Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 570 posts

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#351

Post by ryanmerket »

ninefathom wrote: post #323

I'm struggling to reconcile these two: https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect... -- "the towing range of the electric F-150 is dismal." (~100 miles) https://www.theverge.com/23307298/ford-f-150-lightning-revie... -- "Happily, the F-150 Lightning is a terrific F-150 — and a terrific truck. If you can find one to buy for a reasonable price and you’ve got a handle on charging for how you’ll use it,…

I live in Texas and big trucks are super common. I drive a truck with a lift in Austin and haven't towed a thing.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#352

Post by xeromal »

ninefathom wrote: post #335
jfim wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also certain that Ford has a long way to go before I'll even consider swapping my 35-year-old diesel F-250 HD for an electric hauling rig(1) It's not as if they're unaware of it. Their CEO even said that for some users, an electric truck won't work. From https://archive.ph/6Deq6 : > Farley emphasized that Ford plans to continue investing in gasoline-powered vehicles, noting that the Super Duty pickup trucks gen…

Even with those statements, I think Ford is seriously sugarcoating the issue. It seems that the F-150 Lighting is basically a vanity vehicle at this point. To be fair, that (vanity vehicle) is probably at least half of the F-150 market today anyway. I don't have a problem with Ford putting on a show to make money. But if The Verge is going to work in a Ford showroom, they should at least be up front about it.

The lightning is for mall crawling. It's not really a serious truck if you do legit truck stuff that involves travel aka blue collar workers that often travel to jobs.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#353

Post by speed_spread »

jonathankoren wrote: post #285
speed_spread wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ford is not a tech company. By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company": https://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/06/ceo-mark-fields-ford-dat... Their software chops are certainly dubious, but there is no questioning their intent when it comes to entering the surveillance economy.

> By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company" What does this even mean? They don’t sell access to data. Oh! They use data to make business decisions? Well, welcome to 2004.

It means they figured that monetizing the data they collect on people driving their cars will bring them more cash than selling the cars themselves. The same way electronics manufacturer have doubled their profits on "smart" TV sets over a few years by feeding advertisers knowledge about what you're watching, and when, so you can be targeted more precisely in future ad campaigns.

Have you heard of those small companies called Google and Facebook? Care to compare their market cap with Ford's lately? Do you really think they're worth that much because of their quick web search and easy friend-finding?

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#354

Post by NobodyNada »

genewitch wrote: post #209
NobodyNada wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a Focus with Sync 1 last year, and it was infuriating. The most infuriating part was that every time the car starts it defaulted to aux in mode, and there’s no button on the panel to switch to Bluetooth — if I wanted to listen to music from my phone, it took about 8 or 9 button presses to navigate through three levels of nested menus to get to the “media source” option. Every time I got in the car. I finally…

what year was Sync 1? My 2013 f-150 has sync, i think, no touchscreen or anything, and for bluetooth i do have to push the "talk to car" button on the steering wheel and wait 3 seconds for it to talk to me, then say "bluetooth audio". But i use siriusXM or USB 99% of the time anyhow. There is a bug in my version though, sometimes it resets to Aux, which is funny, because if you have a USB stick in it, you cannot swit…

AFAIK, if you don't have a touchscreen you've got Sync 1 (it's the 4-inch LCD). Unfortunately, my steering wheel controls don't work, so I couldn't use voice control to change the input (and replacing the head unit was way less complex & expensive than the steering wheel controls).

I don't mind the touch screen for CarPlay since all the important controls (volume, mute, skip, Siri) have physical buttons, all the unimportant controls are very large and hard to miss, and CarPlay has very few menus requiring more than 1-2 taps; though I had to be careful to pick out a CarPlay unit with an actual knob for volume, since a lot of them just have buttons that you have to mash repeatedly to change the volume. But not having the physical buttons at all would really suck, especially for things like climate control.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#355

Post by assttoasstmgr »

jfim wrote: post #327
Dig1t wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with your conclusion, this is why I feel that European tech companies can't compete with US ones at all. They just refuse to pay enough to attract the best engineers.

Do they have the margins that allows them to pay equivalent salaries? From what I recall, Meta and Google have gross revenues on the order of one million in revenue per employee, while SAP AG has revenue per employee around 200k.

This. The OP wrote:

> They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google

FAANG arrogance never ceases to amaze me. It's like these guys live in a different universe blissfully unaware of the world around them. Did it ever occur to him maybe Ford is paying normal average human salaries and not grossly inflated Google wages?

