a selling point.
So instead I got a used Tacoma, and disappeared into the ocean of Tacomas that exist here in the PNW. It could be worse :)
That is a fully electric drive train hybrid. That way you can charge it at home and charge it with a generator under use. Problem is our current laws are making certifications a mess.
If you use a truck for work purposes once a year it is likely cheaper to just drive a truck for everything than have a second car. Don't say rent a truck is an option - you probably can't rent a truck for most work purposes - most rentals have fine print against that, even if you can find a place to rent a truck the cost quickly gets to more than just owning your own truck.
even if you can find a place to rent a truck the cost quickly gets to more than
just owning your own truck.
And if your needs are more ambitious, there’s Sunbelt Rentals through much of the country and Enterprise’s Trucks arm as opposed to their more consumer-familiar operation.
If I’m using it once a year, I’ll splurge for a bigass 1 ton 4x4 which Enterprise Trucks is currently listing for $139 a day including 150 miles… and in 100 years, have spent the $13,900 difference between a dweeby little smarte car and owning my own pickup
Not that there’s the least thing wrong with just preferring to own one, just options that I wish I’d known about earlier in life.
I haven't see the contract with enterprise trucks, but I suspect it is similarity restricted against the type of damage this is normal from using a truck for work. You can at least tow a trailer with them. Their locations are not convenient for me either.
EDIT: I realized I have plenty of these contracts archived and don't need to believe HN conspiracy theorists:
(a) Use Restrictions. The following restrictions apply to the use of the Vehicle:
• The Vehicle will not be operated by anyone who is not an Authorized Driver;
• All occupants in the Vehicle must comply with seat-belt and child-restraint laws;
• The number of passengers in the Vehicle will not exceed the number of seat-belts and child-restraints;
• Renter will only operate the Vehicle on regularly maintained roadways;
• Renter will ensure that keys are not left in the Vehicle and will close and lock all doors and windows upon exiting the Vehicle;
• Renter will not (i) transport people or property for hire; (ii) tow anything (with the exception of an attached trailer if rented pursuant to this Agreement); (iii) carry or transport hazardous or explosive substances; (iv) engage in a speed contest; or (v) load the Vehicle or transport weight exceeding the Vehicle’s maximum capacity;
• Renter will not engage in reckless misconduct which causes the Vehicle damages or causes personal injury or property damage; and
• Renter will not use the Vehicle for the commission of a felony or for the transportation of illegal drugs or contraband.
So unless you are trying to reuse the vehicle for hire or tow a non-Home-Depot trailer (which I admit is kind of restrictive, but nothing like what the parent post says), it seems fine.
I’m actually far from a pickup truck hater; they certainly have their place (my parents live in a rural area and I can’t really see them not having one), and I occasionally miss owning one, but I’ve never managed to make the economics come even close to balancing out vs. renting for myself.
Normal-sized pickups aren't meant for offroading.
A decent SUV can get you by in a pinch. A “normal sized” truck, is exactly what you take off road - yes you might have to do some modding, upgrades, but I don’t understand this take. And I’ve been around many a truck at the top of a gnarly mountain.
I must be misunderstanding what you’re saying here. Even rock crawlers aren’t typically using F250 and larger truck sizes.
The Ford Maverick is a smaller vehicle but also a truck. It is a working truck for some, and a rec/handyman vehicle for others.
It's a car with a bed, not a truck.
How often do you need to pull 2000kg?
Towing weight is also a good proxy for frame strength. I do some light forestry work moving and bucking logs, freeing stuck cars, plowing snow in addition to towing trailers and equipment.
Plus, you can't really put a winch or snow plow on a Sportage.
I always find it kind of surprising how large a vehicle people in the US think they need to pull trailers, especially when you compare with the size of trailers people pull in the UK. My own elderly Range Rover (1990s P38A) has a plated towing weight of 3500kg which means you can pull another one on a trailer with it easily. With the back full of tools and spares and a couple of passengers, you've got an all-up weight well over six tonnes!
I've seen plenty of people in working clothes driving them, carrying working tools and such.
Really the only thing I think you can ding it for is the small bed. It used to be that trucks this size would have a regular cab or an extended cab with the two tiny side facing seats, and they would have a longer bed. With the tailgate down you can still move sheet goods with a Maverick though.
The Maverick only tows 2000 base, the 4000 is an upgrade package and only for trailers with their own brakes.
RWD is pretty functionally important for a vehicle to maintain control while towing significant weight, as all the weight sits on the back of the frame, and that's where you want the engine power to go.
The Maverick is not a working truck, which was my original point. In terms of what matters, it is worse in every way than a 40 year old design.
You can't really compare the tow ratings with a 1985 Ranger. Back then the ratings were not standardized and were generally inflated for marketing purposes. Today tow ratings are standardized by SAE J2807. The Maverick has way more power than the old Ranger and weighs about 600 lbs more, plus it has trailer sway control. You're going to have a much easier time towing 4000 lbs in the Maverick than the Ranger.
Edit: The Maverick also has 300 lbs more payload capacity than the 1984 Ranger. The fact is, not everyone needs a giant heavy truck. I see loads of tradesmen driving Mavericks.
Grabbed it in '25 with factory warranty still on it for about the price of a new maverick.
The real issue that limits the Maverick for a wider audience is the rear is too small to comfortably fit kids, especially in car seats. Adding 4 in of leg room to the rear and making the whole truck 4 in longer would've made in a great homeowner family option without sacrificing much agility.
I agree that the Maverick's bed is small and the back seat is small. IMO they would have been better off making a regular cab or an "access cab" thing with two doors and fold-down seats, and used the extra length to add to the bed. Those are great if you're single or don't have kids, and you just need to carry passengers very occasionally. If you're regularly hauling kids around you definitely want the next step up. A lot of tradesmen essentially never even use the passenger seat though, and the back seat is just lost bed space unless you're using it for locked storage.
> It’s all but impossible to go into any rural bar in America today, ask for thoughts on pickup trucks and not hear complaints about the size of trucks these days, about touch-screens and silly gimmicks manufacturers use to justify their ballooning prices. Our economy, awash in cheap capital, has turned quality used trucks into something like a luxury asset class.
> It’s often more affordable in the near-term to buy a new truck than a reliable used one. Manufacturers are incentivized by federal regulations, and by the basic imperatives of the thing economy, to produce ever-bigger trucks for ever-higher prices to lock people into a cycle of consumption and debt that often lasts a lifetime.
> This looks like progress, in G.D.P. figures, but we are rapidly grinding away the freedom and agency once afforded by the ability to buy a good, reasonable-size truck that you could work on yourself and own fully. You can learn a lot about why people feel so alienated in our economy if you ask around about the pickup truck market.
> Instead, the authors of “White Rural Rage” consulted data and an expert to argue that driving a pickup reflects a desire to “stay atop society’s hierarchy,” but they do not actually try to reckon much with the problem that passage raises — that consumer choices, such as buying trucks, have become a way for many Americans to express the deep attachment they have to a life rooted in the physical world. A reader might conclude that people who want a vehicle to pull a boat or haul mulch are misguided, or even dangerous. And a party led by people who believe that is doomed among rural voters, the Midwestern working class and probably American men in general.
> This approach to politics governed by data and experts is what we mean when we talk about technocracy. It’s a system that no longer really functions today because the broad societal trust that once allowed data and experts to guide political choices has broken down. Democrats, increasingly, live in a world where data and researchers convincingly show that low-wage immigration raises the economy and our gun laws are reckless and misguided.
How about I just conclude that while pulling a boat or hauling mulch are completely OK things to want a vehicle for (*), one does not need a F150 with a front end that reaches my chest and has gas mileage to prove it.
As many have noted, pickups like the 90s Toyotas did these things just fine for almost everyone, but most US based manufacturers have stopped making them.
Me noting that doesn't make me part of the doom of the political party I always vote for.
(*) to the extent that we live in a society where private ownership of vehicles is completely unremarkable, that is. And we do, for the foreseeable future.
Also, there are a lot of boats, RVs and trailers which my 2019 Tacoma absolutely would not have towed successfully.
Did you miss like the entire first half of the quoted passage? Because it kinda sounds like you're judging the people buying the trucks.
One buys from the options the market gives them, and the market often does not optimize for what consumers want. It optimizes for barely tolerable products that maximize profit.
Which kind of makes sense, because it's Gluesenkamp-Perez critiquing a book she opposes.
This is a modern society in which we must live and let live. That core value of tolerance, which preserves our personal freedoms, deserves to be weighed as much and more than our shared infrastructure, imo.
The problem is as soon as you go EV, you use a lot of utility from the get go. With a truck specifically, because its a brick aerodynamically. There is no reason to buy a Cybertruck or Lightning when you can get a gas or hybrid F150 (or a Raptor) for a little bit more, and be able to sit at 80 mph on highways without worrying about range.
The biggest suprise about the lightning is that Ford didn't put in a gas engine in it as a range extender. They have 3 cylinder ecoboost engines that would have been perfect for that.
That's probably more relevant to fleet vehicles for construction and maintenance firms than to individuals towing boats. But just to offer an example of how the F150 Lightning is a great fit for certain uses.
7.2kW could run most of my house for days, and it wouldn't be very loud I guess.
Otherwise rural folks often have something to fix on the other side of their property that needs tools. Cordless tools do a lot but sometimes are not enough.
Then again, all the construction sites I see these days have mains power on a post, which we never had back then (I don't live in the same state so I don't know if this is universal or just this area has always been different).
A small generator costs few hundred bucks and fits comfortably in any truck actually used for work. It's a small perk that some pro users would probably pay for, but it's not a selling point for a radically different car design.
For fleet vehicles this is the same story. You have no idea what kinda bullshit circumstances you are going to run into, and investing in EVs is just not worth it at this point when a F150 XLT or XL + Honda generator suffices.
Until that trend flips where fast charging takes the same time as gas station stop (or automakers start putting small gas engines in their vehicles) EVs are always going to lag behind gas vehicles.
The business problem Tesla solved at Ford cannot is the dealer network. He pre-ordered his, and the dealer he was stuck with tried to rip him off like 4 different ways.
The other issue is that car guys are afraid of electric, as the entire supporting industry is essentially obsolete. It's hard to get excited about something that will take away your ability to pay your mortgage. Every car dealer employee and mechanic knows that.
Take for example DVD rental. The market completely evaporated, while there is still a small lingering community that could be serviced by rentals. My local library is proof that there is a market. But there are, bar some weird exceptions, no remaining DVD rental stores.
If an EV needs 50% of the maintenance, then it stands to reason that you need 50% of the staff. That's the easy part. But what about all the other staff? Can you afford as many staff in front of house when your main profit centre shrank massively? Can you keep the same amount of cars in the lot if you don't have the cash to pay the manufacturer fees?
This is dependent on how you drive them. EVs are fun, so you get a disproportionate number of people driving them aggressively. That's hard on tires. If you drive normal, you get normal tire life.
It's not bad for consumers, but a significant amount of the economy is maintaining cars. It's the same thing that happened when emissions standards made cars more reliable. The corner repair shop was displaced by convenience stores, and repair consolidated.
They announced that along with the EV Lightning cancellation: https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/us/en/articles/2025/next-ge...
From a manufacturing perspective, adding a range extender does add a lot of cost and complexity. And from an ownership perspective it adds a lot of service, maintenance and reliability considerations that you don't have with a pure EV.
But in any case, this is exactly what they're doing: replacing the Lightning with a range extender ("EREV") plug-in hybrid. But a new all-electric truck based on Ford's upcoming, cheaper "Universal EV platform" is also due in 2027.
I want whatever the v3 equivalent of the Cybertruk would be. Assuming they improve on it.
I strongly considered a Model S years ago when they first came out, but the price just didn't seem justifiable. Now? The world has moved on, and Tesla... hasn't.
Except the main demographic buying F150s is suburban dads driving to their office job.
It did make his reckless driving more dangerous for the innocents, though.
America is so full of hoarding and objects that go years without anyone touching them. It's profoundly sad.
you’re right.
but I’m still not changing my habits. fuck the environment
The primary limiter is on how many resources we give people.
I've lived in parts of the US where I doubt more than 10% of pickup trucks on the road (and there were a lot of them) were really justifiable purchases as trucks. They were aspirational purchases, and/or were selected for status/class/politics signaling.
I've lived other places in the US where the whole region had far fewer trucks (but a hell of a lot more Volvos... like, easily 10x as many as the other place) where I bet at least 50% of pickup trucks saw enough truck-use to really be justifiable.
The modern US pickup truck isn't built for utility. It's a $60,000 four-door lifted luxobarge with leather interior and a short bed. It signals (perceived) wealth while preserving working-class alignment. It can also be justified by way of having to pick up used furniture for TikTok refinish and flip projects or bimonthly runs to Home Depot to buy caulk and lightbulbs. Independent tradesman can write them off as work vehicles or, allegedly, use COVID-era PPP loans to buy them.
It's the suburban equivalent of a yuppie's Rolex Submariner. Investment bankers generally don't go scuba diving and if they did a dive computer would be vastly preferable.
I say all of that to say that making a pickup truck for that market segment isn't a bad idea from a numbers perspective. You just can't market it as a luxury vehicle because the whole point is that it is but it isn't.
I would have gotten a Tacoma, but I need the extra towing capacity.
Of course the real money is in the high trim levels that sell for twice as much but don't really cost much more.
Crappy used trucks simply aren't up for sale. And even the rare listing I do come across, the asking price is ridiculously inflated.
In the UK, Truck and Driver Magazine featured one so equipped in a head-to-head AWD tipper test (AWD in the sense of all wheels driven regardless of number of axles, not Subaru AWD/Audi Quattro type AWD), alongside a variety of extremely large trucks. Proper trucks, not F150s, we're talking 18-tonne Scanias and stuff here.
Everyone wanted one of the little Hijets to take home.
The best used work truck is actually a van. They lack the coolness factor of trucks, but are far more versatile. You can pick up a <10 year old Transit with under 100k miles for like 10-15k. That price point will get you a >10 year old F150 in the 100-150k mile range.
Plus, there are good options if you want something smaller can car-based, like NV2000s and Transit connects. Which don't really exist for trucks outside of newer (maverick) or niche (Ridgeline) options.
