I believe the F150 Lightening has an option to add a fuel tank and small generator to keep the battery charged and give you some additional range.
ETA, I couldn’t [quickly] find a picture, but it appears to be called a Range Extender.
One of my issues is with people who claim they can’t get an EV because they “drive too much.” 1000 miles per week is certainly unusual, but those are exactly the people that should be thinking really hard about how they can make an EV work. I can see price as an obstacle, but a 200 mile round trip commute is manageable by many EVs.
Even if they have a car which gets 30 MPG, somebody driving 1000 miles per week, could be saving $100 per week by driving an EV and charging at home. Not to mention saving on the 5 oil changes they’ll need per year. Of course any EV driving that much will need two sets of tires every year.
THAT’S what I’d want in an EV! Or just a battery with 100 miles’ worth in it. If I could keep a spare “power pack” in the back, that’d pretty much answer my range questions. I mean, I carry an external battery for my phone in case I run out of juice, why couldn’t I do that with a bigger electronic device that I’m driving?
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Range anecdote:
A poker buddy just got back from a classic “Pile the kids and everything we might need in the (EV) station wagon” camping trip. Drove from north of Chicago to a couple of national parks “Out West”. And back, of course…
They had ZERO problems with range, driving 4-6 hours a day with a half-hour recharge when they stopped for lunch. I know they stopped in Sioux Falls, then the Badlands, then Theodore Roosevelt National Park (ND?) and then further west… the point is, they had no problems…
…until they decided to go off the beaten path on the way home. They’d stopped in Minneapolis, and decided “Hey, we’ve never driven down the Mississippi River, that’ll be pretty!” Well, they’d been lulled into complacency and didn’t check their Charger Map. He found out there were none in the small river towns. They DID make it home, but they’d never driven their battery so low.
We asked the guy “Well, didn’t you think ‘Hmmm, we could get off the river and head over to I-94 where there are dozens of charging spots?’”
He smirked: “Of course, but where’s the adrenaline rush in that?”
(We stopped feeling sorry for him then…)
How we have all forgotten!
Cat-burning vehicles have actually been around for quite a long time.
https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/cartalk/original/3X/9/b/9b5aec97b858e7b59d01861eb9aa430ba6745a94.jpeg
I guess they just never quite caught on when gas was cheap.
And that’s the other advantage of an electric truck. If the truck can haul a generator to a worksite, it can haul a generator around on vacation. A little bit of design work so you can easily hook it up to the truck, and you have the virtually unlimited range of an ICE vehicle for once- or twice-a-year road trips, but with the everyday driving benefits of an EV.
Try stuffing a Honda generator in the trunk of your Prius, I dare you!
That’s silly!
You’d strap it to the roof.
SEE? I knew you couldn’t do it! ![]()
This would be impressive even for a regular ICE pick up. It looks like this weighs about a ton more than an F150 and has about double the torque and HP…plus it probably has a good set of tires.
ETA, the caption says it’s a Rivian R1T.