Welcome to the Hardcore Husky Forums. Folks who are well-known in Cyberland and not that dumb.
Heavy duty electric trucks is the future!
Comments
-
Having strong feelings that the economy can run on unicorn farts is what made this country great.Sledog said:We have a number of people (I use the term very loosely!) here that voted for this shit!
-
Didn't say it was cost effective, just the only way it is feasible. And in this scenario you never buy the battery, just rent.WestlinnDuck said:
That just doubles the battery cost and makes the EV truck even more expensive. And swapping out several tons of batteries isn't ever going to be practical. Easy to have someone plug in a heavy cable. You would need to buy more equipment and employees to handle the swapping. With batteries costing tens of thousands of dollars how do you swap out your nice brand new battery at some truck stop for an unknown used POS battery?Goduckies said:Only way it works is if they invent a battery swapping mechanism
-
Feasible includes cost.Goduckies said:
Didn't say it was cost effective, just the only way it is feasible.WestlinnDuck said:
That just doubles the battery cost and makes the EV truck even more expensive. And swapping out several tons of batteries isn't ever going to be practical. Easy to have someone plug in a heavy cable. You would need to buy more equipment and employees to handle the swapping. With batteries costing tens of thousands of dollars how do you swap out your nice brand new battery at some truck stop for an unknown used POS battery?Goduckies said:Only way it works is if they invent a battery swapping mechanism
-
Depends how much money the left is willing to throw at it...WestlinnDuck said:
Feasible includes cost.Goduckies said:
Didn't say it was cost effective, just the only way it is feasible.WestlinnDuck said:
That just doubles the battery cost and makes the EV truck even more expensive. And swapping out several tons of batteries isn't ever going to be practical. Easy to have someone plug in a heavy cable. You would need to buy more equipment and employees to handle the swapping. With batteries costing tens of thousands of dollars how do you swap out your nice brand new battery at some truck stop for an unknown used POS battery?Goduckies said:Only way it works is if they invent a battery swapping mechanism
-
Throbber wondered why the US military self-destructed. You can ask the same question of the US auto industry which bought into the EV boondoggle which will be the death of industry. Get rid of the mandates and tax credits and if EVs are the future, then like the internal combustion engine replacing the horse, it will happen without government intervention. At best, for some people one EV to be used for short commutes might make sense if they want to feel good and virtue signal without government credits.
https://ace.mu.nu/
It’s been a little while since we last checked in on the “electric vehicle transition,” so let’s see what’s going on.
Let’s start off With Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s great taxpayer-subsidized boondoggle - Rivian! It is more likely that Ace will someday become a writer at The Bulwark than it is that a Rivian EV will ever roll off the assembly line in Georgia.
Companies anticipating tremendous growth in industries that are expected to grow rapidly are usually hiring people, not laying them off, right?
EV-Maker Rivian Lays Off 239 Orange County Workers: Additional layoffs at the EV automaker's Palo Alto facilities have boosted the California total to 479 [OC Register – 4/24/2023]
The staffing reductions will impact a variety of positions, including “trail” engineers, geometric design engineers and mechanical engineers, as well as others involved in support services, digital surfacing, security, purchasing, program management, customer service, supply chain service and software engineering.
How’s Rivian’s stock doing? Very poorly. It’s down over 70% (as I write this) from its 52-week high, and down more than 20% in just the last month.
So, is it a good time to go bottom fishing for Rivian stock? Not if the ultimate price is going to be zero.
This stock tip sheet cracked me up with its analysis of Rivian this week:
With Rivian on track to spend about $6 billion in 2023—roughly half of the $12 billion in cash on hand it had in 2022—the picture doesn’t look good. It’s already cut its workforce by around 6%. Normally that would be good news, but Rivian already missed its production goals for 2022, and the job doesn’t get done without a workforce.
General Motors is also struggling to gain traction in the EV market. Just this week it announced that it will be suspending production of its slow-selling Bolt EV. Despite being a slow-seller, the Bolt was still GM’s best selling EV.
General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra cleverly worded the decision to stop selling its unpopular mass-market EV. "We have progressed so far that it's now time to plan to end the Chevrolet Bolt EV and EU production, which will happen at the very end of the year."
GM to End Production of Electric Chevy Bolt, Its First Mass-Market EV, Later This Year [CNBC – 4/25/2023]
But Bolt sales never caught on as well as many executives hoped, as EV sales overall remained minuscule outside of Tesla. The Bolt also suffered a major setback more recently, as GM recalled all of the Bolts ever produced due to a supplier-related battery issue that caused several fires.
The photo below is of Vermont State Representative Tim Briglin’s Chevrolet Bolt. To be fair, it looked a lot better before it spontaneously combusted while parked in Rep. Briglin’s driveway.
Well how about Ford and its electric E-dsel vehicles?
It’s not good. Sales of its flagship Ford F150 Lightning electric pickup truck are plummeting. Ford ‘s well publicized goal is to sell 150,000 F150 Lightnings per year. That production is a dream that is slipping away.
Ford's Poor F-150 Lightning Sales [24/7 Wall Street – 3/5/2023]
The Ford F-150 Lightning is supposed to be its EV flagship. It is the electric version of its F-150 pickup, the best-selling vehicle in America for over four decades. That should give the Lightning a built-in advantage. However, Ford has only sold 3,600 in the first two months of 2023. It is a sign of how far Ford has to go as it tries to get Lightning sales into the tens of thousands per month.
Yikes, that’s only 1,800 Lightnings per month in January and February. How about in March? Well, it got even worse.
Ford sold only 691 F150 Lightnings in March 2023 [Ford Authority]
I’ll do the math for you. Total F150 Lightning sales in Q1 2023 were only 4,291 which annualizes to just 17,164 sales. That is just 11% of the 150,000 that Ford intends to sell. Even worse, sales are trending downward as Ford is running out of suckers early adopters to buy the truck.
What about Ford’s Mach-E Mustang? Its sales are in freefall too. From that same Ford Authority link, Ford sold only 998 Mach-E Mustangs in March 2023, compared to 2,363 electric Mustangs one year earlier in March 2022., a 58% decline.
For full year 2022, Ford sold over 39,000 electric Mustangs, but it is currently on track to sell less than 22,000 in 2023…if sales don’t collapse further.
*****
OK, enough about the EV sales debacle. What else is going on with EVs?
This is from Business Insider, a left-wing publication that is usually putting out EV fanboy puff pieces.
A 9-hour Drive in Toyota's New Electric SUV Showed Me How Brutal EV Road Trips Can Be With the Wrong Car [Business Insider – 4/15/2023]
I drove the new Toyota bZ4X electric SUV from New York to Washington DC, and back.
The nine-hour drive involved three hours of charging.
I learned the hard way that sometimes you need to choose between staying warm and maximizing range.
This poor guy learned that there really is no such thing as fast charging, nor obtaining a 100% charge at a charging station.
The Toyota refused to pull more than 35 kW, so just getting to 74% took a full 45 minutes of waiting around — not exactly something you want to do at night when you still have hours of driving ahead of you.
So after waiting 45 minutes to get from 37% charged to 74% charged, how much more range did he get? About 75 miles. -
Some of the EV sales stuff cited above is lacking some major context. F150 Lightning sales cratered in March because Ford paused production to address fire risk concerns. GM killed the Bolt and Volt because they're old models and new product are replacing them.
Either way, EV's still suck.