Bonus points, a nice Transit is a great daily driver too.
I started looking into getting a trailer or hitch hauler but it didn't seem to make much sense. I could usually pay somebody on-demand to move stuff around and it always worked out to be cheaper than owning and maintaining a truck. I presently work from home and don't even own a car anymore; the math is quite similar with rideshare and motorcycle maintenance coming in significantly cheaper.
Having said that, I'm still in the market for a larger vehicle with a better tow weight rating as I use the trailer more than a handful of times per year, and my current tow vehicle is getting a bit long in the tooth.
Get an SUV with a trailer hitch.
worked out great. Maybe better than a pickup.
For example - taking mountain bikes somewhere to ride - you can put them in the back, go ride, and leave them there while you go eat without someone stealing them. You can even load them the night before.
dirty stuff can use a trailer (I've never needed one)
and suv carries lots of people - which has worked out many many times more than I predicted.
(it is a gas guzzler, but was cheaper because of that, and didn't compete with higher-priced pickup market)
Vans are commonly used in urban areas, especially by businesses, but suburbs, rural, and construction benefit from higher clearences of SUVs and trucks.
SUVs are also usually much better in hazardous driving conditions because of a more optimal weight distribution.
Reality is, people buy these things thinking they would drive them off road, and never actually do it.
It's possible to make an off-road van, by the way. It's just that real demand is so vanishingly small that you don't really see them.
I deal and have dealt with enough deep snow that would eat a van.
I still might get a Sienna Hybrid for daily commuter
It also makes more sense for me to get a large SUV, as towing is important.
The SUV or Truck is still more capable in hazardous road/off-road conditions compared to the van.
Though in my current neck of the woods, a Sprinter would satisfy my needs well.
I had a RWD pickup with snow tires and went anywhere I wanted to through two utah winters and many vermont ones too.
There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.
I can attest to the fact that minivans are much more comfortable. I picked up my Pacifica hybrid minivan in early 2021 before the price hike and it was a steal compared to SUVs and pickups. When I was doing paperwork for the vehicle at the Chrysler dealership, I was chatting with some sales guys and discovered the shocking fact they had recently sold a luxuriously loaded-down pickup for over $100K. I was fortunate to easily haggle with them over my minivan because they don't make much money on minivans so they focus on pickups, Jeeps, etc.
A couple decades ago, I had started looking to replace an old hand-me-down car from my grandma, and had been mulling over whether I could ever justify spending $30K on an Infiniti at that time. My boss at work got a new pickup, and he was rather proud of it, and I innocently asked if it cost $25K because plenty of my Texan relatives had driven them over the years and I assumed they were a no-frills working man's practical vehicle. After a brief pause, he answered, "It was a little over 40 thousand." That was over 20 years ago.
I can't fit an ATV in a van, and I really don't want to put a dead deer in the back of a van after I hunt one.
I wouldn't trust a van to haul 75 8x8x16 concrete bricks (over 2000 lbs/1100kg) because the suspension wasn't designed to do that, nor was the transmission, and the van will quickly deteriorate.
How about moving a couch? Fits in the truck, not in a van.
I did all of those things in the past 12 months.
All that being said, vans are great, especially with kids. They absolutely do not replace trucks... if you use the truck and don't mind getting it dirty. Shiny trucks with 5.5ft beds are fucking stupid. My kids all laugh at "trucks with a baby bed" these days.
Or, downthread, people just assume everyone with a truck is insecure, projecting wealth, and generally ignorant. Which ironically, is a very ignorant take.
There are some pickups here, having said that: more rural utilities people, or landscapers who move lots of dirt, or farmers, might have one. They tend to be smaller than an F-150, but then everything's smaller in Britain including the roads...
For moving yards of mulch, topsoil or concrete blocks, almost anyone in my country, including people in construction would just have that delivered to the site, next day, by the seller.
No clue what van you're imagining, but weather alone makes many things much worse in an open bed. Moving a couch is a very common use of vans, people rent them specifically to move furniture all the time.
minivan != van.
It’s hundreds of dollars to have the same literal dirt, delivered and dumped on my property. So now, instead of driving the truck full of dirt around my property and using it as desired, I now need to do it one wheelbarrow full at a time.
Fuck that.
As for weather, they make removable flat and domed “roofs” for truck beds, the weather argument is a nonstarter.
From all of the bitching in the driveway, vans were not pleasant to work on the engine. Some of them had to remove a cover from inside the van to gain access, and that cover tended to not be well insulated and was the source of a lot of heat. Not much of a firewall as a car with the engine fully separated from the passenger compartment.
There were a lot of things people did not like about vans available in the land of Yanks. The Limey vans are not the same, so do not equate your experience as being the same.
There are two current reasons
- Millennials grew up in minivans and its viewed as a mom mobile and they don't want that look (despite the fact that most family SUVs are basically mini vans with out the sliders
- US laws favour light trucks
There's also the fact that it's a lot harder to take the top off a van than it is to add a top to the bed of a pickup. If I sometimes moved manure and had a van... I'd probably rent a trailer.
The 70s/80s screwed them up big time. They were big ugly garabge cars. I love fast wagons, but they are dying here.
Even if you're not going to do the knuckle-skinning work yourself, the packaging negatively influences book rates when you take it to a shop
Trailer is kind of obnoxious pain in the ass and has a bunch more shit to go wrong with it's use compared to a vehicle that "just does what you need".
It might not be the literal cheapest but a truck with the desired cab to bed ratio is the right call for the casual user who just wants to do homeowner things and doesn't wanna think about it.
Which is really the thing: it's very useful to have a second car, but a trailer can't be a second car.
What's really desperately missing is useful payload capacity: a standard ute can't carry 1 ton in the tray confidently (and it's downright impossible to find accurate info on what you should do to get that outside of "add a tag axle").
I don’t get it. Why would you buy, maintain, and park an entire second vehicle for something that is beyond trivially cheap to hire out?
If you wanted to DIY then renting a truck for the day makes more sense.
Renting a vehicle invites bureaucratic nonsense. For my personal situation, I need it ready to go at virtually a moments notice or I'll simply just avoid the chore.
If your local government doesn't offer this, there are many commercial operators that do this in the UK. Seems bizarre to buy a whole giant, inefficient, vehicle just for 'hauling' occasionally.
There are private options, of course, but the fees are nowhere near "small" for this service.
Edit: OH, you mean the CT. Silly me.
To the people I know who drive trucks like that, they're basically mobile offices.
I'm not familiar with the USA. What do contractors over there do in terms of clean/dirty clothes? Do they change into clean boots and trousers before getting into the truck? Or are they all in roles where they don't get their hands dirty?
In my country, vehicles marketed to tradesmen and agricultural workers usually aim for a hard-wearing, easy-to-clean interior that's fairly spartan.
Using my wife's fairly recent (2024 model year) pickup truck as an example, every horizontal surface is covered in papers, clipboards, horse tack and medications (she trains horses and operates a horse rescue). The floors and kick panels are probably muddy at this time of year, but I'm so used to it that I don't notice. The surfaces that aren't covered by papers or something else have a nice thick layer of dust (the truck spends a lot of time on gravel roads).
It might actually be vacuumed out a few times a year, but that's far from a priority. Generally, the cleanup only happens if one of us has to wear "nice" clothes to go somewhere.
But bear in mind that the areas that your body touches tend to clean themselves simply because you're moving around. So, the floors, dashboard, etc., might be muddy or dusty but the seats will generally be clean.
The basic "spartan" trucks tend to be for uses where you don't have to travel very far. If you're driving a hundred miles or so on an average day, you'll want to be as comfortable as possible or it gets old really fast.
The farm and woodworking people I know have nicer trucks, but they’re not afraid to get them dirty. Put some rubber floor mats down and the floor is easy to clean. Leather seats are actually easier to clean than cloth seats. The steering wheel wipes clean.
Every square inch of my truck’s interior is covered in a layer of fine dust every time we go off roading because the windows have to be down. I can clean it all relatively quickly because everything is accessible and the interior is smaller and boxier than my car.
Because the only truck owners the people who bash trucks see are their neighbor across the street who is that guy.
The demographically comparable guy who commutes in 80mi one way from his "country estate" in his Audi isn't on the internet bashing truck owners because the guy he lives across from uses his truck.
There's a reason these "luxobarges" are the best selling vehicle in the U.S., and the answer is not virtue signaling.
I promise you with all my heart, those luxobarges are not being purchased because they’re practical in any way, shape, or form. It’s 110% virtue signaling.
I don’t get the recent internet trend of trying to excuse any bad behavior by saying it’s all actually very logical and simply a tragedy of reality. Nobody is buying a gigantic vehicle because it has seats that are easy to clean. Nobody is buying an expensive ride because they just NEED those auto rain wipers.
People are bad with money, and keeping up with the Joneses has always been a high priority in American culture. I see people making $20-25/hr driving brand new Cadillac SUVs. I talk to my car selling friends, and they have the loan rates for 6-10 years memorized, not 3-5 years. Nobody does those anymore.
Of course there is an enormous amount of virtue signaling around cars. It’s one of the strongest social signals people purchase.
Playing Devil's Advocate, if you're going to be fucked either way, why not be fucked and have a nice truck than not?
It seems like, at least from an uninformed EU perspective, that if the "system" gives you the ability to get a big truck for no worse off that if you weren't going to get it, why wouldn't you?
It seems like auto manufacturers overly inflated their prices, and the loan issuers are mopping up said inflation back - so in the end the borrower (at least if poor and they're going to default either way) is better off getting more truck for their buck than less.
Again, I don't understand the desperate internet trend of defending terrible choices by focusing on the, like, 0.001% of people who do everything right and still fail. We've got the highest living standards on the planet. It's absolutely a choice.
Let’s say a normal car costs you $200/month and a big truck costs 400.
200 is not going to make a difference in your situation - you are either good either way or close to breaking point and therefore fucked either way (if not this month, then the next one when you have an unexpected large expense).
If you’re fucked, why not take advantage as much as possible and get the most truck for your buck? Well “your buck” in quotes but you get my point.
If my budget was at breaking point and for only 200 bucks extra (one time payment since I’m gonna default next month) you can bet I’m gonna take advantage and get another ~20k worth of truck that I’ll get to keep until the bankruptcy proceedings complete (at which point the extra would’ve depreciated off anyway). Or is there something I’m missing?
200 * 12 = 2400 * 4 years( let's be real it would be longer ) = 9600. That IS a lot of money, it's not going to solve every problem immediately but applying the mindset of whatever Im screwed so I might as well set my money on fire is exactly how people keep sinking into the hole. You take the 200 extra on the car, on the apartment, the 150 pants. Its death by a thousand paper cuts and it will make a bad situation much worse.
You’re also presenting a false scenario of “screwed either way”. One decision is getting a car that doesn’t leave you with $10k+ negative equity in a year because you did $1000 down on a $85k truck financed over 10 years with an 8% rate. That’s a decade long financial albatross that will cost you $150k by the time it’s done.
The alternative is you put $1k down on a $30k vehicle over 4 years with the same monthly payment and never end up with negative equity.
The gulfs here are enormous and the “screwed either way” altitude is pure defeatist financial ignorance.
It has nothing to do with avocado toast, though that wasn't nearly the zinger you thought it was. As it turns out, eating out is insanely expensive. Cook most of your food and you can save a TON of money. The fact that this simple idea is so hard for people to pull out of the avocado toast comment continues to astound me.
And you're right - you can certainly scam the system for 6 months of "more truck". That's exactly the kind of monetary responsibility that got us into this situation in the first place. Thank you for showing everyone a perfect example, I suppose.
You have such a deep misanthropic view that it's prevented you from seeing anything outside of it. You're preaching a faith not practicing an understanding of the world.
> Nobody is buying a gigantic vehicle
There are tons of contractors, laborers, small business and property owners who need the space or the utility of the vehicle. The reason these vehicles sell well is because they come in _tons_ of configurations.
> because it has seats that are easy to clean
No, that's why the manufacturer puts them in there, it helps them sell more vehicles by expanding their options.
> People are bad with money
Just.. like.. universally? Then how do you explain the number of billionaires and millionaires in this country? Let me guess.. from your heart it's 110% graft and corruption and 0% skill and sense and building wealth?
> I talk to my car selling friends,
Who has "car selling friends?" Your access to anecdotal information may not be helping you.
> It’s one of the strongest social signals people purchase.
We know this.. how?
> So what do people actually like about trucks? According to Edwards, the answer is counterintuitive. Truck drivers use their trucks very much like other car owners: for commuting to and from work, presumably alone. The thing that most distinguishes truck owners from those of other vehicles is their sheer love of driving. “The highest indexed use among truck owners is pleasure driving,” says Edwards. Truck drivers use their vehicles this way fully twice as often as the industry average. “This is the freedom that trucks offer,” says Edwards.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
The F-series is the best selling car family in the US. Some of them are using it for its intended purpose sure, the majority are just using it as parent said, a luxobarge.
25% use it for towing.
30% use it off road.
65% use it for hauling.
Obviously there's overlap but how many people do none of those three?
It's less than 35% which is not a majority.
Can't believe we sit here and judge people for choosing to drive a truck or not.
If you're saying "a less bad thing is still bad!" then your comment reads more like the "We should improve society somewhat. / Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent." meme.
People generally buy vehicles for to fit all of their needs not 95% of them. My back seat and trunk are almost always empty and my passenger seat is mostly empty.
A F550 box truck and a crew cab shortbed F150 are both F-series as well as everything in between.
If not the best selling it had better be damn close with all the different vehicles that exist under that one nameplate.
For being certain about something based on industry data?
>There are tons of contractors, laborers, small business and property owners who need the space or the utility of the vehicle.
And if that was the majority of these purchasers, this would be a reasonable response, but the extreme majority of truck owners use their truck for its intended purpose ONCE A YEAR. Bro just rent it from frickin' Home Depot and drive a Camry.
>No, that's why the manufacturer puts them in there
Ah, and of course the cheaper cars are purposely given seats which aren't cleanable? Or is it still correct that in the context of our conversation, it's nothing special and completely unrelated to how most people use their car? It's not within a million miles of a decision point.
>Just.. like.. universally?
Yes. You got it. I literally meant that every single person on the planet, rich, poor, and everything in between, is bad with money. I certainly wasn't making a hyperbolic point to bring an idea to the forefront - incredible detective work.
