Full-size pickups with a crew cab (four-door) almost always have 6.5-foot beds. My Silverado 1500 is a full-size pickup and has the same 6.5-foot bed as the Cybertruck. OTOH, my truck does not look like something Mick Jagger would drive in a [del]bad[/del] awesome Emilio Estevez movie.
I think if and when electric pickups take off, the market will probably be owned by the electric F-150 coming out in a couple years.
There are a lot of people who would not fit an EV car perfectly right now. I have said this frequently. I guess you missed it.
No, I don’t dismiss them. There are a lot of people who would not fit an EV car perfectly right now.
My beef is with people who pretend that NOBODY should use an EV car right now, and make up outrageous situations and pretend they apply to everyone…
ETA: Do you understand that you have misinterpreted what I have said rather badly?
You’re right that many people opt for the shorter bed but all full size trucks come with the option of an 8 ft bed.
The Tesla truck doesn’t have that option so they’re not marketing it squarely at the truck market. It fits well into the towing market for people that want to haul 6 people and a boat. Plus the 3 motor version can race muscle cars on the way to the lake. I’m not going to say it won’t sell but It has all the visual appeal of a Pontiac Aztec.
That Tesla “pickup” is one ugly vehicle. And I wonder how easy it is to load crap into the back? It looks more like a weird suv than like a pickup.
Once again, I appear to be hanging out with the wrong crowd. Literally all the truck owners I know use their trucks for work, and have either a single front seat or an “extended” cab but with a full-size bed. But if there’s a market for short beds, then good for Tesla.
Naw. My husband and i would do well if we had a small electric car and a larger ICE for road trips and when we both need to drive at the same time. We used to have a minivan and a Civic, and we could downside both a little.
But we need to keep a mid sized sedan for our adult daughter who lives with us, and it seems excessive to keep three cars. So we are juggling the “small, efficient, easy to park” car we use most days with the “hauls people and stuff there and back” vehicle.
I’d love it if Subaru or Toyota made a hybrid electric version of their small SUV. (Or are the RAV4 and whatever Subaru calls theirs crossovers?) I’m considering the hybrid Crosstrek. It’s not really big enough, and it’s underpowered, but it might be an okay compromise.
Duplicate
Toyota does make a hybrid RAV4. A regular hybrid, not a plug-in hybrid, but a hybrid nonetheless.
Doesn’t pretty much every sedan nowadays have back seats that fold down to allow cargo to pass through from the trunk into the passenger compartment? I mean I once carried a six foot step ladder inside a first generation Saturn sedan with the trunk closed. Just fold down the back seats, turn it on its side, stick it between the two front seats, and it fits. If I can carry a ladder in a Saturn then I’m sure a pole saw would be a piece of cake in a Camry. I know the back seats in my old Corolla folded down, so I assume they must in a Camry, too.
Some sedans have a small opening in the middle of the back seat, so you can carry long, narrow things and still seat two people in the back. I think these openings were originally meant for skis but you could probably carry something like a pole saw.
My Accord doesn’t. It looks like it should, but it turns out there’s no way to drop the seats. I guess i should check whether the Camry does. Thanks for pointing that out.
Yeah, and the new one this year even gets better mileage than the non-hybrid, which wasn’t significantly true of last year’s model. That’s one of the vehicles we test drove. But you still need to buy gas all the time… It really is nice having the car charged overnight and always knowing you can drive local errands without thinking about it.
Have you looked at the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV? It only has 35 km electric range, but this vehicle works well for a colleague of mine - she had to get a larger vehicle after her family expanded to 5 and a dog…
ETA: Plug in Rav -4 is coming for 2021 with 39 miles of electric range…
I suspect that there are very different “kinds” of truck owners in different geographic areas.
You should see the morning commute in Calgary - truck after truck after truck heading from the suburbs to the downtown core, each one with a single suited executive hauling a load of air. I’m sure they might use the truck on the weekends as well, to go pick up a bag of soil at Home Depot, or such. Their wives are simultaneously driving a giant SUV like a Range Rover to drop their child off at school which is 3 blocks away.
Small rural towns have trucks that are obviously used to haul materials and supplies, and are actually used for the purpose.
Even there, most of them are going to be Supercabs or crew cabs. It’s very rare to see a standard cab pickup around here and if you do, it’s usually been converted to a hotrod.
What I see a lot around here are full sized pickups with the crew cab and short bed, and a cover over the bed. So effectively they’ve turned their pickup into a huge sedan with a really big trunk.
Good article from Mark Reuss, president of GM about electric vehicles.
He identifies three areas where EV’s need to improve to achieve mass acceptance. Unsurprisingly, we have discussed all of them here:
Range
Charging Infrastructure
Cost
Seems like GM is pretty optimistic about the future when it comes to EV’s
I have a 2005 F150 SuperCrew right now and the bed is 5’6" and it’s by far the worst part of the truck for me. I just can’t fit anything larger in my garage. I’ve pre-ordered a Rivian, which also fits in my garage according to the specs, but the piece which is making me re-consider is the bed length. I use my truck bed for construction 3-4 times a year, hauling lots of plywood, 2x4s, etc. and no “gear tunnel” or “frunk” is going to offset a short bed. If I can’t haul a stack of 4x8 plywood, even if I have to lower the tailgate and tie them in, that’s a dealbreaker. The sides of the “vault” on the cybertruck would make side loading/unloading ridiculously difficult, which is a major negative as well. There’s a reason a lot of trucks have a step in the side behind the cab, it’s useful to be able to get in on both sides and in front of a load. Everything from getting access to tie strap attachment points to getting out of the way once you’ve loaded a sofa or something would be more difficult in the Cybertruck. Not saying they shouldn’t make it, or that anyone who doesn’t have these needs/concerns shouldn’t buy it, just that those are reasons I’m not re-considering my Rivian reservation at this point.
Enjoy,
Steven
Nope! Guess you might need to read where the scenario was posted and repeated and rerepeated to find out a more detailed answer.
Point me to it.