cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/electricvehicles/p/2162853/usa-slate-s-new-electric-truck-will-cost-slightly-more-than-24950
Range is said to be 205 mi (330 km), higher than the original estimate. This price is for the basic truck. The SUV configuration is expected to be $5000 more.
I don’t understand the obsession with range. I agree that efficiency is important, but who is regularly driving a pickup truck 200 miles in a day?
Rural people, as in the folks who actually have a use for pickups. As it so happens, it is about 200 miles round-trip to my nearest airport/major city, so if this were my vehicle, I’d have to take a charge break when picking someone up/dropping them off at the airport, or making a shopping run, or going to a concert/special event, or seeing a medical specialist. And I’m not even that far off the beaten path; I have family for whom the one-way drive to their nearest major city/airport is over 200mi. Plus if you’re hauling anything, I’d imagine that range goes down quick.
That 200mi estimate is based on driving around 30-40 mph
You can expect like 140 miles of range at highway speeds
I live in Wyoming so I understand rural, however we are not the only folks with a “real” use for trucks. Plenty of reasons for a townie to own one.
My point was more that a pickup’s core demographic live in places where range is absolutely a consideration. Some city folks do have good reason to own a pickup, but for most it’s an aesthetic/image thing. Which, given the environmental/traffic safety consequences of driving a larger vehicle than necessary, is plenty deserving of judgement imo.
The range is reduced when used to haul things around or when the AC/heat are used. With charging being significantly slower compared to filling up a gas vehicle and without the option to use a gas can if it runs out, there are unknowns and people don’t like unknowns.
I think the range is fine for regular light use personally, but being concerned about a fairly short range isn’t completely baseless. Or would be if the people buying it actually used it as a work truck.
It isn’t regularly, it is what you do on the margins. that one trip a year. Those really cold days in winter (ICEs have a built in heater). 200 miles is more than enough most days, but once a month it will be really close.
Americans get anxiety from having to do math in their heads. Average commute distance is 30 miles a day, and there is always some asshole who whines about towing his boat.
But don’t try rational arguments with pickup drivers who commute to office jobs and drive a tank for that one time they needed to move a brother in law’s couch.
Miles are a bad way to track performance because real life conditions can wildly impact BEV efficiency. I can tell you from first hand experience that towing, elevation changes, or moving at highway speeds in winter can cut per kWh efficiency in half.
And beyond that, you’re supposed to be capping your daily charge limit below 100% for battery longevity. 200 theoretical miles can turn to 160 miles and down to 70 real quick. That can get uncomfortably tight if you miss an overnight charge.
Frankly, its dumb to criticize people who expect their personal vehicle to perform reasonably well in situations where a personal vehicle should excel. Why own a car if it can’t do a round-trip weekend excursion or haul a bit of furniture?
By your logic everyone should only need a tiny moped with a rain jacket and a backpack. It’s irrational to worry about climate control or passengers or suitcases, you statistically never need them.
You know what? You’ve led me to the diagnosis of my own EV range anxiety: Unpredictable performance.
In a gas powered car, you pretty much can think in miles. They put the “24 city, 29 highway” numbers on the sticker in the window, and that’s pretty close to what you’ll get out of it. Maybe loading it until it squats on the suspension or pulling a trailer or driving like a maniac will decrease the economy. But, if you do those kinds of things, you can fill the tank, note the mileage, drive like that awhile, fill the tank again, note the fuel consumed and the mileage performed and you’ve got a figure you can pretty much rely on no matter the weather. The limiting factor is almost always the driver. Drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank, drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank…
I happen to be a flight instructor. There’s a whole chapter in flight school about cross country flight planning and predicting aircraft performance. Wind is such a factor that you really can’t rate a plane in miles of range, but in hours of endurance. So to plan a flight, you look up the route of flight on an aeronautical chart, the weather forecast, read performance charts and tables out of the plane’s Pilot’s Operating Handbook, crunch a whole bunch of numbers and you’ll know fairly precisely how long you’ll be aloft and how much fuel you’ll burn.
With an EV…they spit out a range in miles that the vehicle will do in unspecified ideal conditions, tell you that heat, cold, using the heater, using the air conditioner, carrying weight, wind and age will reduce the range, and then they’ll get impatient with you if you try to work out what the vehicle will actually do and they’ll mail you anthrax if the answer you arrive at is “not enough.”