>Who has "car selling friends?"
I buy a lot of cars, and eventually made friends with the people I keep buying them from. We hang out sometimes. Do you just... not make friends with anyone?
>We know this.. how?
Who knows? My friends actually sit around talking about the specs on their refrigerators and the color options. They tinker in the garage on the cooling coils for hours a day. You should see how smooth the drawers in mine are.
not sure virtue signalling is best description here. I think "conspicuous consumption" is far better description of the process
Yes some are, but not everyone with a big truck. I'm in truck country and most people can afford their big trucks no problem at all. It's not virtue signaling, they are do-everything cars. Nothing else beats them.
You can go to a off-road work site during the day, and take it downtown for dinner after. Lots of people are making good money and can easily afford them.
I mean… do any of the commercial services in US use pickup trucks? It seems to all be vans? Why not to get a van then as a contractor?
I don't understand why flatbeds aren't more popular here. (Well if we assume that pickups aren't actually for utility then I guess it makes sense.)
You need body on frame, not the van unibody junk.
Granted probably most people on here are CA or SV adjacent, which has a fairly idiosyncratic relationship with its service industries and stricter emissions regs.
It’s not “virtue signaling”, it’s lifestyle messaging like wearing cowboy boots or walking around with DJ headphones as if you’re going to drop a set after the morning standup.
Sprinter vans, utility vans, or even minivans are far, far more useful for trades than modern pickups. Heck, my minivan was the goat for home renovations—it’d easily fit a dozen full 4x8 sheets of drywall/osb/ply/mdf/etc and I could still close the rear gate. I always got chuckles from guys awkwardly wrangling/securing sheets onto a pickup’s bed at the supply yard when I’d easily slide the sheets off the cart directly into the van by myself.
A heavy duty pickup makes sense when you have regular towing, or large bulky transport, needs. While on this topic, I’ll take a moment to lament the demise of the light duty pickup that provided a bit of extra utility while still fitting in a normal parking space.
Yeah, everything about it is generally "solid" and well done but at it's roots it's a very german car. The longblock will theoretically go a million miles but realistically you're gonna replace every part around it several times over to get it there. I'm sure they're fine when new but as they age it's basically the same "replacing way too much BS because while nice it's over engineered" as the rest of german car ownership. Like c'mon man, an asian or american car would "just" require simpler less invasive things and generally be less of a headahce in old age.
Source: semi responsible for keeping one running
For the "I need to sometimes pick up large objects" use case it's hard to beat.
Sedan handles 99% of my driving, but can't really tow anything. Truck handles all of my towing stuff, but gets ~14mpg which hurts so I don't drive it.
Jeep is a jeep, it's always being worked on, but when I use it I'm using it to go ride around on dirt paths or for camping. It gets 17-20mpg when I'm driving it but I don't want to drive it often.
If the jeep was a 2000's series jeep I would totally just get a small trailer for the occasional towing things that I do with the pickup and downsize to 2 vehicles. I know I could rent a uhaul from time to time for about what I pay for insuring and titling the truck, but the $100 annual difference is worth it for the convenience of not having to deal with uhaul 4 times a year.
But I said all of that to say, that a hitch isn't a perfect solution for everyone. I would feel very uncomfortable towing an empty 4x6 trailer behind my sedan, not to even mention the occasional couch or dresser or bunch of boxes from helping a friend move.
The 2 door model unfortunately has a pretty weak tow rating of 1 ton, and I'm fairly certain I have gone well over that a few times. IIRC the four door models a few years later took that up to 5000 lbs because of the extra length.
Why? 1500 lbs rated tow hook on an average sedan should be no problem at all. And that's more than enough for a 4x6 with a couch and a couple of boxes. Might even get a slightly larger trailer so you don't have to take the couch apart.
I've towed 14' sailboats including all gear behind a Corolla, didn't even feel the trailer was there.
So I replaced it with a 5x8 trailer, which anymore gets pulled behind a Chevy Volt. I'd hesitate to load it to the max and take it on the thruway, but for most of my tasks it's actually more convenient than the truck. Loading up a riding lawn mower or a few hundred pounds of scrap metal is way easier with it being closer to the ground, and I'm mostly driving 10-15 miles over back roads so if I'm worried the load is too heavy for the compact car I don't mind taking it a little slow.
Also, it's convenient to load it while it's unhooked, piling in garbage and debris over a week or a weekend and then hooking it up to run to the dump; likewise, just unhooking the trailer full of construction materials and (weather permitting) just unloading it as you build.
I occasionally miss being able to drive it into the woods, but to be honest not being able to parallel park the trailer is a bigger inconvenience than not being able to off-road it.
[0] Since having kids I've come around on the second-row-of-seats/short bed trade-off; not being able to pick up dimensional lumber with kids in tow is way more limiting in my current phase of life than not being able to fit it in the bed with the tailgate up.
People mostly still do it though, because it's cheap and easy to do.
With an Impreza.
That included highways in the Yukon that were more river rock than gravel, backwoods of Montana and Wyoming, you name it.
It was totally fine. Especially in a Subaru, with AWD and a low well centered center of gravity. I'd do it again.
I miss the hell out of my '82 Chevrolet S10 with extended cab and two-tone paint job. The extended cab isn't going to be used for hauling the soccer team, but I could put it was plenty of space for "inside only" cargo. Damn thing threw a rod and cracked the case, and I never could convince my parents to keep it and put a new engine in it. I'd like to think I'd still own it today if they had.
USA seemingly can't sell small or base trim cars.
Product of mfrs cheating CAFE standards.
Half these people still choose to buy the vehicle they do for insane and superficial reasons like "It's got a Hemi", like my uncle, even though Hemispherical combustion chambers haven't been state of the art or even good ICE technology in decades.
Vans are way better in almost every regard.
Actually, I'm buying a house with a garage and I may get a bike trailer, and a tow hitch for my BMW. That would be an even simpler solution
But I believe most vans on the market have an AWD option. Ford Transit and Volkswagen IDBuzz both offer AWD. Toyota’s Sienna is (only?) AWD with a silly lifted trim for the off-roading soccer mom market. Chrysler’s van is AWD.
That leaves the ProMaster as the only two wheeler I’m certain about. Mazda and Kia also have vans, unsure about their drivetrain options. Did I leave anyone out?
Couple years ago I was driving through Arizona during a massive blizzard. Everyone's doing 15, and I'm doing 50 - taking things slow and careful because of the traffic.
I had people in vests standing out in the road waving at me trying to get me to slow down! And I'm going "What in the hell are you doing out in the road!? Don't you know this is a blizzard!"
I grew up in Alaska, we laugh at the snow :)
And, like you said, people think that an AWD car will stop faster. No, it'll just start moving faster, more traction doesn't make the brakes better or the road any less slippery.
I owned a single 4WD car and it was super fun in the winter, but... when it's icy, you're most likely moving faster than you would be with a 2wd, which again results in some heart palpitations when you're trying to stay on the road =)
The only people I know who think this way are made up people who exist only in the minds of people seeking to validate a purchasing decision.
I would’ve stopped to help, but I was concerned that if I lost momentum, I wouldn’t get going again.
Don't forget the people who just want to sneer at other people in ill-considered condescension! Plenty of that from the "the world outside the Bay Area and NYC isn't real and none of those people exist" folks.
What does more traction mean unless it's that the road is effectively less slippery (to my vehicle)?
> AWD inspires more confidence
Stop and work backwards and ask yourself why that is rather than doing the Principal Skinner "no everyone else is wrong" routine. In practice, all seasons on an AWD car result in less slipping around than snow tires on a FWD car. Heck, if the difference where anywhere near close everyone rich enough to have a new car would probably have snow tires because the dealership or tire shop would be able to make that sale. The reason they can't is because in people's experience they're just not necessary.
Stupid internet circle jerks about stopping distance are not the pain point or performance bottleneck for the average user. The degree to which you can enter/exit a side street that has snow plowed in front of it, navigate a steep and poorly plowed driveway, park in an unplowed space, cross the slush between lanes on a main roads or highway, those are what "real users" care about and they're where AWD shines.
>but once you are, every car still only has 2 wheels to turn and 4 to stop, which are quite possibly more crucial in snow..
These trope needs to be taken out back and shot. Regardless of your tire type the amount of traction available in snow conditions is such that "not being stupid enough to come into a situation too hot" is the dominant factor in overall outcome in braking/turning situations. Snow tires are an incremental improvement, not a categorical one. And the difference between a wet road and a snowy one is very much a categorical one.
AWD is the right choice for the statistical average person or "casual user" who's snow experience is dominated by somewhat plowed, somewhat churned snow/slush roads and is already driving incredibly conservatively. If you're driving on a frozen lake all the time like in the tire commercials or live somewhere rural and drive on a ton of fresh snow, by all means get the snow tires. But most people aren't, in that category they're better served by some random crossover and not thinking about it. And if you are one of those people, then spend a little more and get something with studs for all the ice you're inevitably also encountering.
Uh, it should be? The ability to confidently stop is far more important than to go. If you can’t get going, you’re not in a wreck. If you can’t stop, well…
You also missed another key reason to get snow tires: many (most?) vehicles do not come with AWD even as an option. Telling someone to trade their Civic in for a CR-V just so they can get AWD isn’t sensible, when they could mount snow tires and get a significant traction boost.
First off, this is the principal skinner "everyone else is wrong" take.
Second, it's just not how things work in practice. In practice what happens if you have a FWD car that can't "just go" you wind up driving way harder to make up for it. Stuff like hitting hills at speed and trying to take on-ramps at the limit of traction because you are having to work around the limitation of being unable to actually put power to the ground when you need to. Say nothing of all the sketchy situations that happen at the margin of that (backing down a hill you couldn't go up, getting stuck less than graceful merges, etc).
>You also missed another key reason to get snow tires: many (most?) vehicles do not come with AWD even as an option
I don't think that's anywhere near true for the US market.
Most companies prefer vans over trucks. Much better economics.
Either AWD/4wd is necessary when you're going to other people's property because you can't guarantee any given property isn't an icy shithole and when you're a professional being paid by them to be there for a specific purpose the last thing you wanna do is slip out trying to do a 25-point turn on their stupid sloped driveway and put a tire in the landscaping.
Even in cold parts of the US your hvac or plumber is going to be using something like a transit. Very few trade jobs opt for a truck. They don’t make economic sense and impossible to secure anything in the bed.
Sure landscaping crews can utilize trucks but even then, your mowing operation can get more value from a transit style van if they are only using pus mowers.
Maybe it’s just in my neck of the woods but if you cannot get up or down a hill because a homeowner does not clear their driveway then it’s a no go. Very acceptable boundary.
I've never seen or known a trademan that drove a van. They all drive pickups. Maybe this is a regional thing.
I am quite surprised to hear you have never seen an electrician use a van. That said there are certainly specialities where it’s more common.
90% of trade work is all on pavement and trucks suck for tools. If you are a logger yeah sure you may be using a truck to get to your equipment, similarly for lineman but for the vast majority of trade jobs companies opt for commercial vans. You are describing trade work like it’s the tv show landman.
Pickups are absolutely a regional affectation. I kinda want one, but I do not need one.
It could also be just a further deal with Quigley. You can already order from a dealer with the 4x4 option, and your vehicle will go factory->Quigley->dealer and be sold to you as "new", with good warranties.
I grew up in Minnesota driving rear wheel drive cars to start. They worked fine even in the olden days where plows would take a couple days to clear the country backroads and even rock salt was applied sparingly due to the expense.
Not a single one of my vehicles had winter tires - all seasons were perfectly serviceable. You’d get stuck once in a great while but that’s what the bag of sand and shovel in the trunk were for.
Front wheel drive came along and made it easy mode.
All wheel drive is certainly something I love these days, but it’s an extreme luxury that makes winter driving laughably easy.
A basic utilitarian work vehicle does not need to be 4WD in 90% or likely even 99% of use cases anywhere in the country.
Only in the most strictly technical "I'm not touching you" sense.
Either AWD/4wd is necessary-ish when you're going to other people's property because you can't guarantee any given property isn't an icy shithole and when you're a professional being paid by them to be there for a specific purpose the last thing you wanna do is slip out trying to do a 25-point turn on their stupid sloped driveway and put a tire in the landscaping.
Even if it's some megacorp's facility that "should" be plowed and salted, it might not be when you show up at 6am on the dot to service something.
>I grew up in Minnesota driving rear wheel drive cars to start. They worked fine even in the olden days where plows would take a couple days to clear the country backroads and even rock salt was applied sparingly due to the expense.
>Not a single one of my vehicles had winter tires - all seasons were perfectly serviceable. You’d get stuck once in a great while but that’s what the bag of sand and shovel in the trunk were for.
I completely agree but the past isn't coming back. Those standards of performance are unfortunately no longer acceptable, especially in business settings.
The average contractor servicing suburban and exurban properties in a work van is going to be able to trivially navigate 95% of all snowfalls with FWD with a modicum of winter driving skills. It's just not that hard, and very few places get the type of snow that requires a fully off road capable vehicle.
If I lived in the mountains of Colorado and servicing ranches or something of course I'd be buying for those conditions. But a standard city in the northern US or Canada? Meh. Total waste of money for a fleet vehicle. These sorts of locations are where something like 99% of all vehicle miles are put on.
For personal use now that I can afford it? AWD is on all my vehicles. It's a magical technology since it allows turning your brain off, and making some situations comically easy to navigate. But I'm not optimizing for cost efficiency or practicality there - I'm optimizing for luxury and convenience.
I'm not talking about places that can be written off because "the boonies are a rounding error".
I'm talking about some guy who owns a plumbing business in Boston and wants to reduce the number of days per year that conditions make things sketchy. $3k per truck or $4k per van is absolutely chump change compared to the PITA of having to add more buffer to winter scheduling to account for delays and inconvenience.
>for personal use now that I can afford it? AWD is on all my vehicles. It's a magical technology since it allows turning your brain off, and making some situations comically easy to navigate. But I'm not optimizing for cost efficiency or practicality there - I'm optimizing for luxury and convenience.
Baffling that someone who readily admits that "you can turn your brain off" doesn't see why people who either have to drive their own work vehicle every day, or put a vehicle in the hands of an employee wouldn't value that even higher.
