The truck is designed to fill the role that the vast majority of trucks sold today fill. If anyone is wondering, that role is not "serious work truck" owned by a contractor or someone who does long-haul towing; it's a "soccer mom/suburban dad truck", hauling family to events, maybe with some sports gear or some gardening supplies in the back. Why is it not a work truck? Because there is no reason at this point for him to design for a vehicle that accounts for such a small niche of truck sales.
I don't see work trucks as a "small niche", but neither do I see how it fills the role of soccer-mom truck very well either. It looks difficult to get either passengers or cargo into our out of, small windows=very little visibility. There's a reason trucks haven't evolved much stylistically...the design works.
The only market I see for these is to vain people who want something attention-getting and have more money than common sense.
From my experience most often FEAR stands for False Evidence Appearing Real.
I decided many years ago if I was going to let the fear of FEAR control my life that I had already ceased to exist in a functional sense.
The negative comments sounds more like some made by farmers when tractors first started showing up in the community. Chicken Little still has trained helpers when it comes to EV's it seems to me.
And taking the Pollyana approach is better, how? I see legitimate concerns expressed here, pooh-pooh'ing them serves no purpose, and even detracts from valid points you may be making. Now EVs may become more popular as years go by, maybe not. The battery issue is a serious one and needs to be solved (or an alternate power source employed) before these will become practical. I don't think the Great Unwashed really care what kind of engine their vehicle has as long as we don't step backwards in convenience. I'm glad you enjoy your leaf and hope you get many years out of it, but they're not for everyone, at least not yet.
How many gas stations and roads were available when cars first came out? Itç—´ all taking time and will continue. Even with these amazing new battery improvements that come out it takes supposedly 5-10 years to make them commercially viable due to supply chains and testing.
Different situation. 100-odd years ago people didn't typically travel very far unlike today where long commutes or road trips are commonplace.
A while back I viewed a YouTube vid of a guy who bought a Toyota hybrid cheap with a bad battery, rebuilt the battery with junkyard battery modules, and came out with a decent car for little cost. He kept saying you need to think before each step but aside from extreme caution there was nothing difficult about it. And he wasn't the first to do this, he referenced prior descriptions as his guide. I wish I could find that video now.
I've heard stories that are just the opposite, that the batteries must be "mated" to the car somehow or they fail in short order. Of course only the dealers have the proprietary software to make that happen. How convenient.
A few years ago at my home place they (AEP) wanted to install 1,000,000 volt towers across the property, close to both houses. We stopped it (for now).
All I'm saying is it's not this simple, non-polluting wonderful solution. You have to consider all aspects, ramifications and impacts it will have long term.
So far I've read great replies here from very knowledgeable people. Look deeper.
We had a similar situation a few years ago in N.H. with a project called Northern Pass...a high voltage DC line from some hydro plants in Canada to the Boston area. It never got state approval, but only because the utility failed to convince the site evaluation committee that the advantages outweighed the drawbacks. A different political makeup of that board and it could have sailed right thru...the governor and the state's largest newspaper were very much in favor of it. They're trying to put it in Maine now.
The tree huggers in southern New England were all in a tiz because they were deprived of their "clean renewable" power. I wonder if anyone asked the residents of the land that got flooded to create these dams what they thought of the whole thing.
I'm far from a computer guru, but back then I was referring to it as the "Y2K Farce." People were afraid that the computers in their cars were going to self destruct, etc. Midnight is way past my bedtime but just for giggles I woke up and turned my GPS on so that I could watch it self destruct... it didn't. The only nefarious thing which may have happened... I had a 35 mm camera and when I got the film developed there was a picture of nothing, with the date stamp Jan 01.
I'm not usually up that late either, but we were at some friends' house on new years eve 1999. They had a C-band satellite dish they got most of their tv from, at midnight we were watching the ball drop. 5-4-3-2-1, tv went into snow. Everyone started laughing, clapping, etc. Our host just looked disgusted, flipped a switch and about a minute later everything came back.
Turns out he had motorized his dish and programmed it to dump at midnight to let any snow fall out. :laughing:
