I'm really curious about how Ram and GMs EV trucks are gonna do in the market place. A truck is a terrible platform for an EV with our current technology. It was stupid to not make them hybrids. There's so much more real world potential there.

An E-Mustang pulled into a car show tonight between a '68 Camero and a Boss Mustang.

He sat there for a moment looking around, then quietly left.

Winter in Michigan. EV apologists crack me up.

The US manufacturers stopped making cars because their offerings were mostly uncompetitive with the Japanese, Koreans, and Germans. They focused on high-profit SUV's. I worked for Ford in the 90's and the corporate profits on SUV's were insane. Dealer profits just stack on top of that too.

For whatever reason, people are willing to pay a lot more for an SUV with the same exact mechanicals as a much cheaper car or light truck. All you have to do is make it a wagon and put big wheels and tires on it.

Now with Bidenflation and higher interest rates, people can't afford the price.

The problem with small efficient EV's is that small efficient IC cars are still a lot cheaper and you can get 40-50 MPG Highway in a Civic. No one is talking about how great their Nissan Leaf is, or their Chevy Bolt. They like the big and powerful and fast (and heavy) Teslas and Rivians.

Elon Musk's genius was going after the high end crowd, not the economy crowd.

I have already seen several stories of discontinued EV (Ford specifically) where the battery has died and Ford does not make a new one and it’s effectively a boat anchor dealer repair folks are like hey sorry bro kick rocks. I will bet my next mortgage payment 98% of ICE cars built in last 70+ years can get made running by finding and rebuilding parts or somebody crafty enough can make said part. I do not see people making batteries in their home machine shop any time soon.

In some cases the do make sense and I’ve driven one they are fun. The acceleration is amazing in those EV. One of my best friends in CA is a manager for a BMW shop. He’s spending $500-800a month on gas on his ICE car just commuting. He is getting a BMW EV on an employee lease and can charge it at work. Swapping car payments are basically the same. So the gas savings and free charging in his case is great. But he’s also driving a lot and gas is really expensive where he lives. So he can justify it. It will be a 3rd vehicle and they are a 2 driver family. Other 2 cars are ICE cars

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:

He sat there for a moment looking around, then quietly left.

"Quietly."

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:

... I doubt there's a charging station within a 30 minute drive of our ranch, but there are gas and diesel options 3 miles away.

Beautiful fords there. Reminds me of the Uncompagre plateau area.

You don't have any electricity at your farm? Not even a 110 wall plug in? Wife and I have a shack at the coast which we elected to not put a charger in as you can plug in the Tesla with a regular 2 prong wall plug, which we do. Unfortunately, it's a regular 12 amp wall outlet, so charging is slow. If we leave it plugged in all night we get 6 miles of range per hour. Which is plenty for us down there. The place has 220 if she wanted a charger put in to get a fillup overnight, but she doesn't care and we don't need it.

As far as load bearing goes, brother has towed 4700+ lbs of construction trash to the dump via trailer with his Tesla Y. Tow rating for his Y is 3500 max, and I was worried for the tires, but it handled it. The tow hitch is built into the car, and needs to be ordered when you get the car as it's integrated into the bumper. As far as limitations of towing a trailer to camp in while traveling, the range decrease would make that a terrible idea.

Wife hates the idea of towing anything with hers, and we also have a gas pickup so there is no need.

As an aside: Colo. has 41 Tesla Superchargers at this time, more coming. https://www.tesla.com/findus/l...gers/United%20States

It would be more profitable for Ford to buy me a BMW M3 than to sell me an EV.

A guy told me about another in his neighborhood who was almost first in line to buy a Ford ‘Lightning’ pickup. For whatever reason, these types want to be the first to drive such vehicles.

Seems that Mr Musk's IKEA look-alike truck has been sh*t-canned.

quote:

Originally posted by .38supersig:
I recently bought an old truck for $8,000 and put another two grand (exhaust, radio, belts, etc...) in to it.

The fun part is that it gets exactly -> nine <- miles per gallon on premium fuel.

Seems it will take a while to burn through $40,000 in gas before I get to what a new car is these days.

I can't grasp the concept of finding an old electric in the future and wanting to restore it just for fun.

