I am going to judge a lot of them for driving like assholes. There’s a reason people call them Tasshole.

At least where I live Tesla is a good option for overpaid office guys, the guys that used to drive a BMW or Audi. Lots of Tesla drivers that are impatient, aggressive and just annoying on the road.

I drive a Tesla and Elon can suck Dick, but the actual people that make the car have done a good job for what I’ve gotten.

Don’t know much about the truck though really

I drive a Tesla. my excuse is, I bought before he went full fascist. I don’t think I’ll buy another one.

I have. A lot of pickup trucks, for example, are built out of F450s. Old F450s.

The F-150 line is almost entirely vanity vehicles, though, and I have never seen a Lightning on the road but am sure I do not exclude it from my judgment.

The only time I’ve seen it was when it was a company-issued truck lol

If I could get a new electric truck for less than $60,000 I’d use it though, because I get free charging and I could use the truck to make enough money to cover half of the payments. Just my personal situation.

I make Costco runs in my Golf just fine. Very few families really NEED that giant vehicle. Even the ones that do, could easily get by with a normal 5 seater car and one larger vehicle.

People who don’t need trucks but want them anyway are the main force driving what types of trucks go to market. If it weren’t for that performative nonsense, automakers would go back to their primary market: practical work vehicles, without all the family suv bells and whistles. Therefore, cheaper.

All trucks are not built the same, that’s my point. I want a truck that’s a truck, not a minivan masquerading as a truck.

Status: dick.

I think the point still stands: people who buy trucks want to believe they can do real work, kind of like the fantasy of an SUV as a rugged vehicle even though their buyers typically treat them like street cars.

Do you need a truck? No? Don’t buy a truck. It’s that easy.

Well, you’re right, that guy is an asshole. But he also makes a point, namely that there is no person in the world with a reason to purchase a Cybertruck other than just to jerk off Elongated Muskrat a bit more. It doesn’t do anything practical. Even someone with an F150 or a Ram 2500, while yes they do generally own a parking lot princess, it can do truck stuff in a pinch. It has a bed and a tailgate and it can haul a trailer. Cybertruck can maybe haul a trailer but it isn’t going to do anything else practical that a Ford won’t. You’ll never catch a contractor driving a Cybertruck. You will find them driving an F150.

Point is, he’s not saying you aren’t real, he’s saying the hypothetical person that has a valid use case for a Cybertruck isn’t real. If someone is going out to buy a truck to perform work they aren’t looking at Tesla.

Except that generally speaking, your gas tank doesn’t really change capacity that much based on the weather – the fact you have to idle it is obviously a concern, but typically your fuel economy doesn’t dramatically change because the weather outside changes. By contrast, I’ve heard and seen an EV in very cold winter weather basically become a brick until it spends some time in a nice heated space, and then it only wakes up until you bring it back outside and the battery freezes again.

I’ve done really long road trips in extraordinarily cold weather. I used to live in the far north, and I still work up there occasionally. You’re not losing 80% of your travel capacity or anything like that.

I agree with you that most people driving trucks probably don’t need to be driving trucks. My home vehicle is a nice little Corolla that gets great gas mileage.

But reality is that for a lot of workers, the show must go on, rain or shine, heat wave or cold snap. I’ve had to be that guy – coldest day of the year and some piece of critical infrastructure is broken, the boss says “I don’t care, we need it working, get out there”. Temperatures that cold you literally start to feel death’s caress. It starts to soak into your meat, and it at some point it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing.

Days like that, even a diesel is pretty scary, but pretty much no vehicle ever turns off. If it’s a gas vehicle at least the block heater can let you start the thing.

We’ll see.

Everything I keep on hearing says that these things become basically worthless the moment you’re not driving under perfect conditions. I’ve personally witnessed EVs become basically useless in winter, or when there’s a few too many hills. I’ve even heard that you’re going to want a heated garage to go with your fancy EV in real winters. I’d also like to know what toll real winters have on the overall lifespan of a battery on a $100,000 truck – it’d suck if you have to send your expensive vehicle to the junkyard in just a few years because you don’t live in an ideal climate. I guess I should also point out that -20 is not -40, and the work doesn’t stop because it isn’t warm out.

I’ve been eyeing an EV for running around town, but the risks hold me back.

Living in tropical climates it would be understandable that the mechanics of more extreme latitudes wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

The closer you are to the equator, the more consistent your days and nights are throughout the year, and the more direct sunlight you’re getting. As you get closer to the poles, the winter days get shorter, the summer days get longer, the winter sun is less intense, and the Summer sun is more direct. The extreme of this is when you get up to the Arctic where the sun can be up for months at a time and then down for months at a time. As a result, you also see some massive temperature swings. There are regions that will see +40 and -40. It’s highly unusual tomreach either extreme, but Iroquois Falls, Ontario has seen official temperatures of as high as +41C in summer and as low as -58C in winter. In winter, you go to work in the dark and go home in the dark, and in summer you can wake up to bright sunshine at 5am and fall asleep in bright sunshine at 11pm.

This combination of factors means that solar power is not appropriate for winter weather the closer to get to the poles. As as a country as a whole, in Canada in 2022, solar panels produced 105,000MW-h of energy in January, 404,000MW-h of energy in July according to statscan, the federal government’s stats arm. That’s an aggregate including regions such as southern Ontario, which is significantly further south than most of the country and do not see the extreme temperatures I’m talking about.

Air conditioning is not comparable to heating. Air conditioning moves cold to hot areas and hot to cold areas. Heat pumps like this are capable of efficiencies above 100% since you use just a little energy to move heat from where it’s unwanted to where it’s wanted. By contrast, resistive heating can only achieve 100% efficiency because it needs to generate the heat that’s in use. That’s a massive drain on batteries. You might ask “well why not use a heat pump like air conditioning?”, But heat pumps become inefficient for heating at low ambient temperatures. Most heat pumps don’t work below -10C ambient, and cold climate heating pumps are a new product that can operate down to -30 but there can still be efficiency issues.

Not to mention that if the sun isn’t sending enough energy to warm the environment to more than -40, then thermodynamically you can’t use solar power to heat something like the inside of a vehicle or the battery of an EV without massively derating the solar panels so you’d need a massive solar panel compared to what you were trying to do.