Source: own minivan
Ironically, the Honda Ridgeline - long lambasted as “not a real truck” - can fit a 4x8 sheet of plywood, at least width-wise. You’ll have to either prop it up on the tailgate, or drop it and strap it down (which honestly you should do either way), but it will fit between the wheels.
I love my Ridgelines; had a Gen1 RTL, and now a Gen2 BE. A neighbor I used to have traded his F-150 for an F-350. The most I ever saw him haul was a very small trailer with some furniture. I’ve had a cubic yard of mulch dumped into mine repeatedly (a Gen1 Ridgeline will hold and haul this, but it’s heaped, and depending on moisture content it’s slightly over max rating, so maybe don’t bring a passenger).
After deciding to replace it, we struggled to decide what kind of vehicle to upgrade to. For our lifestyle and the side projects I like to do, another minivan was the obvious choice. Now it's a 2018 Pacifica and we're retired. The quality is outstanding, with 112K miles on it, I expect to put on another 100K before seeing what's available for the next upgrade. None of these vans ever gave us any engine or transmission trouble, despite the high number of miles I was able to put on them.
Remind me of my favorite article title: In the land of the free, why can’t we have mini-pickup trucks like the Taliban and ISIS?[0]
[0]: https://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dion-lefler...
First of all I'm not convinced that the utility of the trucks is mostly unused. This seems like a trope from anticar people. But second of all and more concretely, I've done a lot of trade work that would have simply not worked in a van, so seeing your common sentiment is always bemusing.
Funny story, the guys who demolished an old bathroom for us hauled the crap & dust away in a very dirty beater van (either a small cargo van or a minivan with rear seating removed, can't remember). It was their designated demolition vehicle.
There are only two trades that use sheet goods: drywall and carpentry. Most of the time they’re getting dozens or hundreds of sheets delivered to a job site.
What are you going to do with (12) 32 sq ft pieces of sheet goods anyways, put up drywall in a half of a bedroom or reroof a quarter of a garage?
If you really want to do this, you’ll get a roof rack for hauling sheet goods.
(Same bed-size as Tacoma; midgate that folds down to hold a full sheet of plywood; seats 4 people comfortably; same length as a Mini Cooper SE).
I saw the movie in the theater and, at the time, found it strange that anyone would have a work vehicle as a dream car.
Not really true. Something like an F150/250/350 is absolutely built for utility. It's popular for a reason. It's just not used for utility by a large number of buyers. It's a "pavement princess".
The Cybertruck is an objectively bad product for many reasons of which utility is pretty high up there.
For example, it's really heavy because of the steel body yet it has an aluminium frame. The problem with aluminium is that it deforms with stress in a way that steel doesn't. Why does this matter? If you're towing a heavy load over rough terrain the frame is going to face large forces up and down that will end up snapping that frame.
> It's the suburban equivalent of a yuppie's Rolex Submariner.
That's a funny example because it shows you know just as much about watches as you do about trucks, which is to say nothing.
Sure, finance bros might buy Submariners but that doesn't change the fact that it's a very robust product designed for diving, originally. Now the need for that has been diminished because we now have dive computers, quartz dive watches and such and you can argue it's not worth ~$10k or that there as good or better options for less (which there are) but it's still an excellent product with many years of design to suit its original purpose.
Even if you use a dive computer as an experienced diver, you'll generally also have a dive watch because computers can fail [1].
> I say all of that to say that making a pickup truck for that market segment isn't a bad idea from a numbers perspective
So we have luxury SUVs where once the SUV was a commercial vehicle (eg Toyota Land Cruiser) and they may sacrifice some of the features such vehicles originally had (eg AWD) but the trades are made for a product that people want.
So yes, you could make an equivalent truck and say it has a market. Maybe it does. But even if it does, the Cybertruck isn't it. Because it's a terrible product for every purpose other than an expensive demonstration of your political leanings.
[1]: https://www.analogshift.com/blogs/transmissions/watches-for-...
Nice ad hominem. No diver is buying a Submariner specifically as a backup for their dive computer for the exact reasons that you went on to outline in your post. It's a textbook Veblen good. The Chinese can build a mechanical Sub clone that keeps the same time as a real one for $100. Swatch (via Omega) builds a more technically-impressive dive watch at a fraction of the price. Oris makes one with an analog depth gauge for even less than the SMP. All of them are more inaccurate and less reliable than anything quartz or digital.
Rolexes stopped being tool watches a few years into their post-Quartz crisis recovery. My GC buddy drives a Tundra. Fleets of white collar workers drive Crew Cab F-150s with wheels more expensive than the worthless Regular Cab I had years ago. No need to get twisted up about it.
I love it. Full-flat back allows for camping in your car (I'm just over 6 feet tall.) Three bicycles and three people can fit. Wood, tools, DIY... And it is tiny, so it is easy to drive and park.
It doesn't like driving faster than about 110km/hr, but that's good enough for me.
The utilitarian trucks you are talking about are k-trucks, or kei-trucks. "Kei" just means "lightweight."
In Japan, they are refered to as "kei-tora": 軽トラ
"I guessed that 98% of all truck beds are empty"
"In 25 minutes I had counted 150 trucks, and 99 of them had been empty. This 66% empty ratio was much lower than I had expected. I hadn't realized that so many trucks were being so successfully utilized."
"The results were similar: 39% of the trucks were hauling goods, and 61 of them were empty"
"Along with this adjustment of my perception, I also realized that an empty truck is no more wasteful than an empty back seat. Most cars AND trucks in the US drive around with 75% of the cargo space unutilized...what difference does it make if it is interior or exterior space?"
https://cockeyed.com/science/data/truck_beds/truck_beds.html
People using truck for work (tradesman etc) do it all thorough the day. People who just use it as status symbol get to work and back from work at given hour. Also probably more usage in weekend when people doing weekend project go shop and people not doing that don't even get out on the longer trips.
Sitting on one road for an hour (and looking at photos, far from peak traffic) is near meaningless
Reading the HN version of truck drivers is such a stark contrast to interfacing with actually contractors on a day to day basis.
A vehicle being comfortable and luxurious isn’t something only the bourgeoisie can appreciate. People who work spend a lot of time in their vehicles too.
As you say though I do see trades workers with the fancy pickup trucks (often with a trailer, cant scratch that bed paint aha) which I attribute to low interest on auto loans and poor business sense.
Certain jobs in certain trades, not all of them
> and a 80k f150 platinum
Base F150 starts at half that. This is silly
Correct, which is why I used said most trades and not all trades
> Base F150 starts at half that. This is silly
The average new vehicle price in the US is 50k, people are not buying the base model.
$50K is much closer to the $40K base model than the $80K platinum model.
Everyone loves to cite the platinum model as if all the contractors or CEOs or whoever were bashing today are driving it, but most people are not buying the most expensive models.
Half of the vehicles are below 50k.
This is a textbook example of a case where median would be better.
No it isn't [1].
> There seems to be no limit these days to how lavishly equipped, not to mention expensive, full-size standard-duty pickup trucks have become at the upper reaches of their respective model lines. [...] They’re brash and uniquely American alternatives to fine-tuned European luxury SUVs. For those keeping score, Kelley Blue Book says the average full-size pickup sold for $66,386 last month, due in large part to the growing popularity of such upscale models.
Sixty. Six. Thousand. Dollars.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2026/01/14/the-cos...
The online crowd has such a love for sprinter vans, I don't see anyone talking about them except a very small group.
The people around me have F250s + a trailer twice the size of a small sprinter. They can work and have a small house behind them when needed.
Sprinter/Transit will NOT replace F250s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/marie-gluesenkamp...
<blockquote>
“Spreadsheets can contain a part of truth,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “But never all of truth.”
Looking to illustrate this, I bought the recent book “White Rural Rage” and opened it more or less at random to a passage about rural pickup trucks. It cites a rich portfolio of data and even a scholarly expert on the psychology of truck purchasers, to make what might seem like an obvious point — that it’s inefficient and deluded for rural and suburban men to choose trucks as their daily driving vehicles. The passage never does explain, though, how you’re supposed to haul an elk carcass or pull a cargo trailer without one.
It’s all but impossible to go into any rural bar in America today, ask for thoughts on pickup trucks and not hear complaints about the size of trucks these days, about touch-screens and silly gimmicks manufacturers use to justify their ballooning prices. Our economy, awash in cheap capital, has turned quality used trucks into something like a luxury asset class.
It’s often more affordable in the near-term to buy a new truck than a reliable used one. Manufacturers are incentivized by federal regulations, and by the basic imperatives of the thing economy, to produce ever-bigger trucks for ever-higher prices to lock people into a cycle of consumption and debt that often lasts a lifetime.
This looks like progress, in G.D.P. figures, but we are rapidly grinding away the freedom and agency once afforded by the ability to buy a good, reasonable-size truck that you could work on yourself and own fully. You can learn a lot about why people feel so alienated in our economy if you ask around about the pickup truck market.
Instead, the authors of “White Rural Rage” consulted data and an expert to argue that driving a pickup reflects a desire to “stay atop society’s hierarchy,” but they do not actually try to reckon much with the problem that passage raises — that consumer choices, such as buying trucks, have become a way for many Americans to express the deep attachment they have to a life rooted in the physical world. A reader might conclude that people who want a vehicle to pull a boat or haul mulch are misguided, or even dangerous. And a party led by people who believe that is doomed among rural voters, the Midwestern working class and probably American men in general.
</blockquote>
Would you believe that moose are also hunted in places that have very few pickups?
It can be that but all the major manufacturers have a ton of trim levels and options. Personally I drive a f150 that doesn't even have power windows.
Most Cybertrucks I've seen in the wild are running at a low ground clearance, reminiscent of a 'coupe utility' vehicle like an El Camino.
It's a big car platform with a bed. It's the "top of the line" for "car based" pickups like the old Subarus, the Maverick/SantaCruz and Ridgeline.
While it nominally competes with the F150 it doesn't really. Same as how the Ridgeline nominally competes with the Ranger, but doesn't really.
I think it's a real shame the cyber truck never took off. While gimmicky I think the longevity of it's absolutely stupid thick(er than typical) gauge stainless body would have put pressure on other OEMs to stop building shitty truck beds that dent and rust if you look at them funy.
The difference is that the Submariner can actually be used as a dive watch. If it turned to fail significantly more often than other dive watches underwater, people would be much less inclined to buy it even though it would literally make no difference for them.
Are you suggesting that modern trucks can’t be used as trucks?
There are some good EV trucks out there. The Cybertruck is kind of uniquely bad because they tried so hard to make it unique and funny looking.
There are millions of workers carrying tools, parts, supplies, and refuse in pickup trucks. Where I live (rural), almost everyone has a truck, and it is for work, not show.
And in cities, as I walk around neighbourhoods, I see endless roofers, plumbers, builders, gardeners, and more using them for work.
Cybertruck is a product management failure.
> A pickup truck should just be max utility You don't know much about trucks? What does this even mean, max utility? Trucks are designed for different purposes. Should we eliminate all programming languages besides bash or python?
> especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one Seems like you don't know much about business either. Most new products should NOT try to do everything at once the first time.
That's very unrealistic considering the market.
Yet we are in a thread where one with max utility has been cancelled and one flop of the century continues to sell.
As the owner of a rusty 1985 pickup with manual windows and no radio, I can tell you there is great demand for utility pickup trucks that the manufacturers WILL NOT MAKE.
The first problem is CAFE rules. Congress legislated the light pickup truck out of existence. To get around CAFE rules, manufacturers increased the size of trucks and added a back row so they could be reclassified in a way that skirted CAFE rules.
However, there's a big demand for pickups, so people bought these because they needed trucks, and nothing else was available. Manufacturers took advantage of demand and started adding features normal pickup drivers didn't want or need, to access a high-market class of buyers. "Where else are you gonna go?"
$100k pickups, here we are.
Manufacturers are in no hurry to go back to the low-margin pickup days, even though that is what classic pickup buyers actually want.
How do you even define that? Give it a heavy duty bed and you're wasting weight that could be put toward hauling/towing capacities (and lord knows how people here would feel about ignoring those). A big engine for "reasonable driving" when fully loaded guzzles fuel.
> 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
Serious question. I can't think of any, but I'm also not familiar with car markets the world over. In Japan, for example, the best-selling car is the Honda N-BOX [1], which is an incredibly practical car.
And why would I want to drive one? I have literally no reason to drive that waste of batteries.
Adjustable ride height? Miraculous. Meanwhile my car is mapping the road surface, actively leaning into corners and following road camber, actively avoiding potholes, and adjusting the suspension, including ride height, constantly.
Traffic Sign Recognition, including recognizing school zones, and recognizing active school zones.
Adaptive blind spot - so nice. Speed differential low, or you're going faster? Will not activate, or only activate last moment. But if someone is blowing by you in the HOV lane, it will warn of them when they're still several hundred feet back.
Laser headlights. Matrix headlights. Night vision with thermal imaging.
Predictive active suspension - The car actively scans the road ahead with sensors and it will adjust suspension for poorer road conditions.
The car can not just stop, but will actively swerve, if safe, around obstructions to avoid a collision, or even a parked car opening a door into traffic.
That's fully a metre and a half tighter than the Cybertruck.
I 1000% agree with this, in fact I love the way it looks, like something out of a SEGA Saturn game. But I would never buy one for the same reasons I would never buy any Tesla, or in fact any EV, or any post-2014 car at all. But the looks of it are not one of those reasons :)
I do have to laugh every time I see a Tesla with one of those “Bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!!” stickers, because to me they just read as “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. It's weird to me to think that other people are thinking that way about their automobiles, because I bought mine (Prius C) based on its features and how they fit into my needs and my life. I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."
I understand you don't think it's a good car, which is fine, but most people who bought one did not agree with you.
Your comment is a little confusing because you obviously understand this concept, you bought a Prius because you thought it was a good car, not because of a political statement others may have projected onto your purchase. The same is true of most Tesla owners.
No, he had it right. Those stickers are idiotic. It won't make anyone like them any better. Sell the car if you don't like it that much.
... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.
Or the opposite, buying the car wasn't a statement at the time and they don't like that driving it feels like a statement now so they got a bumper sticker to acknowledge that their continued ownership is not a statement of support for Musk and his ideology.
