I never saw the appeal even as a kid.

Smart boards are FUCKING useless. The only partially effective use I’ve seen for one was software training. They’re moderately okay I guess for teaching a room full of students how to use Photoshop or AutoCAD. They’re a pointless gimmick that some CEOs should have their balls hammered flat for bilking the public as hard over.

I think I got reasonable tech training in high school in the early 2000s. I was taught how to use Word and Excel, and made to type up some of my assignments. Years later I’d watch my Gen X boss doing the company books by doing the math on a calculator and then typing the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

That said, I didn’t learn to type in keyboarding class, I learned to type hitting on girls on MSN messenger.

Flight instructor here:

I kept having to undo the damage that academia did to my flight students, because looking things up to make sure you knew it right felt like “cheating” to them. So. Many. People have acadotrauma, y’all. Do you know how often I had to resort to behaviorism models to convince grown ass men it’s okay to be seen using a checklist? I had to ask our chief pilot to watch me do ground procedures on an airplane in front of the student to establish it as a norm. You know, the way they trained Alex the parrot to talk. Because a checklist is a piece of paper with the answers on it and we hurt people for having those. Same with writing down frequencies. What? You’re going to memorize the A/FD?

Or would it be edutrauma?

I grew up in the 90’s, there were Apple //es orMacs with edutainment software on them that we’d be taken to once a week, and by high school there were several computer labs full of Windows XP machines scattered around, a couple “public” ones that teachers would occasionally schedule to take the class to to do some research or type up an essay, and a few that were computer focused, I took a class on MS Office in one of those, and that’s where I was when I first heard the planes hit the towers.

About that time is when it felt like the manager and politician class latched on. That putting computers in schools made them look good, it was a bragging point, “Look how modern and up to date we are” so they’d start to cram computers in where they didn’t need to be. My junior year in college I took a calculus class that was in a CAD workstation classroom. We were told not to touch the large, loud computers on our desks and had to try to see the board around the monitors. That was probably the most egregious case but it happened a lot. “Don’t touch the computers, this isn’t a computer class.” Like all the fresh shiny equipment colleges will walk tour groups into, turn on the lights, show off that they have it, turn the lights back off because no classes take place in there, that equipment is for owning not teaching.

Now the shift is, kids get issued a chromebook and use that instead of pencil, paper and textbook. “We’ll use these because that’s what it’s like these days.”

My father’s Avalon will never show turn by turn navigation on the infotainment screen ever again because the mobile app it requires is dead. Car is 9 years old.

Does that include larger vehicles with larger batteries like the Lightning and Silverado? Bigger battery takes longer to charge.

I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall.

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.