- Ford’s CEO said Tesla’s Cybertruck is for “Silicon Valley people” not “real people who do real work.”
- Jim Farley said Tesla’s pickup truck won’t compete with the F-150 Lightning.
- Tesla is expected to release the EV pickup later this year, but it’s been delayed several times.
If we’re being real, neither truck is for people who do real work.
When it’s 40 below out and your truck needs to go all day because you’re at a work site and it’s the only place to warm up in between getting some critical piece of equipment back up and running, a battery that’s so dead it needs a 600V charger for a few hours just to get home isn’t going to cut it.
If it’s 40 below out, the vast majority of outside workers should be not working. The vast majority of work that could use a truck is work that isn’t going to frequently (or ever) encounter that kind of temperature range. A 600V DCFC is going to charge either of those trucks quickly in the majority of scenarios.
Most truck owners aren’t people doing “truck work” anyway, though. They own a truck as a public facing part of their personality. It’s virtue signalling.
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.
Letting your car run out of battery charge is just as stupid as letting it run out of gas. It’s not the car’s fault.
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.
This past winter, there was a crew building an attraction on the river for the winter festival in Winnipeg. They had a Ford Lightning there. They were using it as a warm-up hut, for charging up their tools and hauling crap around. Temps were in the -20C to -30C range. They were out there for days. Seemed to work just fine.
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.
I’m from a tropical climate. So the inverse applies. Aircon is incredibly efficient. Evs have enough battery to leave the aircon on for 3 days straight. I imagine heating would be similar.
I think you’re pointing out that the batteries don’t work well in the cold. That would be the perfect time to strap a solar panel to the roof connected to a battery heater or a space heater inside the car.
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.
Thanks. I do intellectually know some of this but I don’t grok it or the implications.
There’s things that are really fundamental to our local environment and it’s hard to wrap our heads around when we go elsewhere.
Up here, other than evergreens, everything appears to die in the winter. The trees all lose their leaves, the grass turns brown, surface plants whither. It has to be this way because nothing not very explicitly evolved for the environment can survive the winter weather.
When I went to cuba for a vacation about 10-15 years ago, it was sort of hard to wrap my head around the fact that all the trees were always growing because their winter was nothing like ours (in fact, it was early spring when I went, and we nearly crashed the car on black ice driving 8 hours from the northern community I lived in at the time to the big city airport). It’s only natural, but the concept of a year-round growing season seemed totally alien to me.