Next on the list may be exhaust cut outs just to make it more fun!

Well, just for fun, someone will take that old EV car and put a gasoline engine in it, and call it a hot rod.

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:
Seems that Mr Musk's IKEA look-alike truck has been sh*t-canned.

? Cyber truck is in initial stage of volume ramp up. They have hit 1000 units a week, which would be $100 million in revenue a week, at this point. They had 2 million orders reserved before production started, which was only like 4 months ago.

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
The US manufacturers stopped making cars because their offerings were mostly uncompetitive with the Japanese, Koreans, and Germans. They focused on high-profit SUV's. I worked for Ford in the 90's and the corporate profits on SUV's were insane. Dealer profits just stack on top of that too.

For whatever reason, people are willing to pay a lot more for an SUV with the same exact mechanicals as a much cheaper car or light truck. All you have to do is make it a wagon and put big wheels and tires on it.

Now with Bidenflation and higher interest rates, people can't afford the price.

The problem with small efficient EV's is that small efficient IC cars are still a lot cheaper and you can get 40-50 MPG Highway in a Civic. No one is talking about how great their Nissan Leaf is, or their Chevy Bolt. They like the big and powerful and fast (and heavy) Teslas and Rivians.

Elon Musk's genius was going after the high end crowd, not the economy crowd.

But Ford just said (a suit in charge) that they made a mistake discontinuing their passenger cars. He also said their skunk works group has already pivoted and working on smaller, more affordable options in this space. He more or less said they made some large mistakes. They are taking a bath right now on these large, heavy, and expensive vehicles.

People are not willing to pay a lot more for large SUV’s with these insane MSRP’s. In fact, they are all taking baths on them right now. They’ve hit market penetration on consumers willing to spend this amount. Those same consumers who did purchase these expensive things are stuck with them now. They depreciate rapidly so the smart money equals buying used, not new. Most buyers buy vehicles for some insane capability it has that they will never ever use or utilize and/or they buy for image/status reasons. Those buyers bought their image mobile and the depreciation has hit them, hard. And these are the same buyers who buy something, drive it for 2-3 years max, and trade it in for another expensive thing they don’t need. Manus have hit the wall with this. Interest rates are certainly a factor, but that is simply one metric. All vehicles have gone up significantly in price.

I also don’t agree that small ICE vehicles are so much cheaper. I have a Leaf. Been daily driving it for 10 years and 2 months. It’s a commuter vehicle. I have other vehicles, gas, for other things such as towing or performance riding and driving. The Leaf, all in, cost $19,700. I’m looking at replacing it with another one, a MY2023, that has triple the range, and I’m finding 1 year old models with 6500 miles on the ODO for $20.9k. I make my own power at home so no, no Civic is going to compare. The Civic is going to be more expensive.

The Bolt and Leaf buyers aren’t Rivian buyers. The Bolt and Leaf are commuters. People use them to drive to work, the gym, Costco, etc. These buyers/owners aren’t going to take a bunch of look at me photos of the car for instacrap or whatever. It’s a tool for them. Same as a tool in a toolbox. Why would I waste my time telling everyone how great my Leaf is? It’s great for me. Been the best value in a vehicle of my lifetime. Maintenance has been nil. I make my own juice to power it. 10 years and 2 months driving it should tell you something. Rivian buyers, well let’s say I see them all the time. I’ve never seen one tow anything and I have never seen anything in the pickup bed. It’s an image/status vehicle and if they were really using it for truck purposes a gas or diesel would have been a better purchase. That’s the image/status buyer buying those so of course they are going to vomit out their mouf at every chance possible to yak about it because they are paying through the nose for it. I’ve never been into the image/status bullshit. Why spend all that money on something so flawed? For bragging rights? Fake bragging rights at that. No thanks. Not with my money.

And Elon, Tesla is laying people off. They are coming to work and their badge doesn’t work. Tesla has already cut the MSRP’s as well. They are hurting too. Like the other manus, they chased all that high end buyer money and that well is drying up. Only a certain amount of people have disposable income high enough to afford a 50k-120k vehicle that they are just going to drive to work, the mall, or a grocery store. That’s not a sustainable business model. You have to make affordable vehicles as well, smaller, lighter vehicles. If Tesla was the geniuses that some claim them to be they wouldn’t be laying people off, dropping MSRP’s, etc, to keep moving forward.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:

I have a Leaf.

