Live data from Hacker News

Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

wired.com

321–330 of 915 posts

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#321
post #35
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with all but a few EV manufactures [1], they were losing money each sale ( >$30k)[2]. [1] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/only-four-ev-brands-are-pr... [2] https://www.theautopian.com/ford-lost-36000-for-every-electr...

The only two car companies to make any meaningful profit on EVs were founded as EV companies first? That’s not that surprising. It’s very hard to make elephants dance. If that remains true it means all these auto companies will be dead in 25 years, or eternally strung along on government support. If there were no tariffs or other market barriers I get the impression that BYD would bulldoze the entire world and there…

Yeah, the problem is that the tariffs are letting our carmakers just become unproductive, uncompetitive leeches on the American consumer. They're getting lapped by China/BYD.

Once BYD bulldozes the rest of the world, our domestic manufacturers are guaranteed to fail.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be biased because I hang out in the slate subreddit and have been pretty attentive to The product as a whole since they announced it this spring but I think they're on to something assuming they can figure out how to build out the service and parts network. The vehicle itself may be a runaway sales success but if there's only or two locations in each major state where you can get it serviced, that runaway suc…

Their wikipedia page says they announced “a partnership with RepairPal, a network of certified auto repair shops and dealerships across the US, to give owners access to 4000 service points from day one”. I don’t know if a “service point” is the same as a mechanic shop though.

That only matters if said repair shops are A: actually trained on the vehicles and B: can get parts.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#323
post #233

We don't want your electric car ... we want your car, but electric . We want an electric F150 or an electric Suburban or v90 wagon or whatever. But instead we get e-initiative i-mobiles. We get TRON-cars. We get iModels. There is a reason for this: The incumbent auto makers understand fully that the ICE version of whatever model they electrify will suffer enormously. They believe that they can somehow retain all of t…

I'd love an off-road capable electric 4WD (because think about how amazing having computer controlled precision torque applied to wheels individually would be for getting out of a tricky situation). Especially if you could buy some kind of field charging kit - maybe something you could power off a wood fire or flexible solar panels that you could stow. I imagine that's not realistic at the moment, but a boy can dream…

Look at the new Scout, they are planning to do everything you mentioned

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#324
post #233

We don't want your electric car ... we want your car, but electric . We want an electric F150 or an electric Suburban or v90 wagon or whatever. But instead we get e-initiative i-mobiles. We get TRON-cars. We get iModels. There is a reason for this: The incumbent auto makers understand fully that the ICE version of whatever model they electrify will suffer enormously. They believe that they can somehow retain all of t…

I owned one of the first VW eGolfs, and it was an excellent car. Just a regular golf with an electric drive.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#325
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their wikipedia page says they announced “a partnership with RepairPal, a network of certified auto repair shops and dealerships across the US, to give owners access to 4000 service points from day one”. I don’t know if a “service point” is the same as a mechanic shop though.

RepairPal is just a rent seeking middleman like Angi's list. I don't see what that partnership will provide, certainly not shops that are trained to repair the truck.

I hadn’t heard of it before reading that paragraph on wikipedia, but the name combined with the wording made me suspect as much.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#326
post #233

We don't want your electric car ... we want your car, but electric . We want an electric F150 or an electric Suburban or v90 wagon or whatever. But instead we get e-initiative i-mobiles. We get TRON-cars. We get iModels. There is a reason for this: The incumbent auto makers understand fully that the ICE version of whatever model they electrify will suffer enormously. They believe that they can somehow retain all of t…

I'd love an off-road capable electric 4WD (because think about how amazing having computer controlled precision torque applied to wheels individually would be for getting out of a tricky situation). Especially if you could buy some kind of field charging kit - maybe something you could power off a wood fire or flexible solar panels that you could stow. I imagine that's not realistic at the moment, but a boy can dream…

> having computer controlled precision torque applied to wheels individually

Fwiw many vehicles already have this. Mechanical torque vectoring via differentials, electronic controlled differentials, and electronic brake-based torque vectoring. The latter is the most common, works pretty well in modern cars

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#327
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we will find out if many of these things actually matter with the Slate truck. It is in many ways the antithesis of this electric F-150. If that vehicle fails then there are no more excuses, a significant chunk of Americans just don't like electric vehicles and are destined to be laggards.

I'm just a Dutch guy that emigrated to Thailand, but I'd never trade my Toyota Hilux diesel for an electric truck. I don't want to have to rely on electric to be able to drive my car. A hybrid could be ok though. The nice thing about diesel, in case of emergency is you can have a couple of filled jerrycans around so you can always move if needed. I like the reliability, it feels more anti-fragile, if that makes sense…

While ICE vehicles need gas/diesel specifically to run, EVs can be charged from a variety of sources, including a diesel generator. Electricity is the great unifier. You could pedal a bike to make some electricity, but no amount of pedaling will create fossil fuels.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this map: https://supercharge.info/map , it has a feature called "range circles". If you set it to 50 miles, you'll see that most of the country is well within 50 miles of the nearest supercharger. Including almost all of Texas. At 100 miles of range, you only have a couple of blank spots. With third party chargers, there's really only one blank spot in Montana. At this point, the range is already a solved proble…

The kinds of situations that drive range consideration for things like trucks is that your planned route suddenly becomes unavailable after you've already burned most of your range. Range anxiety isn't about the ideal case. I've had several situations in the Mountain West when roads suddenly closed Hell, I've nearly come up short in an ICE vehicle a couple times. I try to keep 150-200 miles of spare range on my vehic…

>>I try to keep 150-200 miles of spare range on my vehicle when I am in that kind of country. That is hard to do on a typical EV.

Plus the additional anxiety of trying to figure out if dropping temperatures will add massive downside variance to your initial range estimate.

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There’s at least one spot within 100 miles where you can wait 20 minutes to get enough charge to get to the next charger” is not an argument that will convince someone to give up the convenience of the gas station.

The convenience argument works for a small segment of the population that road trips a few hundred miles at a time regularly. For the rest of us, EVs are far more convenient. I don't ever go to a gas station, and every day I start out with 320 miles of range. I stop at the EV equivalent of a gas station two or three times a year . I've saved a lot of time not having to get gas every week.

The people I know make those road triys. Sure 99% of the time we don't, but we expect the car to do it

Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

#330
$20b capital write down means that consumers paid that much more for all vehicles to subsidize redundant and insolvent EV product lines .

Tesla is the only company making money off of these products .

People keep complaining about the AI bubble but we sustained an EV bubble for 15 years without it popping .

Post reply on HN