Remember Ford (and this analogy extends to most companies in traditional industries) still has to be able to sell cars to the average blue collar Joe at a price point he can afford, and still turn a profit. Outside SV most people don't drive $80k Teslas. Somebody's still gotta write software for the $16k econoboxes. I'm sorry but nobody deserves to get paid more than e.g. a specialist doctor to hack JavaScript code I don't care how smart you think you are, when there's a guy in India probably just or nearly as good at it who'll do the job for $40k/year. FAANG is swimming in money and can afford to piss away $$ in talent wars, artificially driving up salaries and the prices of everything else, which is why no average person can afford a house in SF anymore. Those that won the FAANG lottery and managed to cash in? God bless them. But don't let the reality distortion field make you think that's how the rest of the world works.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#356

Post by colinmhayes »

jesuscript wrote: post #249
sleepydog wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any professions in European countries that are paid as well as US tech workers, for similar levels of skill and/or education? Moreover, if EU tech companies are not willing to pay the best software/hardware engineers what they're worth, where do they all go? Not everyone wants to live in the US or work remotely.

I think even their doctors are paid lower than US counterparts. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is the shallow way, the raw numbers. The other way is that Europeans have a better social ethics and don’t need the gaudy numbers. Americans do. We don’t have a real culture of social welfare. We value capitalism unlike any other country in the world.

Medical licenses are controlled by cartels in the US. They lobby the government to limit the number of residencies so we end up in a situation where only 40% of people who apply to medical school get in since they can't expand until the number of residency slots increases.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#357

Post by colinmhayes »

rkagerer wrote: post #257
speed_spread wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ford is not a tech company. By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company": https://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/06/ceo-mark-fields-ford-dat... Their software chops are certainly dubious, but there is no questioning their intent when it comes to entering the surveillance economy.

Ford sees itself as a "data company" What a disaster. I wish they would focus on simply making good cars.

Margins for car companies are shit. Why would anyone invest in a race to the bottom high marginal cost company when differentiated zero marginal cost companies exist? And what if we just told everyone we were the latter?

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#358

Post by elihu »

twobitshifter wrote: post #93

With the performance of this and other EVs now beating the Raptor pickup, do you think we’ll start to see performance regulated for safety reasons? A massive pickup able to 0-60 in a few seconds is cool, but in the hands of the less responsible it sounds like a huge safety risk. We cap the performance of tiny scooters but multiton trucks are able to go as fast as humanly possible?

Maybe we'll see CDL requirements for more vehicle. I mean, it's a new thing that people can just go out and buy nine thousand pound cars that can do 0-60 in about 3 seconds (i.e. the EV Hummer) and I don't think society has adjusted to the ramifications of that yet. Sports cars are largely tolerated because they're (generally) small and light and if you drive dangerously in one you're as big a risk to yourself as to everyone else.

The F-150 is actually not a terribly unreasonable vehicle. It's about 6,000 pounds and accelerates a bit slower than the Hummer. It's shaped like a battering ram, but isn't a whole lot heavier than a Model S, which are more in the 4,500 to 5,000 range. (I think Tesla kind of gets a free pass for building scary fast/heavy vehicles simply because they don't look like trucks and so it's easy to not realize how heavy they really are.)

Unfortunately it's hard to build EVs that are light, due to battery requirements. Maybe horsepower/weight ratio limits on public roads are actually a good idea though.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#359

Post by 3-cheese-sundae »

elzbardico wrote: post #88
PaulWaldman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mazda is apparently taking the right approach here -- increasing the tactile buttons on the dash and console, and ditching touchscreens. Huh? After using both Ford's (2022 Explorer) and Mazda's (2022 CX-7) infotainment systems recently for several weeks, I couldn't disagree more. Android Auto and CarPlay interfaces were designed for touchscreen control. Mazda forcing the use of a wheel, like a joystick is a safety h…

I refuse to believe an UX professional or even a programmer ever thought this could be a good idea. It must have been pushed down the throats of the designers and developers by an edict from some point-haired MBA.

I'm positive this is what happened. My anecodotal evidence: the touchscreen-while-moving functionality was removed when my 2016 got a software update. One day I could just touch the giant map to enlarge it, the next I had to twiddle the knob a precise number of notches and watch the screen to make sure I highlighted it correctly.

It could be worse: Lexus infotainment screens of certain years would refuse to display the radio's RDS song info when you pressed the "Message" button (which enlarges the window to see it) while you were moving. Meanwhile, the RDS data happily continued to scroll by, one word every 3 seconds, in the tiny marquee at the top.

Re: Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

#360

Post by colinmhayes »

elteto wrote: post #281
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Volt does 0-60 in about 7 seconds or so in sport mode but even better @ 0-30 and it feels so ridiculously torquey and instant to me and I can't even imagine needing anything beyond that ever. All the jockeying about 0-60 in 3 seconds or whatever on various Tesla machines just makes me shake my head. I really fear what that means in a large massive vehicle.

Not to diss on your ride but 7s is Honda Civic level territory. It’s pretty slow.

I think that's the point... For many people the "slow" cars are more than fast enough. For what it's worth the low end evs are much better at 0-30 than 30-60.
Post reply on HN