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.
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?
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.