I have a question for you -- it will save me a trip to a Nissan dealer, and save the aggravation of dealing with a sales person.

What is your leg length (inseam)? With your driver seat adjusted for comfortable leg room, is there enough travel left over for the seat to adjust for a 36.5" inseam? I.e. if your inseam is, for example, 32" is there an additional 4.5" of seat travel available?

GM’s lineup doesn’t impress me either. Buick has gone all SUV and Chevrolet has the Malibu. Cadillac has a couple sedans but the starting price is around 38k.

They jumped the shark too.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

What is your leg length (inseam)? With your driver seat adjusted for comfortable leg room, is there enough travel left over for the seat to adjust for a 36.5" inseam? I.e. if your inseam is, for example, 32" is there an additional 4.5" of seat travel available?

I’m over 6 feet and it’s good with me. My inseam is 32” so I think you’d be fine. But honestly you should sit in one and perhaps test drive to confirm. Used, as in 1-2 years old, especially the CPO’s, are a damn steal price wise. If you needed more leg room you could probably mod the seat rails to move it rearwards even more. I test drove the newer Leaf 2 years ago and when I did I told the new car sales guy that I’m not buying today. I want to sit in it, drive it and compare it to mine then I will make a decision. They gave me the keys and didn’t go with me on the test drive. That’s what I’d do, go into the dealer and tell them you are kicking it around so you can sit and test drive and not get pushed sales wise.

Even if these EVs were no more expensive than ICE vehicles, even if the battery packs lasted 100,000 miles, even if charging stations were everywhere and it only took a few minutes to charge them, even if the materials were mined and processed in our closest allies’ countries, even if the batteries were economically and ecologically recycled, they would be a bad idea.

We, as a country, don’t have anywhere near enough electric generation, fossil, nuclear, hydro, solar and wind combined to power a significant number of EVs. Fossil plants keep getting shut down and no new ones built to replace them. I’m 64 and as an engineer right out of college I worked on one of the last three nuclear plants to come on line. Six nuclear plants have been retired since then. No new hydro plants have come on line in my adult life. Solar takes about 20 years to get more energy out of them than it took to make them. Wind doesn’t seem to be cutting it either. Working for the Chicago electric utility, the system would have no reserve during the hottest weeks of the year 35 years ago, before server farms were a thing and both of the Zion nuke plants were shut down.

Until we get both the infrastructure in place, and far more importantly, an energy generating source that can effectively charge millions of EV’s AND provide the electricity to afford people normal comfortable lives, EV’s are not viable. I know we have members that have them and get by with minimal difficulty, but if the entirety of the USA is forced into them, that will no longer be the case. As of now, we hear all the time of brownouts and rolling blackouts in high density urban areas. Without major changes to infrastructure, major difficulty will ensue.

Now factor in the cost of the one thing EV’s cannot do without- expensive battery components. ICE vehicles last a LOT longer with proper upkeep, and lithium is a limited resource when compared to the volume of oil we know exists. Lithium mining and refining is more expensive, and as of now it is estimated we have about 70 years of the stuff to mine globally once EV’s dominate the world market. The ocean has a lot of lithium in it but the cost to extract it with current tech is prohibitively expensive, and who knows what we will do to the ecosystem of the seas if we find a way to extract it in large volume. Yes, we can recycle and re-use lithium but for now the prospect is a lot more expensive than assembling new battery packs. Now add in that almost every battery powered gizmo on the planet currently uses lithium as their power source.

I’m glad some have EV’s, like them, and they fit in their lives and lifestyles, but for everyone? They are an eventual dead end without abundant, cheap, clean, safe, and globally available energy.

quote:

Originally posted by sigspecops:
I'm really curious about how Ram and GMs EV trucks are gonna do in the market place. A truck is a terrible platform for an EV with our current technology. It was stupid to not make them hybrids. There's so much more real world potential there.

About as stupid as the John Deere electric Combine Harvester, maybe?