A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

What limitations specifically are you referring to?

Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.

The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.

And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?

Lots of trucks are still for work, but they have gotten so expensive more people than ever are considering them as luxury purchases.

Electric windows have been a luxury item for generations.

Traditionally, with an F-150, they were just much slower, prone to failure and expensive to replace.

Especially if you often go in & out from a gated area where you have to roll your window down every time and use your pass or talk to the guard :\

Or roll them all down whenever it has been parked in the hot sun, to quickly let out the overheated air before the air conditioner can become very effective. If you have A/C, or even use it at all :)

Window motors may not last much longer than a set of tires then, and cost as much to replace, often without warning. You're supposed to be able to afford it anyway.

However in the late 1990's the manual knob was moved to a stupid place, and it became impossible to lower the window in one quick second any more.

I can only imagine that the automotive engineers were constantly being bathed in the luxury of their environment and never even put enough test vehicles having no options through any kind of ergonomic comparison.

For the longest time these kind of things were built to provide an extreme amount of comfort for someone having a similar stature to Henry Ford. Almost lasted the entire 20th century before there was such great discontinuity.

Engineers probably didn't test drive any having manual seat adjustment, on long trips either. Otherwise they would have done better than to have an adjustment bar blocking the entire area under the driver's seat in such a way that about 25% of the footroom was lost, which was formerly available as you occasionally adjust your posture for endurance.

It was like expensive sportscar people started designing trucks. You don't sit upright in a sports car so the space is not wasted there. No more twin I-beam front suspension either, you didn't really want a truck that tough any more in the 21st century did you?

They didn't know any better. At least they once did.

And who doesn't like luxury?

Automatic locks is another one, once very seldom seen except in things like Cadillacs. That's why people envied them so much for decades, and when they finally came within reach of the mainstream they flew off the shelf.

Depends. rear wheel drives can get stuck on pavement if it is raining and they are trying to go uphill. Snow and ice make it worse. But put some load on and you get enough weight over the axel to be fine. Of course betteries may be under the bed thus providing good weight distribution.

> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.

Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).

The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.