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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Most companies prefer vans over trucks. Much better economics.
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
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
Crappy used trucks simply aren't up for sale. And even the rare listing I do come across, the asking price is ridiculously inflated.
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)
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.
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
I had a RWD pickup with snow tires and went anywhere I wanted to through two utah winters and many vermont ones too.
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'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.
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'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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
To the people I know who drive trucks like that, they're basically mobile offices.
"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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Of course the real money is in the high trim levels that sell for twice as much but don't really cost much more.
(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.
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
Edit: OH, you mean the CT. Silly me.
I would have gotten a Tacoma, but I need the extra towing capacity.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
even if you can find a place to rent a truck the cost quickly gets to more than
just owning your own truck.
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.
Normal-sized pickups aren't meant for offroading.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I've seen plenty of people in working clothes driving them, carrying working tools and such.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
They announced that along with the EV Lightning cancellation: https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/us/en/articles/2025/next-ge...
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.
Except the main demographic buying F150s is suburban dads driving to their office job.
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 primary limiter is on how many resources we give people.
you’re right.
but I’m still not changing my habits. fuck the environment
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.
That's very unrealistic considering the market.
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.
> 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.
Yet we are in a thread where one with max utility has been cancelled and one flop of the century continues to sell.
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.
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"
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.
However, the most likely place to rent a pickup from (U-Haul) does not allow this.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
It wasn't just the hate i think.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/tesla-full-2025-data-europe-t...
That's fully a metre and a half tighter than the Cybertruck.
And why would I want to drive one? I have literally no reason to drive that waste of batteries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
It's a fashion statement, not a work vehicle.
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.
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'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.
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...
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.
Better to have a reminder, surely the car could figure that one out.
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...
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.
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.
Any vehicle that requires less servicing makes them less money, so they don’t want to sell them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
- 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.
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 ;)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Those minutes add up!
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.
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 difference with Tesla is that their current "best price" is published out in the open.
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.
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.
That's certainly a factor that eases adoption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My Lightning was <$51K in 2024.
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.
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/enDoes 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.
> 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. ;) )
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.
Don'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!!!
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.
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.
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
Individual states go back to 1919.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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).
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.
I would love to buy a cybertruck chassis with a VW bus or minivan on top (current political issues of Tesla aside).
so hopefully ford can turn the F-150 into an Extended Range Electrical Vehicle
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Approximately 100k for a truck of any type is ridiculous.