We don't try to guess why you bought what you bought, or why you need to so actively rationalize it, and you stop assuming that those stickers are something other than "Please don't key this car" signs. Less dramatically some of them are also "I bought this before the guy started throwing celebratory HiterGruß on stage and carving up important parts of the government for nonexistent savings."
Which... for people outside of your bubble is something important.
He assumed that people who drive a statement car emblazoned with a big sticker that says "HERE'S THE STATEMENT I INTENDED TO MAKE" bought it because of the statement. I think that's a reasonable assumption.
I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
Nihilism is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Surely you recognize how someone could think buying a car from the company owned by a near trillionaore who helped a fascist get power and now tweets about the need for White solidarity is a bad thing.
Still are, for Cybertrucks
Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.
This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.
Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.
Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.
Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...
After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.
Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.
I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).
I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).
You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.
My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.
I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.
It's not surprising since people don't really have meaningful representation in government and have to resort to trying to hit companies where it hurts in order effect change whether that means boycotting a car company because of a CEO, or boycotting a beer because of a trans person in an instagram ad.
Unfortunate as it is, what you buy and where you shop is very much a political statement.
It's juvenile and silly and screams "midwit overly absorbed into political news."
Enjoy your unearned moral superiority. It's a thin blanket against the cold wind of mediocrity, but you do you.
Nothing except his antisemitic tweets, his posts defending Hitler, his support of Alternative for Germany, his support of prominent white supremacists, his chatbot which praises Hitler, his endorsement of racist conspiracies, and the occasional "Sieg Heil". What exactly would "something" look like to you?
Being morally superior to that is an exceptionally low bar to clear and it's earned easily by everyone who rejects the hate and lies he publishes, supports, and encourages.
What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.
The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.
That is there, recorded, and you are telling me to ignore what I see.
I know you won't care, this video is not for you, is there in case anyone else starts to belive your lies, they can see for themselves.
I find it hilarious that people think this because he did some tangentially Roman-salute-esque gesture once. His political platform is nowhere near Nazism. He would actually be a much more interesting person if it were.
Thing is, after the initial momentary amusement the novelty quickly evaporates. It doesn't have the compelling presence of, say, a Tumbler. https://brucewaynex.com/pages/tumbler
There are lots of interesting concept cars on every car show. Too bad companies choose to never make them.
Anything with that teardrop shape is immediately out of my purchasing decision matrix.
I like boxy vehicles and sharp angles you could cut yourself on. The Toyota FJ Cruiser. The new Ford Bronco. The new Land Cruiser FJ.
The original DeLorean DMC-12 speaks to me. The Ferrari F40. The Corvette C8.
The Unimog. FMTV trucks.
Nothing that looks like a dollop of sour cream or a tear drop breast implant is ever going to appeal to me. Aerodynamics be damned.
I was seriously thinking about looking into finding a surplus FMTV until I realized just how loud and uncomfortable they probably are. Sure, that can be fixed, but I have enough projects.
All the test demonstrated is that you should not exceed the towing capacity of Cybertruck while its front subframe is pinned to the ground by a tractor.
It wasn't just the hate i think.
A big part of the Cybertruck marketing was the robustness of its unusual design: exoskeleton! space grade materials! They smashed the door with a hammer and it didn't dent (just avoid pétanque balls...), Elon Musk commented that it would destroy the other vehicle in an accident. Morally dubious arguments sometimes, but it appeals to many potential customers.
And then, the vehicle that is supposed to be a tank falls apart by looking at it funny. And the glued on steel plates, is it that the exoskeleton? Not only the design is controversial, but it failed at what it is supposed to represent.
That is so right on the money. I attended the LA Auto Show a couple of months back and the takeaway was that every manufacturer pretty much makes the same safe car. There might be a feature here and feature there, but it's the same car.
In the years past they at least had lots of concept cars. This year, I maybe saw two and they weren't all that "concept".
I think the Cybertruck was DOA and his involvement in politics got people who shared his views to buy one in order to signal the same.
https://www.thestreet.com/electric-vehicles/teslas-cybertruc...
It's not just you, it's universally tasteless and that's the point: It is a contrarian vehicle.
In an age where the Internet has flattened subcultures into surface phenomenons, the only remaining way to publicly distance yourself from normality is by making patently, obviously bad decisions and using the backlash to further fuel your ego.
The collapse of the company overall, particularly the Model Y, which is a great car, is all about Elon. Not only his unveiling as a fascist, but he essentially looted the company.
they wouldn't let him out of the sale -- he sued 3 times to get out of the twitter buy agreement -- so now he owns that too.
It's a fashion statement, not a work vehicle.
Downvote all you want, the sales numbers speak for themselves.
I agree they are not work trucks, not meant for work tasks.
Because of course towing long distances is the only reason you'd ever want a truck.
Obviously we can start by acknowledging that the vast majority of F-150s (and other half-ton pickup trucks) sold in the US these days are purchased by people who maybe haul a load of mulch or dirt once a year and otherwise use them as daily commuter vehicles for which no part of their "truckiness" actually matters for any reason other than image. I absolutely agree that these people should drive something that's not a truck, but that's a battle we're not going to win, so I'd rather have them driving an EV truck instead of a gas-guzzling V8. It's an improvement in some ways even if in reality that suburban parent would be best off with a minivan as their daily and renting a pickup from Home Depot for that mulch run.
My one friend who has a Lightning is exactly this. She used to have a gas F-150, replaced it with a RAV4 that she didn't like so she rapidly replaced that with the Lightning and loves it. Lots of power, quiet, smooth, and never needs to go to the gas station. I don't think she's ever fast charged it, just plugs in at home and goes about her life.
Where I live there are a lot of people who actually do need a truck or truck-based SUV for recreational purposes but don't really go long distances, like towing their boat up to the lake for the weekend, towing ATVs to the trail, or towing a RV trailer to a nearby state/national park where they'll then plug in to the nice 50A outlet and charge back up overnight without having to think about it.
There are also an absolute ton of commercial fleets that need pickup trucks for one reason or another but their trucks never leave their metro area and always end up back at the office every night. Lawn care, delivery, etc. where the only downside of the current lineup of electric trucks is that they're all only offered as the ultra short bed crew cab configuration instead of a long-bed standard cab.
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EVs are absolutely the wrong choice for time-constrained long distance travel, like long-haul trucking or the midwestern three-day-weekend road trip, but the Lightning and its GM competition that were actually designed to be good at things instead of a pure image machine are very good at certain roles.
They don't fit the image if they drive an e-truck because e-trucks aren't great at those "truck things. At least that's my theory why the e-trucks aren't doing well, even if they should be.
No doubt a used Lightning is a great deal if you only need to carry stuff once in a while.
A lifted dually with rubber band tires on giant wheels isn't good at truck things, and everyone who actually does truck things knows that, but a lot of the crowd that will complain about electric trucks has no problem with one of those.
IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Basically the only thing "left wing" about it is the fact that it's electric.
> Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
The only thing it actually did new was the drive-by-wire steering, which is by all accounts impressive but could have been done on any normal vehicle as well. The "unique" styling is mostly just re-learning lessons that John DeLorean taught the rest of the industry decades ago.
Elon is an ass, but this is still the most crudely and childishly stereotyped thing I've read on the internet today. Congrats.
Whats in their trucks? Well, a crew cab occasionally is used for car pooling workers, where they all park their vintage beater trucks at the business... Sometimes weather sensitive tools, or job related items, documents, you can just throw these in a glove box... The bed usually has a gas pump for refilling remote equipment. Cones and other safety shit. Sand hoppers for plowing. Yes they also use these "luxury" trucks to plow.
The thing is... These people are making decent salaries... my direct relatives are multi-millionaires who still pick up a welder, a hammer, a shovel.
Im see alot of assumptions about why trucks evolved the way they did, who owns them, and what for... I would argue the "luxury faker" is a very small crowd, one that likely moved to the cybertruck... and despite the trucks looking modernized, are beaten to pulp over long service lives.
Now, go get in a modern tractor, dump truck, or excavator. They are also all AC, Radios, Computers, Leather Seats, etc... People want to be comfortable.
If it was made by some other company I would genuinely consider buying one. But I would never buy another Tesla. I owned an older Model X, before Elon went full-fascism. And even ignoring Elon, the car was awful. It was shoddily built, kept breaking down, and the service experience was shockingly bad. Absolutely atrocious.
But after all that, I can't give money to Elon ever again. I can't fund America's descent into fascism. I could not live with myself.
Function should drive form. The design would be cool if it was for a cool function.
Say you have a beautifully-made, expertly-weighted tack hammer. That looks cool on your work bench and works well. If you refashion the hammer into a kitchen spoon, it looks dumb in the kitchen and works poorly for stirring a pot.
It may be a terrible car from a terrible program, but these events at least bear mentioning. If you saw it happening in 2025, would it have a cooling effect on your decision to purchase? Who would want the trouble?
Ford is a car company. They sell cars. The Lightning was a poorly selling car, so they stopped selling it. Pretty simple!
Tesla is a lifestyle company. They make line go up by owning the libs, catering to edgelord identity, and triggering speculation. The Cybertruck probably gained the company more memetic shareholder value than it lost as a real product.
It's a brodozer for people that are slightly environmentally conscious or have Elon issues.
And again, I say this as an actual cowboy, in that yes, I own cows. And a lineman who ferries manly men (and a few manly women) to do manly man work on high voltage power lines that will kill you so dead it's a guaranteed closed casket funeral. Trucks aren't just dick compensators, they exist to do work. And the Cybertruck sucks at all of that work. The F-150 lightning was a useful fleet vehicle due to the 120VAC outlets alone, aside from being, you know, a usable truck.
There's a reason most of the offering are very similar. We figured out what work pickup trucks need to do and how they're engineered to do it 50 years ago. The Hilux and friends made it highly economical. So you've got the Hiluxies and the SuperManlyMinivans and those are the two main kind of pickup trucks.
The biggest problems are: it costs ~2x what Elon said it would, it has less than half the range he said it'd have, and it has had 10 recalls in its short life.
The recalls have been for things as basic as: light bar falling off, exterior trim falling off, bed trim falling off, the acceleration pedal falling off, inverter failures. It paints a picture of a low-quality product that has a very premium price.
How do so many people justify buying the new redesign? I mean it came out after the CEO went in front of the world and gave two nazi-like salutes, then did DOGE!
Do they buy his 'autistic' defense? Do they just not care about what the CEO does and support him with their money anyways? Do they actively support his ideology?
I suspect it's likely a mix of these depending on the person, and probably more that I can't think of.
I mean they're good cars, no doubt, and it's a damn shame many decent engineers and workers put in so much effort to have it all tainted by such nasty politics.
But I cannot ignore those salutes, nor the myriad other slights starting with calling those Thai cave-diving heroes pedophiles. Tesla is dead to me, a victim of this insane time and its CEO.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/tesla-full-2025-data-europe-t...
Why? Do you want your other tools to be _different_ for no reason at all? Do you want your drill come with sharp corners you can't touch just because it'll look different?
If I see a Cybertruck I’m extremely confident that driver approves of Elons antics and likely fervently supports them. It’s a physical manifestation of his ego and mostly bought by his legions of fans.
If you’re a Cybertruck driver and you don’t want people to think that, you’re in the wrong car.
It's clear the design was half baked from the start.
It seems to be a good product (with compromises as any product) but its not a slam dunk to choose that as a Model 3/Y is.
You haven't seen enough trucks and pickups then. The Cybertruck serves no utility purpose.
That was when it was supposed to cost around $35,000.
Four years later when my reservation was ready to order, on December 8, 2023, the CyberTruck cost more than $100k.
Because it cost almost 3x more than what was originally advertised, I cancelled the order. I know many other people who canceled for the same reason. Keeping in mind this was after several delays, so I and many others with reservations were already frustrated with the product before it became available to order.
Because utilitarian design and purpose of this vehicles has been established long time ago. Cybetruck "wanted to be different" but it fails in every aspect of its own "innovation". It's ultimately stupid vehicles with so many flaws that arguing it tried something is pointless. Like, having a man walking to North Pole in runners - he's not trying something new, he's straight stupid and should be treated like that
As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
People think EVs are cars with tanks of electrons, and run aground the same way you would if you thought horses were cars full of hay. It's a different transport tool that gives the same results, you just have to know how to use it properly.
EVs aren't for everything, but mine fits my use case perfectly.
The 2025 gas version's MSRP was about 30k, and the electric one was about 35k with a $7500 tax credit.
Does this factor in cost of ownership? Gas, oil changes, less complexity?
> worse range (lower, particularly for towing)
Towing reduces a gas powered car’s range, too.
Not true for EV.
Towing is also a bit of an edge case.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
Most road trip stops, according to the AAA, are 15 minutes anyway. Only on the Internet does everyone take 5 minutes to refuel.
No, I'm just talking about sticker price.
Lifetime EV costs are relatively unknown at this point, so that would be a relatively speculative comparison. You have to have a pretty optimistic view on long-term EV maintenance costs and charging costs to have EVs pencil out better with long-term cost of ownership.
If you want to talk about ongoing costs like oil and gas in ICE vehicles, you probably also need to be thinking about cost of charging (whether you can charge at home, or only at expensive DCFS) and perhaps relative cost of consumables like tires (EVs might require costlier higher load rating tires and the torquey motors might make it easier to chew through tires faster). E.g., in my area, fast charging has a per-mile cost roughly on par with gas prices (~4x home electricity prices). So if I couldn't charge at home, ownership would be somewhat costlier.
> Towing reduces a gas powered car’s range, too.
Yes, yes, but that's more acceptable when you're starting from 500 miles of non-towing range than 230, and filling up gas is still faster than filling electrons.
So a car that's free to operate - zero maintenance, zero fuel cost - that cost $10k more than a regular car would not be a financial win?
Sticker price is a silly metric to solely focus on. Doubly so considering people rarely actually pay sticker.
You're just throwing around fictional numbers. EVs don't have zero maintenance costs or zero fuel costs. Real numbers for fuel can be lower than gas (in particular if you have home charging), and you could certainly color an argument that maintenance costs are lower. But it's not zero. Brand new gas or hybrid cars also have very low maintenance costs.