The plane trip is a great analogy. There’s probably plenty of data on which aircraft can fly it and, optimizations aside, you might have the option of over-fueling to be sure you can accomplish it.
With a BEV your pitiful energy limit might mean doing all those cross country calculations just to reach the other side of the state. And even then the sheer number of variables (Will I hit traffic? Will a fast charger spot be available at X? When exactly will it drop below freezing? Will my battery be conditioned at start? Does M miles of ~N mi/kWh surface streets beat M-Y miles of highway…) makes it impossible to precisely say.
You basically have to drive by feel, hence my reckoning of my car needing 1.5-2x dashboard mileage buffer for critical margin trips. I’ve personally made the exact same trip in different conditions and pulled in from as low as 3% up to 35% battery remaining.
The only solutions are way better/larger batteries, much smaller cars, or massively expanded charging infrastructure. Unfortunately nothing [affordable] in the market is addressing any of those.
The overall point I’m getting here is that yes, that’s a fine expectation to have. But do you really need a King Ranch Super Duty just to go to the airport twice a year?
Sure they do, but then complain about aFFoRdAbIlIty when a tank is $250.
Thats the trouble with private vehicles in a nutshell. Sit idle for 95% of the time, and we need to buy models that are capable for the 1% of the drives we might want to do in a year.
That’s a false dichotomy.
I’ve been driving an S10 for decades. Yeah, it’s a little bit 20th century, it makes 18mpg out of a large, slow, primitive V6. It’s great for small truck missions, it’s reasonable for long hauls, and I can expect to go THIS far on THIS much gas.
Not far on a lot of gas.
More range not only means driving further without charging but also fewer charge cycles being needed.
Imagine it being like your phone when you play games and the battery dies after 6 hours. How long do you think your phone’s battery is going to last when you’re regularly charging it that often? Now imagine you paid $30k-$100k for the phone and you’ll see why range is important to most people.
I personally have a 100 mile work commute and have decided not to get an EV for the time being because I want one I can keep at least a decade like my current ICE (Camry) without worrying about a $20k battery replacement or having to constantly keep it on a charger. It looks like the new solid state batteries should solve this issue but nobody is producing them yet.
My obsession isn’t with range, it’s with charge time. Yes I’m a bit irrational wanting a fully charged car every morning but that may not happen with a lower battery efficiency using a level 1 charger. I’m sure you’d appreciate better range efficiency like any gas car user would want better MPG.
Even with high efficiencies, you are going to have troubles with a level 1 charger. Level 2 charging is 5 times faster and still takes a long time to fill a battery. The most efficient consumer EV, the Kona, only charges at 6 miles per hour of level 1 charging. Yeah, you can get 80 miles of charge leaving your car charging overnight, but it completely limits any flexibility in using your car outside of commuting. I should know, I tried to do level 1 charging with a 90 mile range car for a couple months. It sucked, so I got a level 2 charger installed. After that, the 90mi range was fine for 3 years.
The shorter your range the more important fast charge is. My car with a 200 mile range is almost(!) always fine on level 1 since I so rarely use make so many trips in a row that it would empty the battery. My wife’s phev with only 30 miles of range is always at near 0% when she gets home and she (like most people) is likley to be making another trip soon so level 2 is a must. (of course it could switch to gas it isn’t charged, but gas is several times more expensive so we try to use gas for long trips only)
Yeah, 120v15a is a pain. At least see about rewiring an outlet for 220v 15a. An electrician can often do it cheaply because its the same wires. Then you can get most of a full charge between commutes.
In almost all cases your 120V15A outlet has other outlets on the circuit and so it cannot be rewired that cheap. In almost all cases it is really 120V 20A though, so you can set your level 1 charger to a slightly faster rate since odds are nothing else is running on that circuit (but good luck finding a charger that supports that faster level 1 rate).
My only problem with the Slate’s range is that, being a truck/SUV, I would want to use it for overlanding (the kind of use-case where even gasoline vehicles need extra fuel tanks strapped to them, as shown here). Trying to do that with an EV with anything less than exceptional range would be limited and take careful route-planning.
Obviously it’s not a “regular” use and therefore shouldn’t rationally be a deal-breaker, but nevertheless taking a couple of jerry cans is a lot less weird and complicated than towing a generator. (And the fact that I’m seriously considering the latter as an option just goes to show how much I like the Slate truck anyway.)