Yeah. Botched rollout across the board. All the world wanted was a small electric pickup truck for tooling around town, but nooooo, they had to exclusively build insane luxury EVs instead.I think after my [electric] tractor is done I'm going to start looking for a donor small pickup for an EV swap and build the only vehicle I will ever need. Maybe a Chevy LUV or Nissan Hardbody if I can find either. Both of those are the perfect size and indestructible.The plug-in hybrid is the best design for consumers in my opinion. Toyota was right about that. From a government policy perspective I'd have done a tiered push where there'd have been a rebate for all EVs under a reasonable weight class to incentivize non insane designs, and I'd give half the amount for a plug in hybrid rebate. That way people are still going in the direction you want with adoption but you're not accidentally incentivizing only options that are worse for the environment than small gas cars and not boxing people into only EV if the current tech doesn't work for them.Obama or Biden should have bit the bullet and committed to resources to building charging networks if they wanted this to work. Instead they did the neoliberal thing and tried to get private businesses to handle it for them. You know, because that worked so well with Obamacare and with tax prep and with...
It's true that Obamacare tried to preserve private insurance, sort of, rather than going to a full-scale socialized medical system. I don't think it worked very well, although I have my doubts that the US bureaucracy could do any better with a socialist medical system. Maybe some places can do it well, but as we've seen with the VA -- where the class of people who use the system enjoy significant public honor over what ordinary citizens do -- our government just can't do it well.
4 comments:
Socialised anything has worked reasonably well in populations where everyone is fifth cousins and looks like second cousins, such as the European countries with very tribal borders since WWII. Anyone else, not so much. I live in a 55+ co-op community where we own the house but all of us own the land (streets, septic, water) in common. There are moderately high barriers to entry. Even in those ideal circumstances, disagreements can get ugly and people stop wanting to pay for other people's stuff. Even when it really is everyone's stuff in the long run, like cutting down one thousand of the very old white pines.
Ford's new-ish small pickup truck - Maverick - comes in a hybrid. We had a '22, flipped it two years later because the demand, and so resale value, was INSANELY high, and got a '24. It's well matched to most consumer loads. Doubles the gas mileage of our 2018 F-150, which was itself among the smaller offerings in that line.
Not a 'plug in' hybrid, though.
My wife has a '23 Maverick hybrid--real hybrid, not a plug-in--and loves it. She's getting 50mph on it in mostly city driving; although she has some long-ish shots between traffic lights that help her out. It's not a working truck, though, it's transportation for her and for when she's carting the grandkids from here to there and back.
Transportation for her because, short as she is, she likes the truck because it seats her higher than most cars so she can see surrounding traffic better.
Real hybrid: I've never been able to get a straight answer, even from dealers, on whether the ICE in a plug-in will recharge the battery or if I have to stop somewhere and plug it in to recharge the battery. If the latter, that for me defeats the purpose of hybrid-ness--it would either be an all-in ICE or an all-in battery car/truck--and would be a deal breaker.
Eric Hines
... on whether the ICE in a plug-in will recharge the battery or if I have to stop somewhere and plug it in to recharge the battery...
You'd think that the design would put turbines on the wheels, a turbocharger that used part of its force from re-burning exhaust to turn another turbine, and also use the ICE's main force to turn turbines (perhaps adding one to the serpentine belt, or just building out a more powerful alternator that would devote power to the battery). There's a lot of circular motion going on in a car or truck; you could be harnessing it at every point.
Friction would increase, of course, but that's an engineering challenge that is manageable.
Post a Comment