> Sticker price is a silly metric to solely focus on. Doubly so considering people rarely actually pay sticker.
Pretend I wrote "average out the door price" instead of "sticker." This number is higher than comparable ICE/hybrid vehicles, and for pretty obvious reason -- high capacity batteries are still enormously expensive. This is why range+price tends to be worse than similar gas/hybrid cars. I expect battery prices to continue to fall in the future, which will improve the economics for BEVs. But that's in the future! Not today.
Most other parts of the world EVs are starting to be cheaper than the equivalent ICE in the same category.
Range often doesn't need to get better, the impression of range needs to change. That's where a lot of misconceptions play into effect, over-focusing on things like gas-station-like charging stations over at-home charging. Over-focusing on "zero to full tank/battery statistics" when no one keeps a gas vehicle with a full tank overnight every night. Over-focusing on high speed charging and ignoring boring but useful "Level 1" charging, which is "just about everywhere" because our society has been building electrical outlets for a long time. Sure, the experience changes in things like long distance trips, but experience changes aren't "worse" by default of being a change.
Yes, if we're talking about normal family travel, an EV works fine for many trips (though there are still charging "dead spots" in parts of the country - looking at you WV).
But, "truck stuff" like towing, they aren't there yet. Maybe in a few years when we get the next generation of battery and charger tech.
So if you are towing a 2000lb empty box mobile home it's gonna be worse than towing an 8000lb flat bed of decorative boulders.
Obviously you could do that same thing in an ICE car, but I feel the pressure to keep moving so it hits different.
Those minutes add up!
I also try to drive in a manner that is friendliest to the battery (ie I'm not accelerating a bunch to pass people or driving 90 mph), and almost all the driving is on a highway. But, that's how I naturally drive in my gas car as well.
I do ~Denver to ~Salt Lake City and back 2x/year through the Wyoming route and I've done it 6 times so far in a Tesla and 4 times in a gas SUV. I do it in the early/late summer so temperatures are warm, which I'm sure helps the mileage.
The tesla mapper site claims you can do it with only 35 mins charging, but I prefer the northern route, and my actual departure/destinations are about ~1hr more driving, but I'm sure that wouldn't add more than 45 minutes to the charging time: https://www.tesla.com/trips#/?v=LR_RWD_NV36&o=Denver,%20CO,%...
How does cold weather affect this? What about when there is no supercharger (I live in Germany)?
Or driving faster, 160kmh/100mph in Germany is normal.
A common trip for me is DC -> Dolly Sods WV for camping. Less than 3 hours drive time each way, about 150 miles. I only need to stop for gas once during the trip and for only as long as the tank takes to fill (no meal needed).
In an EV, that ~6 hour round-trip takes about 9 hours due to 2 hours of charging and a 60 mile detour. That's using ABRP, with an Ioniq 5 from Reston VA to Dolly Sods Wilderness and back, no overnight charging because it's a wilderness location (gravel parking lot in the middle of nowhere).
That a fairly dead area of the country charger wise but I see several CCS chargers <5 miles out of the way and a lot more if your Ioniq has NACS.
My SO commented the same after our first long trip with an EV. She drove the whole way.
Yes it took an hour longer due to charging, but when we arrived she wasn't exhausted like she was used to, so she could go out and do stuff right away. So overall she preferred it a lot.
You can buy 1-2 year old used Teslas and BYD's in Australia for ~30% below retail.
Meanwhile Toyota hybrids not just retain their value but there have been moments where used RAV4's are listed above retail because the waitlist for new was so long.
The difference with Tesla is that their current "best price" is published out in the open.
Bought a $67K Polestar 2 with 20K miles on it for $29K.
So yeah, depreciation keeps me from buying $67K new cars (regardless of their powertrain.)
The extended range Lightning tended to be $60k and up. Sure, it had AWD, but lots of people didn't need that. The Cybertruck is even more expensive.
Both had huge preorders when they were announced at ~50k.
I admit I was also under the impression they were expensive, and I was shopping for a Powerboost F150 first, until someone told me that MSRP was a lie.
That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark"
Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot.
Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.
The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!). If this doesn’t bother you, then it’s fine. It matters to me though.
Sometimes I also drive early in the morning 600km, and in the afternoon back, so I’m home until 22:00. With EV, that’s just impossible.
You also surely recognize that your driving patterns are very atypical and a car not working for them says very little about how suitable the car is for the market as a whole.
Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW.
One top of that you need to find a charger. They are all over, but many of them are slow speed chargers. There are also a lot of gaps, if you pass a charger with 50% battery remaining you can't be sure you will make the next one. (most cars can pass several gas station with 5% gas in the tank and still make it to one). You need to ensure you will get back to your car when it is charged so they don't charge extra (this is a problem if you are at a concert or something and are trying to charge while doing something else that can't be interupted)
Someday all the above will be fixed. Everyone agrees NACS is the future connector, but it isn't rolled out. Someday every "gas station" will have a charger with the gas pumps (or perhaps something else?) - at least along routes where people often make long trips. Someday you won't need a phone/account, just swipe a card - or so I hope. But someday isn't today.
This is why I am like a broken record repeating that EV misconceptions kill EVs. You are applying gas car logic to electric cars, which is what people do, and stops them from getting an EV.
But it's wrong.
Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need.
The Renault 5 is a town car. Its specs are closer to a golf cart than a motorcar. It fills a niche, but if you are traveling often, a different EV would suite you better.
People assume everyone has the same resources as they do. Your point would be fine, if Renault 5 would be very cheap.
But it’s not. It’s the car what many people can afford.
Thinking that people have “misconceptions”, because they don’t buy expensive EV-s, which have good capabilities, is very strange.
You say EV-s are good and people just don’t get it. But people who buy EV-s for 25k, their experience is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than in EV-s for 50k.
These people are buying those cars, because that’s what they can afford, not because they are stupid to see that a more expensive car can do better.
Look at 25k ICE cars. They offer lot more comfort regarding “charging”, as same price EV-s. They work in a city and outside city as well. No trade-offs.
That’s my point, when I say “price and range”.
———- Renault 5 EV is a pretty normal car in Europe regarding its specs. Why would it be a golf cart?
AC only EVs dont exist in the US market any more AFAIK. Looking at the Renault 5 models currently available in the UK market, they dont have any AC only models either (maybe they do in other countries though).
Can Renault 5 EV be charged in 30 min?
If you got an EV with fast charging (and there were fast chargers on your route) it would actually be under 20 minutes more.
For example Ioniq 5 has a range of ~480 km. Let's say you started at 100% and drive down to 10%. That gets you 430 km, so 270 km left to go.
At a 350 kW charger the Ioniq 5 goes from 10-80% in 18 minutes. Assuming you do not want to take it below 10% that's 340 km before you next need to charge, more than the 270 km you need to reach your destination. You arrive with 70 km left before needing to charge again.
Let's do the round trip extra time. That's 1400 km for the trip. Again assuming we start at 100% and we don't let it go between 10%, then we get 430 km using before the first charging stop.
At that point we've got 970 km left that will have to be powered by our charging stops. Every 20 minute stop is giving us 340 km, so we'll need 3 stops, or one hour of stop time.
You might also need a stop, most likely shorter, at your destination if you are going to do a lot of driving there before returning home.
In a majority of cases with EVs charging speed is a bigger factor in how much time you spend stopped than range. Many people overlook this and might be a longer range EV when they would actually have faster trips if they got one with a much higher charge rate even if it had a substantially lower range.
The way to think of it is once you get past the range you got from charging before you left, every km travelled on the trip comes from stops during the trip. If EV X charges twice as fast as EV Y and they both need a stop at the same place, Y is going to spend twice as much time on chargers for the rest the trip as X no matter how many times they have to stop. If the fast charging X has half the range it will stop twice as often, but an X stop will be 1/4 the time of a Y stop actually charging.
Y making few stops does mean less time spent on stop overhead, by which I mean the time when you are off the highway but not actually charging. That should only be a couple minutes or so per stop though since you can overlap time consuming stop activies like visiting the bathroom with the actual charging.
On most trip that saving from less total stop overhead can't come anywhere near the savings from faster charging and so fast charging meh range will usually beat crap charging but great range unless the trip is short enough that only the short range car needs to stop. The great range car also does got farther before needing the first stop, so it doesn't need to add as much mileage during the trip put that too usually doesn't make much difference either other than fairly short road trips.
But “price and range/charging speed” still applies.
I can’t afford an expensive EV with fast charging, but I can afford a cheap ICE. I get it that in US people buy 100k cars as there is no tomorrow. But not everywhere it’s like that.
For 10k one can get a decent ICE. Can you get fast charging used EV for 10k?
This is fine if you're a homeowner. For a huge chunk of people living in denser housing, this is not feasible, and at best impractical.
I have a hybrid now, it's still a conventional powertrain, and it's not chargeable. That's not exactly what I want, but it's what I could get.
I want a fully electric drive train hybrid with around 100 miles capacity on the battery, then a generator that's big enough to keep it running if the battery is drained.
100 miles gets you through the average day without having to use gas.
An electric drive train turns your engine to a generator that runs at a fixed speed and is more efficient. It also massively reduces the complexity turning into a system more like an EV.
And, if I go on a long trip, the car still gets me to where I'm going without charges (unless I choose to so I can save gas).
Would you drive around with the trailer all the time? Probably not ...
- It didn't come with a home charger at all. They're not cheap.
- It came with a J1772 adapter, but no CCS adapter. The car itself has NACS. So I'm limited to Tesla superchargers, which are expensive, unless I buy a new adapter (not cheap, or cheap, but suspicious Temu brands).
- The experience of using all of these different branded charging points is _awful_. You need to create 10 different accounts with a bunch of terrible apps. The maps to find charging infrastructure seem universally awful.
- Pretty common to arrive at a charging location to find that some nutjob has hacked off all the charging cables. The only reliably maintained charge points are the larger, more expensive high speed charging locations.
I think a lot of the issues would be solved if I was more committed to the car and the house that I'm living in, and installed a home charger to charge at night. But the charging experience out in the world is absolutely _dismal_ when compared to gas vehicles, even if you change your behavior.
The real pain point, in my opinion, is whether you have any place to plug in nightly. If you don't, then as you pointed out, it becomes a nightmare to own. Range anxiety is completely justified when public charging infrastructure is still as unreliable as it is, years after the initial build outs. Your points about charging pain are all too common.
If you have a garage with an outlet, you are generally fine. I lived off a level 1 charger for over a year before I decided I wanted the convenience of a level 2 charger.
For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.
Also if you are always driving 40mi/day, you likely float with a battery percentage around 80%, leaving plenty of capacity for those consecutive 100 mile days with your standard overnight slow charge.
Again, this cannot be said enough, EVs are not gas vehicles, they do not refill like gas vehicles, if you apply gas vehicle logic to them, they look awful. But they are not gas vehicles, they don't follow the same logic and rules of gas vehicles. So you don't apply gas vehicle logic to them.
It's like handing chopsticks to an 18th century westerner, they'll stab their food with it and laugh about how stupid and useless they are. You need to learn and use chopsticks before criticizing chopsticks.
This whole thread (as always) is full of people stabbing their food with chopsticks.
What's bizarre is that this should be incredibly non-contentious when it comes to EV adoption. By code, everyone in the US already has two phases at their panel and running a wire and outlet in their garage (or a weatherized cable to the outside) costs $100-150 in materials and a similar amount in labor. This is literally negligible in the broader scheme of the automotive economy. My humble suggestion to you is: save your breath, we're on the same side, raise your voice instead when it comes to demanding a sane EV industrial policy, regulatory policy, urban planning policy, removing subsidies for oil and gas industries, and the like.
Level 1 EVSE's are super cheap, almost all of them are under $200. They aren't fast (most are 1.44kW), but that doesnt really matter if you are parked at home for 12+ hours a day.
(also small semantic nitpick, but your car did come with a charger, its built in to the vehicle. the EVSE that connects it to a wall outlet is basically just a fancy extension cord. this is why they are so cheap)
I've admittedly only used public fast charging twice in my year of EV ownership, and both times, I used a credit card at the machine. No app.
The two were EVGo and ElectrifyAmerica. I don't know if the other ten brands require an app ;)
Like:
- turn off the engine in your garage
- don't hold the ignition switch on and break the starter
- don't smoke cigarettes while filling up with gasoline
- the heater doesn't come on until the engine is warm
Just buy a house and install charger.
Nevermind the fact that there are very, very few EVs suitable for anyone with more than 2 kids.
So you need to go 600 miles, and you need 1 full charge worth of energy during that.
If that one charge takes 1 hour, you can also break it up into four 15 minute sessions at any time of your chosing.
I'm sorry, but almost no regular person does 10 hours without at least four 15 minute stops.
Range is not at all the problem people make it out to be.
How much does that car cost?
Are you assuming, that every charger on the way is 200kW?
I did Shreveport, LA to Pesos, TX as an example.
If you're OK with 2 charging stops, an Ioniq 6 or a Tesla Model 3 will work just fine.
Also, charging speed is irrelevant to how many stops you need. Most chargers are >150kW these days, though.
If you truly want to minimize charging stops, you'd be better served charging 3+ times for shorter periods of time, though.
Nite that many cars can't charge that fast. And if they can, it's usually only for the very lowest SoC of the battery, say below 20% charge.
When buying, look at 20-80% charging times. Don't get dazzled by peak charge rate.
Like everyone else, you are thinking in "gas car" trying to resolve an electric car problem.
You start every trip in an EV with full range (unplug from home base charger). You drive 300 miles. You full recharge. You drive another 300 miles. You plug-in and go to sleep.
600 miles. One charge. $20k EV.
That's certainly a factor that eases adoption.
It's not hard to convince people to move to electric, just make it such a better economic proposition that it would be silly not to.
I think the best reasons for not having an ev at the moment are 1. Not being able to charge it cheaply overnight where you live, or 2. Doing more than 400 miles in a single day more often than 5 times per year.
I think an ev would work well for anyone not in those categories.
So far it's Tacoma. Maybe some day he'll have an EV instead.
Later he had to take it in to the shop and they gave him a loaner cargo van, and from then on he regretted not getting a cargo van instead of a truck.
The vast majority of what he did with the truck was carry tools, which are easier to access in a van; the few times he carried materials he would have to unload the whole truck or get the trailer anyway.
