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Ford Will Take $19.5 Billion Hit as It Rolls Back E.V. Plans (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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Basically, the huge-personal-truck model doesn't work so well with batteries. Making them cheap enough means making them small...which Ford didn't try to do

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[–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Fellow lightning owner with solar here:

Yeah, the whole house battery plus vehicle is what made this decision. Bonus points that I don't need to rewire the garage for tools and I don't need to pay for delivery of sheet goods or landscaping stuff. I also just put 4 adults and an infant in the truck for a comfortable day trip. My meter is still net backwards after 6 months of charging exclusively at home.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I don’t need to pay for delivery of sheet goods or landscaping stuff.

    Those place rent utility trucks and vans for $20, with proper suspension, instead, ruin your $70,000 fake work truck.

    Also, a van can fit 4x8 sheets, while a pickup cannot without the tailgate down and various straps and flags. Or not, and lose the load on the highway as other geniuses do. And where I live, it rains, which doesn't work well with drywall, assuming someone hasn't stolen it first.

    On actual worksites, no one uses there personal trucks, they use proper company vehicles.

    Solar charging...hmmm.... 100Kwhr battery would take 20 square metres of panels two days to charge, assuming no clouds, in july, very close to the equator.

    I'm done with the nonsense in this thread.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    That's the nirvana fallacy in action. Yes there are tradeoffs. And I get that it isn't for everyone. I also have a lot of privilege to make this a reasonable purchase financially.

    The nearest non-uhaul day rental is a 90min round trip without traffic, which would be rare on a weekend or even weekday afternoon. So I was paying 80-150 for delivery, which really sucks when you realize you're one sheet short on a project because you forgot to account for something. But it isn't a super regular usecase.

    And while I appreciate the concern for my suspension, I'm definitely not using this as a work truck. For sheet goods, I'm talking about a few sheets of plywood occasionally for personal cabinetry projects, not a house worth of drywall 4x a week. And I can run all my shop tools off the truck's battery instead of loading up the one 15amp circuit in the garage and running 80feet of extension cords for more. For landscaping, it's a yard of mulch or a few bags of soil amendment and fertilizer (my wife has a very green thumb and we live in clay country).

    Regarding vans: if the id buzz could actually fit a sheet, I would probably have gone that route. But short of an Econoline or Sprinter (which afaik don't come BEV), you definitely don't have 8 feet of depth, and I can't thing of a smaller van with 4ft between the wheels inside, so now you're driving with the giant liftgate bouncing on your goods and you still need straps and a flag.

    For charging yes, it's silly to think I'm purely solar charging. But I have 26 410W panels and we're at 400kwh this month so far (Winter solstice soon too). And the truck only has 2k miles on it in the 6 months I've had it, so yeah we're definitely net negative on the meter.

    For house battery: I valued the truck as 20k worth of battery backup in my math. We live in wildfire country and there are safety shutoffs and outages from storms somewhat regularly. Knowing I don't need a generator to recharge batteries for an extended outage is more value.

    Really dumb systemic problem bonus: my car insurance went down when I replaced a 10year old base model 5speed hatchback with this truck. I got a $50 rebate check.

    So yeah, it's not a panacea and I don't think we're trying to say it is. But it made enough sense for me.

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