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

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

#361
post #43

I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger. Here is what could be potential deal-breakers: - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues. - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both! - Comparable h…

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues. Noooooooooo! No apps, please ! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it! EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :( > - Lack of go…

> Yes to a simple battery system!

But you realize this will make cold-weather range suck and on-the-road charging suck, right?

Preheating the battery and cabin on "shore power" is something EV buyers just expect at this point because that can consume 2-3kWh of energy (equivalent to 6-10 miles or 10-16 km). That's almost 10% of Slate's range (see below).

Preheating the battery about 10-15 minutes before you arrive at a supercharger is another expected feature. It can increase charge acceptance rate by over 50% (reduce charge time by 1/3).

The 150 mile range is extremely optimistic given the size of the battery and shape of the truck. With just 5% top and bottom buffers, you'd need to achieve over 3.1 miles/kWh... which is the consumption expected of a small aerodynamic sedan. I would bet real money that highway range (at 75 mph) for the small battery is less than 120 miles from 100% to 0.

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

#362

For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

This is largely why all the vehicles around us have become supersized. It's completely idiotic.

It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist. The vast majority of new vehicles are crossovers or _light trucks_, which aren't held to the same emission/efficiency standards.

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

#363
post #77

I like it. My wife runs a riding academy and we use a Honda Fit the way some people would use a pickup truck: we can fit 10 bales of wood shavings in the back. [1] We’re dreading when it fails because they don’t make the fit anymore and compact hatchbacks seem to be on the way out. Recent experiences have made me a bit of a Buick enthusiast and I can see driving a 2005-ish sedan except that I won’t get those sawdust…

The Honda Fit is great. You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission (used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable), and if you're using it heavily then you have the advantage that most cara on the market take less abuse, so you can maybe grab a decade beyond that by picking up somebody else's used Fit when you're done repairing yours.

>You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission

In many parts of the country (I'm Canadian, I assume the same for the US) the body and undercarriage are going to rot before the drivetrain goes.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc. > Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that. Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have,…

> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc. It absolutely does NOT mean those things. Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine. My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.

>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?

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

#367

I love it, now give me a gas engine so I can take it on weeklong off-road camping trips

I want a generator hookup in the bed. A 5kw generator will get me all day and then when I'm done for the day charge the battery and provide me other generator benefits.

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

#368
post #87
post #35

I love it. However I wonder about the overlap between people that need a truck and this particular truck. I have only owned trucks when I needed to go out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with a payload, in places with poor access to electricity. If I need to go in bumfuck nowhere without payload then there is no need for the truck, and if I need a payload in the city it's just way way cheaper to have it delivered wh…

I definitely worry about the ability of this thing to drive through a couple feet of water safely.

Due to it being electric or due to the specific design? EVs are generally much easier to design for water crossings. I actually drove an electric motorcycle across a river fully submerged, which it wasn't even designed for (had to do a thorough check afterwards but it was completely fine). This is not even remotely possible with the bike I normally ride (Africa Twin).

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

#369
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. And it'll always be sold out.

I'm sure you can get on the waiting list (for a lead time of 3-40 years) or buy it from a reseller for $70k. Problem solved.

> buy it from a reseller for $70k.

Now there's the real price.

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