I already have a plug-in hybrid that gets 40+ miles/charge and have opined all over the internet that the perfect car is one that gets 100+ miles/charge before firing any gas engine.
It sounds like the next Lightning will give me that though I don’t put much stock in their promises. Personally the Scout is too bougie but it does similarly.
As long as most of your drive cycle fits within the EV range of the plugin hybrid, they are cheaper to operate than a regular hybrid. The crossover point depends on the drive cycle and the cost of electricity vs gasoline.
I had a plug-in hybrid SUV that got 2.2miles/kWh in EV mode, which covered 75% of the miles I drove. The net savings were significant vs an equivalent plain hybrid SUV in my area, which would get basically the same gasoline miles/gal.
A 2023 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (38 miles EV range) costs less than a 2023 Toyota Highlander Hybrid with the same mileage on the odometer, and far less than Land Rover or other luxury SUV brands.
I bought my Outlander used - also was a great deal.
The real way dumb money loses is by buying new cars, not by choosing an electric drivetrain.
PHEVs have battery management systems and buffer capacity to protect the battery just like pure EVs. For many, at extremely high power demand, they switch to the gass engine anyways, so if anything the batteries are less stressed.
For three years my plug-in hybrid let me commute 50 miles daily on next to no gasoline.
I drive a plain ICE engine, but I plan for my next car to be a full EV for the reasons you state, plus the savings on gas for all miles driven (and I have driven 30k miles in the past year).
Thankfully, the mass of humanity that should be transitioning lives in populated areas and never tows anything for more than 75 miles. There is no need to get bogged down in back and forths with the small subset of people who an EV will not work for.
Because even very rural places have electricity - almost always. I can find quite nice homes that are 20 miles from a gas station, but have power and could easily charge a vehicle. If I lived there, a vehicle I could use without a gas station would be quite desirable.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
So I agree, EV is a great idea for rural.
The F150 Lighting (and the Cybertruck) are failing precisely because it was impractical. It was expensive, has limited range when doing actual "pickup truck" work, like hauling tons of construction materials. It was built for the very niche market of buyers at the intersection of luxury pickups and EVs.
People who buy huge luxury pickups tend not to want EVs, and people who buy EVs tend not to want huge luxury pickup trucks.
A practical work truck needs to be smaller, less luxurious, and less expensive, electric or not. If Ford follows through and releases a plugin-hybrid Maverick with 150ish miles of EV range plus the onboard generator, that would be ideal.
A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
What you can't do it tow it long distances (>90mi, worst case) without 40 minute stops every 1.5 hours. That sucks.
But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
However, if you are pulling your lawn care trailer around town, you will not have a problem, because every day you start with a full charge.
As an aside, the main killer of range for a trailer is a function of speed and drag. Low drag trailers driven at highway speeds (60-65) have marginal impacts on range, regardless of weight.
Again, the whole thing is ridden with misconceptions and misunderstandings. The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
This pattern also applies more broadly. Most people don't actually need to drive 400 miles without stopping, don't actually need an SUV, and in some cases don't actually need a truck. For a huge swath of the population some variation on a hybrid/electric hatchback/wagon or minivan is actually the best match for their needs, but practicality is rarely the prevailing factor in vehicle purchase decisions.
1: Sometimes I actually do drive 400 miles in a single sitting, and I want to be able to keep doing that.
2: The last 10% of charge seems to take the longest. If I can safely fast charge in 20 minutes from 30 to 300 miles range, then I would have no range anxiety even when I'm on a long road trip.
3: I know the tech is coming, and I can wait until it gets here. I don't have an "only" option when it comes to vehicles.
That would be about a $1,300/month loan for 6 years.
I would either need to add $30,000 annual pre-tax to my income or to pay off every debt other than my house to even begin to consider that as an option, and there are so many other things I could spend $1,300/month on.
I will keep an eye on the used market though. I'm sure some deals will come up eventually.
All that said, the average new car price in the US topped $50k in 2025, which is pretty wild in of itself. These expensive EVs are actually cheaper than some of the optioned up trucks that sell in huge numbers. It all seems crazy over-extended debt to me but, is what it is.
I wouldn't mind so much if all I had to worry about was making car payments, but having an entire life to support and car payments puts some brakes on my purchasing power.
I could swing $600/m if I needed to, but $1,300/m is a cheap mortgage or rent, not a car payment imho.
For 6 hours of straight driving, 20 minutes to stand and use the bathroom isn't too bad.
I live in a high CoL area, but I still can't imagine a lawn care business affording an $80k truck. Most of them seem to drive used Tacomas and Mavericks.
> The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
People who are paying $80 to $90k for a luxury pickup truck aren't particularly worried about operating costs.
With perhaps the exception of a few climate-change believers who happen to also run construction companies or farms/ranches (they do exist!), what F150/Cybertruck owners are worried about is signaling to others that they paid $80 to $90k for a luxury pickup truck.
To this day, I've seen 1 Lightning loaded with construction gear.
I've never seen a Cybertruck doing heavy work - they are usually rolling squeaky clean around ritzy parts of town, or getting stuck in snowdrifts in the mountains.
The EVs I see doing work: Ford Electric transit vans.
In Seattle, it costs $30 per large furniture item to make it go away using official methods. How much do you have? (And how does that compare to the price of buying and keeping a pickup truck?)
There's a couple of Honda (I think?) Kei trucks around me. 4WD, low bed, fold-down rails. I don't know about taking them on the highway with a load of furniture, but they're the most versatile-looking 'round-town vehicle I've ever seen.
I really wish we could have something like that, that's less than 25 years old.
You are right, except most of those people don't want an EV
Lots of people do exactly that. You can load it all the way past GVWR and it has little effect on the range. It's towing that hurts. Many people use these for business with great success.
Not enough to make it economically viable. Most people who want an EV want a compact, sedan, crossover, or sports car.
Most people who want a luxury pick up truck want to burn gasoline.
The niche market that does exist wants a Rivian.
For EV trucks priced and appointed for everyone else, I'm looking forward to what Slate and Telos make.
Ford's sales for the Lightning were outpacing Rivian, too.
> For EV trucks priced and appointed for everyone else, I'm looking forward to what Slate and Telos make.
I do hear that fairly often. It reminds me a lot of the brown diesel wagon phenomenon. Lots of online interest, very little follow through. I guess time will tell.
In some ways the massive online interest is proof, because most people outside of pickup truck forums who would talk it up have neither experience nor use for pickups. They are simply never going to buy any pickup truck-shaped vehicle and so are irrelevant to commercial success.
You know that electric trains are very practical, not ? Also, what about these EV trucks and EV vans ?
What's the range of an F-150 Lightning when towing a small travel trailer? The Rivian R1T is ~150 miles give or take. I assume the F-150 is similar.
At least for towing, the math isn't great. Especially when you add in the cost - my Honda Ridgeline was $42k in 2021. EV trucks are roughly double that amount.
It's the most boring and practical vehicle I've ever owned. But, it does everything, so I'm having a hard time convincing my wife I need a Ranger Raptor or (used) AMG GLE.
Test drive the tremor Lariat. Sure it's not the 3.0L but it costs a third to operate for a year, and you still go too fast in sport mode.
My Lightning was <$51K in 2024.
EVs are simpler and cheaper. Look at how fast adoption is growing outside the US. If US citizens could buy a BYD for the same price as in China, the the US auto makers and oil companies would be in trouble.
I drive quite a lot throught southern Europe with my EV, and it's super frustrating that gas stations have the infrastructure on the highway while for my EV I have to go just outside the highway to a fast charger (wasting time), then I need to pay again (and waste a lot of time to go through the gate) to get back on the highway for example in Italy.
It is not about being first it is about continual investment to do it better. China are also the ones that have the most electric infrastructure to greatly reduce their reliance on foreign countries because of that momentum they kept up.
Yeah starting first doesn't mean winning. I don't put much stock in any stats that China self-reports, but none of those things would surprise me.
Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low.
This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs.
- teslas have a lot of range/battery compared to early EVs
- superchargers are in many locations, have plentiful charging spots, and are reliable
- teslas have a good UI to navigate and charge
[1] 99% of the time. If you're an apartment dweller in the artic circle with a supercharger 2000 miles away, please scroll onwards.
Tesla with lowest range has 430km, highest range 650. Let's average it to 500km.
The average American driver drives 60km per day. In other words you need to charge less than every 8 days.
You can charge to 80% in about 20-30 minutes.
In other words if you find yourself near a charge (easy) for 20-30 minutes a week (easy), then on average there is no range issue.
You're either in a rural area in a single-family home with home charging, or in low-density urban area with single family home charging, or in a dense urban area with lots of public charging. Very few sit outside these three categories that don't enable them home charging or 20-30 minutes a week public charging.
And that's only going one direction. The number of fastchargers 10x'd in ten years, the range of the model S grew by 50% in the last 15 years, the charging speeds roughly tripled. Sufficient charging infrastructure seems like a solved problem, resolving it is a matter of a mere operational roll-out everywhere rather than a political/technical/economical challenge, a matter of when, not if, and a matter of increasingly smaller pockets of the country that are yet to be fully connected. (whether it's 1% or some other small percentage, range shouldn't be a driving factor for tesla sales anymore).
A few times a year I do quite long drives, sometimes you get the odd road closure and you've added a day to your trip at best, could be stranded at worst.
There will be a phase shift where there are lots of fast chargers but in Australia we aren't quite there yet. Lots of my friends have EVs. The busiest routes are pretty good.
On the one hand I will be a late adopter of the tech but on the other at least I know it will be a significant upgrade when I get there.
Some examples:
1. I constantly see EV owners install 60A/11kWh service, costing them on average $10k when their driving needs don't require it.
2. People thinking they need more than 300mi of range and think they will run out of batteries like they do on their headphones.
All of this needs an understanding of the aforementioned units and basic physics. But, you're not going to get that by just talking to people. Salespeople are especially not going to do that, they can't even do that for combustion cars.
My next EV will be a small BYD (dolphin or dolphin surf), these things can get between 200KM and 400KM per FULL charge, depending on your speed and settings. If you use the "slow" wall charger (that doesn't require installation or modifications to home circuits), not only will the batteries last longer, it will easily charge up your 100KM actual drive range in a couple of hours, typically overnight.
If you empty the battery each day and recharge it each night, that nets you 300KM per charge, or 2100KM per week. I don't know a single person or family that does 2100KM a week with their cars. So the whole range anxiety is rubbish. Just plug in every night and go to bed and tomorrow you have another 300km available.
Oh and then there are public fast chargers if you do get stuck. I live in Africa and this is solved problem.
Sorry for the rant..your comment about the expensive charger installations makes my blood boil as most people can just use the normal wall charger and charge overnight.
It's like when phones went from 8-10 hour capacity to over a day; suddenly it wasn't a thing you think about anymore.
The only EV pickups in the US are like $60-$120K. Price is a huge barrier to entry.
Average sale price, per Gemini:
- GMC Hummer EV: $105,600
- Rivian R1T: $91,500
- Tesla Cybertruck: $88,300
- GMC Sierra EV: $82,500
- Chevrolet Silverado EV: $78,200
- Ford F-150 Lightning: $65,400
But yes, as usual, dealers killed an EV. Same story for so many EVs. They don't want to sell them. They saw their opportunity to milk and screw up a product they didn't want, because of scarcity, and effectively poisoned it.
Meanwhile the article says "the Ford F-150 Lightning delivered approximately 27,300 units in the US."
I wonder how much dealers lie about these things. They tell you that there's not enough of them to go around, then Ford cancels them, because of what exactly?
In one year. Total was north of 100K
The depreciation for most EVs isn't all that different from that of new ICE vehicles. For a while, MSRPs were artificially inflated by the EV tax credit, which could give artificially worse depreciation appearance.
It seems that the hybrid-first strategy has been working pretty well for them. (The 2026 RAV4s are hybrid-only with no ICE-only options, AIUI.)
"But look at Tesla market cap!!!"
Toyota had the right intuition: focus on EVs when the global sales will make sense for it, meanwhile avoid throwing good money after bad like most legacy automakers did with EVs.
Notably, the Venza was discontinued after the 2024 model year and those sales figures represent inventory leftover from prior years.
Avoiding EV fomo when the market wasn't there was a good calculated risk.
Toyota did make a BEV, too. FOMO?
The car producer that still seems to think hydrogen is the future? The armchair internet analysts seem closer to correct.
Americans and American companies often hold onto technologies long after they are clearly done for in the belief that hope and marketing and stubborn refusal to let go of some romantic view that gas stations and loud noisy slow devices that require constant maintenance are cool.
Toyota and others are rightly betting the American taste will be slow to swing, that our leadership is spineless and has no forward vision, and that they can keep monetizing old technology. What they are getting wrong is the inexorable force of economic and technological reality will strangle ICE manufacturers in a slow then sudden death. BYD, MG, etc are r through the regulatory grind while building their production and logistical capacity. Once they can penetrate the US market veil it’ll be over for Ford, GM, Toyota, and others. Tesla will have to cut margin so fast it’ll be dizzying.
If you’ve driven these Chinese EVs you’ll know the writing is on the wall, and as these legacy automakers cancel their last gasp attempt to be relevant in the future, they’ve ended their role in world manufacturing in the quixotic notion that hope is a strategy.
EV sales have fallen YoY in North America.
I like it because it skips the usual hybrid approach of switching over to an ICE engine that drives your wheels in a different way and simplifies things immensely.
Would be interesting how small and how cheap you can design a ~50kW genset to be (any smaller and you don't gain that highly coveted towing range). I don't think it's an easy task, you still need to integrate the crash compliant fuel tank, the emissions compliant exhaust system, water cooling for the engine, ect.
It's a pretty long BOM you're adding to an already expensive BEV, so you don't really have thousands of dollars of budget to add to the production cost.
The changes for cooling, etc. will be substantial, but the problem space is already well-known by the team, so the time to market probably won't be as long as we think.
Gotta remove a whole lot of batteries from that car to make it cost competitive again. Realistically, with an engine this powerful, we can probably cut down to like 30kWh of total battery capacity, which gets us back to where we started financially. And 30 kWh is enough to drive 70 miles all electric, which should pretty much should cover most daily use for people who charge at home.
