If the Slate had a 6 foot bed, VTL capability, and a little more range I’d be really into it. I’m a woodworker, hauling plywood and lumber with a 5 foot bed doesn’t sound fun.

The folks who really care about tow ratings and range are those who have boats or campers. Which means they do road trips while towing. Do you want to tow a camper on a road trip in a rented vehicle?

Yes, gas trucks also suffer poorer fuel economy when towing. It’s less of a practical problem because it means more 10 minute fuel stops. With an EV, it means more 3 hour fuel stops. It’s fairly easy to equip a gas truck with a larger or additional fuel tank. My S10’s fuel tank is on the left side of the bed; it would be fairly trivial to mount another tank on the right side, or, a Blazer’s fuel tank isn’t that hard to install behind the axle where the pickup hangs its spare tire. Doubling or tripling a pickup truck’s range is something a guy can do at his house. It’s functionally impossible with an EV.

In the United States, if you need more than about 20 tons of freight moved, you use the railroad not the highway. “Road trains” aren’t a thing here.

Regardless, I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to illustrate - your example of a “streamlined vehicle” undoubtedly consumes a lot more diesel than your example of a vehicle which is not streamlined. Isn’t that antithetical?

In absolute terms, yes. A semi truck consumes more fuel than a pickup truck. So does a diesel locomotive. The point is the difference in aerodynamic drag with and without the trailer.

Aerodynamically, a semi truck is the same shape with and without a trailer. Somewhat streamlined nose, flat sides, flat rear. With the trailer attached, that flat rear is just 50 feet further away. A semi truck without a trailer will make better fuel economy because it doesn’t have to accelerate the additional weight or overcome the friction in the additional axles, but the cab has already taken most of the aerodynamic punishment it can.

With a non-streamlined pickup truck, the additional wheel friction and acceleration energy are factors, but you’re also functionally doing this:

So a pickup truck sees a much bigger punishment to fuel economy when you hitch up a trailer than a semi does.

Yes, but a “truck” with a 4 ton towing capacity obviously needs motors with more torque than those on a tesla.

Not necessarily. My S10’s 4.3L V6 engine makes 200 horsepower and 200 foot pounds of torque. It’s rated to tow 7600 pounds, with the addition of a transmission cooler. A Tesla Model Y is rated at 397 horsepower and 389 foot pounds of torque, it is rated to tow 3500 pounds. A lot more factors than horsepower and torque go into a tow rating. The strength of the frame at the hitch, a height sensing proportioning valve, the duty cycle ratings of the power train to name a few. It’s not about “Can this car get this weight moving” it’s “can this car perform a safe emergency stop 9 hours into a 10 hour journey towing this weight?”

As little as 5 to 10% on the highway, not particularly significant.

See that’s the funny thing about EVs. ICEVs get better fuel economy on the highway because the constant aerodynamic drag at cruising speed is less than all the braking you do in the city. EVs are the other way up, because of regenerative braking they get a lot of their energy back when braking, but you can’t get aerodynamic drag back. And that’s without the additional drag of a trailer.

No. That’s not the market targeted by the Cybertruck. The yeehaw sister fucker demographic would rather eat their own face than drive an EV. They’re the ones cutting holes in their beds to run 10 inch diameter exhaust stacks through them so they can prove how much damage they’re doing to the environment.

No, the Cybertruck is for urban nazis. The tech bros who work in fields like IT or software development. They wear slacks to work. Nothing in their natural lives makes them feel like real men. Their hands are soft. They don’t have the first clue what a lathe is for and they genuinely wonder why we have farms when food comes from grocery stores now. They hate blue collar men as beneath them…and yet they fetishize them. Elon Musk is chief among them, and he happens to own a car factory. Enter the Cybertruck, what a ketamine addled techbro huckster thinks a pickup is. It’s a costume worn by males attempting to cosplay as men.

My S10 outranges a Slate by over 50%, refuels from empty to full in less than five minutes, seats 4, has a 6 foot bed, tows up to 7600 pounds…a Slate is a massive step back in a lot of ways.

…There. Now everybody knows.