Now, the questions if we can do that cheaper with a much smaller engine. Ford has a 1 liter inline 3 in the Fiesta and Focus that makes half as much power. Should be enough...
If they did that, it would remove one of my reasons for not being too interested in the Lightning EREV -- the anticipated loss of the frunk. It still introduces a bunch of mechanical bits and associated maintenance requirements, that is unavoidable, along with a substantial increase in cost.
I bought my Lightning with the intent of keeping it 7-8 years, and it meets my needs very well, so this is mostly just navel gazing for me. The EREV version would have more range that I would rarely benefit from, and be substantially less powerful, which is also a negative from my perspective, in addition to costing a bunch more. My current truck is by far my favorite so far. I hope when I'm finally ready to try something new, there are better options. It's a high bar.
Agreed. And I don't think it will be cheaper. The Lightning was already selling for less than the comparable ICE equivalent, there is no way they will sell the Lightning EREV at the same price point after adding a generator along with the associated supporting parts. I bet it will be at least 10K more, and I won't be shocked if it's closer to 20K.
The whole point for those non-utilty buyers is the badass, tough-guy branding. Would a whiskey-drinking, steer-wranglin', meat-smokin', spur-boot-wearin', woodshop-havin', permanent-5-oclock-shadow BAMF drive a electric CT? No. Therefore the CT fails at the one thing they expect of trucks due to its lack truck aura.
https://fordauthority.com/2025/02/ford-ev-inventory-hub-syst...
The brakes last a lot longer because of regen, everything else applies but is pretty marginal, although I had to pay BMW $500 to replace a tire on my i4 because of a nail. I could have shopped around for that I guess.
https://nrsbrakes.com/blogs/supporting-articles/the-unused-b...
Better to have a reminder, surely the car could figure that one out.
It's not immediately deadly, but your brakes are one of the most important safety systems on the vehicle. They should be in good working order.
I'm genuinely curious because, for no good reason, I take pride in the fact that most trips I don't even touch the brake pedal other than to come to a complete stop and only when parking, etc where you can't regen all the way to a stop.
My EV for example has a brake cleaning mode that turns off regeneration for approximately the next 10 times you use the brakes.
Using that is probably going to be safer than slamming on the brakes.
Basically the primary differentiator between car companies and the primary barrier to entry in the combustion vehicle business is the engine, especially in the US. Look at the marketing, horsepower and torque are always the topline numbers. Zero to sixty and quarter mile drag races are the favored metrics. Each company spent decades perfecting the engines and the majority of the engineering effort goes into them. Even the transmissions get second fiddle status.
But now EVs come along and the electric motors are commodity parts that are already well optimized. There's little one company can do to make the motor significantly better. Battery tech is cutthroat and also largely outside of the car company's scope, although Tesla does more than other car companies with their megafactories and experiments with oversized cells. If EVs become popular there's little to stop competition from sprouting up everywhere and killing profitability for the legacy auto manufacturers.
Even if you had the chutzpah to get all of the materials together for a fleet of vehicles, you have to spend big cash and grease a lot of palms to get a vehicle you make certified. It takes years and millions of dollars to get to the 1st sellable vehicle.
This is a portion of why BYD, for instance, isn't selling in America.
There are other reasons of course, but one of them is the millions and millions of dollars you're putting at risk just to potentially be told "No" by the government.
https://www.atic-ts.com/north-america-motor-vehicle-componen...
Also, I don't think it is the cost of DOT testing that is the primary barrier to entry for a company with three quarters of a trillion dollars in revenue. The domestic car manufacturers are never going to stand for a repeat of the Japanese invasion of the 70s that nearly bankrupted all of them simply because they were not listening to the customers and trying to sell vehicles that were too big and too expensive. Everyone knows what would happen if some bare bones $15,000 EV with a 250 mile range and ample supply appeared in the market.
They're actively scamming americans by artificially limiting their choices, raising prices, and calling it freedom.
And yes, I think there should be some loopholes or programs to get small numbers of vehicles made by small companies, but I also know that insuring a car with such small numbers would likely be a nightmare for the owners.
Why didn't they just do it anyways? Dealerships seem like a pointless middleman, but I know absolutely nothing about what leverage they have. Self-driving cars can not come fast enough
You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.
Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.
That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.
That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.
There are a few reasons for that:
- Ford designed this as a one off vehicle, not as a platform to build multiple vehicles on. So, a lot of the manufacturing process is making components in low volume just for this truck that they are selling in small numbers. It never hit the economies of scale where they could optimize and lower cost.
- It's a big heavy vehicle that needs lots of battery. Batteries are expensive.
- The tariff situation made importing components from Mexico, China, and elsewhere prohibitively expensive. Ford can't source everything they need locally just yet.
All this drives the production cost up. When they launched the vehicle a few years ago, they were still able to import components. They had a shot at sourcing much cheaper batteries from China down the line. All that went away and locally produced batteries aren't as cheap.
Another factor is that it's a product that was designed to be premium and more expensive than the ICE F150 in order to protect sales of that. It was forever going to be compared to that in terms of performance and towing capacity. And the combination of being more expensive than that while having less range and even less while towing is not a great selling point.
Companies like Rivian or BYD that have no ICE truck sales to protect can operate differently. They simply make the best and most affordable vehicle they can without artificially making it needlessly expensive. Rivian isn't cheap of course but they sell well because it's a desirable product. And Rivian has done a lot of work to lower cost and is now introducing cheaper models on the back of that. BYD is cutting well below F150 ICE prices with their Shark truck. Because they can. Not for sale in the US of course but it makes F150 Lightning international sales a bit unviable. As a US only niche vehicle selling in the low thousands per year the Lightning had no future.
As a 2012 Volt owner I think EREV was a great idea in the 2010s given battery tech and networks at the time. In the 2020s, they seem a weak compromise that I wouldn't recommend to people.
The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.
If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.
The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.
I’d be really interested to know if they’re going to do that.
The tech is incredible and will filter into all vehicles in a decade or so (48v, Ethernet instead of CAN, etc)
Both result in much lighter wiring, saving money.
The steer by wire is also very cool, but I don’t know enough to say if it’s justified on regular cars or a cost saving.
Pickups always top the "best selling model" list, but there are only a couple models of pickup and dozens of models of SUV. If you total up all the SUVs, they sell much better than pickups.
so hopefully ford can turn the F-150 into an Extended Range Electrical Vehicle
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69147125/ford-f-150-light...
Unlike a traditional hybrid, the F-150 Lightning EREV is propelled 100
percent by electric motors. This ensures owners get the pure EV driving
experience they love — including rapid acceleration and quiet operation —
while eliminating the need to stop and charge during long-distance towing.
That said, they big car makers only chased the government incentives, which was a great reason to have them.
Electric everything is the future. It is obvious (e.g. heat pumps, EVs).
New started at 40k, went to 60k for sale, pre-order fulfillment fell off a cliff so it sunk to 56k, and settled around 50k.
2022: 15,617 sold
2023: 24,165
2024: 33,510
2025: “Around 27,300 units sold in the U.S”
$4k-$6k per battery module replacement. Full pack $25k-$50k.
And they don't age well. Most of the ones around here are starting to look... grimy. Or dingy. After just a couple of years. It's a poor advertisement for itself.
And, yeah, then there's cultural eye-rolling. It's really the only vehicle I hear people openly mock when they see one... And that's not a Tesla/Elon thing entirely, since people don't have the same reaction to other Tesla vehicles.
I also use it to commute, and it's even better at that (part of that is mine being the Platinum trim). Quiet, smooth, powerful, has Android Auto/CarPlay (unlike GM's products), etc.
They really are a fantastic vehicle for those who don't need to quickly tow heavy trailers 400 miles. Especially on the used market.
I think the issue was that Ford wasn't making much margin on them and they weren't moving sufficient volume to make up for that. (around 20K/yr avg)
I’m convinced that the CT could’ve become a legend if they had just done a limited run of like 500-1,000. At that level, nobody would care if it was poorly built or worked well as a truck. It’d just be a crazy collector item that would go to car shows.
I would love to buy a cybertruck chassis with a VW bus or minivan on top (current political issues of Tesla aside).
Approximately 100k for a truck of any type is ridiculous.
I rented a lightning on Turo and it was amazing - planned on getting one as my next truck. I would drive a CT depending on price but they just draw too much attention.
That's your deciding factor? Not all of the other things wrong with it and the brand?
There is tons of room for a low cost, high quality small electric or hybrid pickup in today’s market.
Ford Maverick sales have been exceptionally strong, setting records in 2025 with 155,051 units sold in the US of A, up almost a fifth from last year.
Tesla needs to make a product that people want, and continuing to try to sell one they don’t want just won’t work. Why not pivot and build the truck people are asking for? Otherwise, this program will fail.
This reflects a very common pronunciation of syllable-final Ls in English, called a vocalised L, but I've never seen it reflected in spelling in such a way. Very cool!
I'm extremely curious - did you go for that spelling as an intentional stylistic variation, or was it a typo reflecting your usual pronunciation?
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-tesla-model-y-worlds-bes...
Any vehicle that requires less servicing makes them less money, so they don’t want to sell them.
And I think that is spot on.
I also suspect internally the thinking is that the f150 lightning costs more to make than sell, which means it won't get strong advocacy.
Thing is, I'm 100% certain years of tesla vehicles cost more to make than they sold for, just in the nature of developing new things.
Maybe the dealers could have done better. In fact, they definitely could have. Most did have a demo Lightning, in my experience, but that doesn't mean salespeople were pushing customers towards them.
When hybrids are common, the styling reverted to more normal car-like.
Unfortunately other automakers see this as the pinnacle of interior engineering; swoon over this and try to pull a "LETS REMOVE ALL OF THE BUTTONS, ITS WHAT CONSUMERS WANT" maneuver.
All consumers really need/want is an affordable, repairable, minimalistic and simple vehicle. What automakers are shoving down their throats is touch screens, animations, ridiculous LED light displays, etc. Then they wonder why electric sales suck.
Have they tried cladding it in flat, steel panels, to get it off everyone's radar?
EV dominance is not only defined by battery technology but also by ADAS functions, driving dynamics and many other considerations also common to ICE cars.
In Europe, Chinese vehicles are only selling in any meaningful quantities in the low and very low price segments. And that is mainly due to cheaper labor costs in China and very thin margins (something European OEMs are not interested anymore).
When it comes to higher price segments, European OEMs and Tesla dominate clearly due to superior technology offerings. As an example, the BMW iX3 is completely sold out for months even before market release, as it’s the first car so far that has reached 1000km without charging (Debrecen - Munich). That’s not only a battery technology achievement but also aerodynamics and drivetrain efficiency, where BMW leads together with Tesla.
The Chinese market is very competitive itself as well, and is clearly dominated by Chinese OEMs. Classic European OEMs are seen as vehicles for old people, and newer generations are opting for local manufacturers. Infotainment and ADAS are also driving customers towards Chinese OEMS, mainly because of looser regulation which allows Chinese offerings to edge what Europeans and Americans are offering at the moment. To the point that the big three, Mercedes, BMW and Audi had to switch their ADAS stack to a Chinese made one (Momenta) in order to not lose more customers.
Battery technology is quickly becoming commodity and margins are thinning. Same as it happened in other industries: no one knows who is manufacturing their Samsung or iPhone battery. They might know about the CPU but they clearly care about the brand and the software experience. Cars are becoming not different.
In Europe that software experience (including driving dynamics) is and will be dominated by European OEMs, while leaving the cheap offerings for Chinese brands. They might even recover long term in China if they can quickly adapt their software to Chinese needs.
American OEMs will do fine, they either have high quality software offerings like Tesla or Rivian, or they can easily partner with American software companies to provide Americans with their desired experience.
To give some weight to the above, this thread leans way too heavy into EVs being awesome and the main issue is "the people or industry" (misconceptions, misunderstanding, oil industry bad, etc) while backing that with "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO).
Here's some counter points to a bunch of claims made in this thread:
1) EVs are not as practical as this thread proposes:
- Battery degradation is still mostly an unsolved issue. 10% within 3 years is common on the latest models as reported by drivers, 15% within 5-7 years is also quite common. LFPs do better but provide considerably less ideal range. 20% degradation is the cliff, where degradation accelerates and lithium ion batteries are considered EOL. For cars that under ideal conditions do 500km - 550km that's not okay over the lifespan of the car where you want good performance in the 8 to 16 year range. In addition, average car on the road in the USA / Europe is at 12 years (many cars far above 12 years old). These batteries will be lucky to make it to 12 years so the average age of EV fleet will end up much lower than ICE (not great)(more disposable) unless you replace the battery. Battery replacements are $10k-$20k and poor warranties (4 years or less). Costs are not coming down for various reasons.
- Actual cold performance (under -10C) is not good, there's no way to resolve this without increasing ideal range
- Range is considerably lower at highway speeds than city driving due to energy dynamics, exactly the opposite of what users need. ICE cars have an advantage here because their power curve is non-linear and power output improves with RPM, RPM goes up with higher speeds in the final gear so efficiency improves for a portion of the curve.
- Charging when living in apartment complexes or in multi-home units is not competitive at all with filling up at a gas tank, time wise or cost (unless subsidized).
- Most people drive few miles daily but long road trips yearly, often to remote places without reasonable charging infra. Versatility of use cases is a core requirement for most car users and EVs are not competitive here.
2) Growth is not as significant and growth rate has significantly slowed down
- EV sales are not at 30%+ of all car sales world wide as someone proposed in this thread claiming China is at 50%. China is at 50% NEV, which stands for new energy vehicle and makes up hybrids, BEV and EREV. EREV + hybrids are 40% of sales in China. That means BEVs are only at 30% of total which is what the rest of the world considers EV. World can't be at 30% EV sales itself as the rest of the world is far behind this sales % compared to China.
- China is pushing higher EVs not due to tech superiority but for energy security for obvious reasons, i.e. a lack of traditional energy independence and rising geopolitical risk
- Subsides have played a huge role in the growth and removal of subsidies will depress sales growth more
3) "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO)
- No one has won this race because the tech is not technically sufficiently superior to the currently available. This will change when solid state batteries become common place, but the problems with the tech are hard with a long tail of issues so that's still many years away from being widely rolled out.
This list is not exhaustive. Moving on.