The maximum weight for a tractor-trailer rig in the United States is 80,000 pounds, 40 short tons or 36.36 metric tons.

A tractor-trailer rig is surprisingly streamlined. The cab is shaped and sized for the front of the trailer to ride closely in its wake, often with fairings that reach as close to the trailer as practicable. Sure it’s a brick, but it’s ONE brick:

A pickup truck towing a trailer isn’t anywhere near that slick, even with a gooseneck trailer, the trailer is often taller and wider than the cab. It’s a brick, attached to another, larger brick being pulled through the turbulent disturbed air from the first brick:

In terms of torque, EVs have a significant advantage. Electric motors produce a lot more torque at low to zero RPM than internal combustion engines do. Limited slip differentials or all-wheel drive are solved problems.

The additional energy required to accelerate the additional weight up to speed isn’t that much of a problem as an EV will get that back with regenerative braking. Well, some of it. Most trailers have brakes of their own that do help with braking distance but are there mostly to keep the hitch under tension to prevent jackknifing. An ICEV figures on losing all of that energy to friction braking, a BEV plans on recovering some of it. An electric pickup carrying 1000 pounds in the bed will be more efficient than one pulling a 1000 pound trailer, in most cases.

An electric pickup isn’t a no-brainer for the US market. It’s a big-brainer.

Most EVs are shaped like running shoes for aerodynamics. Pickup trucks are big air smacking slabs. Larger pickup trucks advertise towing capacity as a major feature, EVs are bad at towing, again because of aerodynamics. The additional batteries and such required to make an EV pickup work are large, heavy and expensive. I think the technology needs to cook a bit before we get there.

Now on the compact pickup truck front…those are basically extinct. The Slate is almost a good attempt, the problem is it’s almost the anti-cybertruck. The Cybertruck is what you get when a billionaire nazi notices how thoroughly the drugs have emptied his scrotum. It’s the costume a truly awful male wears to cosplay as a man. The Slate is almost the equal and opposite, it’s what r/fuckcars thinks of when they start a sentence with “Can’t you just make do with…” A 20 year old S10 kicks the Slate’s ass in every way because the Slate is designed mostly to play dress-up like a barbie doll. They’re taking pre-orders but they won’t show you where the tie down points in the bed are.

No, it’s best would have been to crush more rich people.

They guarantee parts availability for 10 years. 2012 was 14 calendar years, 47 human years ago.

I mean, it’s an x86 pc. You can run Windows on it.

So there’s been a massive spike in demand for a product, that demand isn’t forecast to let up for the foreseeable future, and yet it’s outright impossible to get in on the action.

RAM is Lostech.

Okay Valve. Can YOU make memory?

Stock Dire Wolf had 4 ER Large lasers IIRC Along with sundry other lasers, an LRM10 and I think some AC10S? It’s been a hot minute.

Nothing he added was pointful. All of the CGI retouches of the original trilogy were pointless CGI effects for the sake of having pointless CGI effects. At one point in the Mos Eisley sequence a huge pack animal walks through the frame, obscuring almost all of it. Why? Because it was some computer generated shit to throw in!

Autopilot: Engaged.

Autopilot: dIsAbLeD.

There wasn’t an Awesome in the game, it’s set during the Wolf/Falcon refusal war so it’s all Clan mechs. Nothing’s stopping you from from loading like five of them on a Dire Wolf though.

I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?

but are they really making this about Culture Wars, or are you?

They’re the ones spending hundreds of millions of dollars to depict The Patriarchy oppressing Belle, not me.

Here’s a video by Lindsay Ellis analyzing the remake of Beauty and the Beast, including a fairly large section criticizing the added feminist talking points and their effect on the overall story.

Then there’s Snow White and the whole scandal with the dwarfs. See, they initially planned to use live action little people to play the dwarfs, but Peter Dinklage of all people went on a podcast talking about how typecasting little people in that role and calling them ‘dwarfs’ was offensive. So Disney erased the word ‘dwarf’ from the movie, canned the actors and replaced them with awful CGI. Because that’s the bleeding heart liberal method to avoid offending marginalized groups: Erase them.

Unhealthily watching = scrolling shorts for too long.