All I know is I went to tesla.com, went to their store locator (which was hard to find on the website), deselected all the choices except “stores and galleries” (which was itself counterintuitive), then clicked the one nearest me to get the details. With this result: Find Us | Tesla. The current overhead Google Maps view shows very few cars on their property. As of today nearly every space was occupied with a Tesla of some sort.
The website seems a bit ambiguous as to whether this is a service facility, a sales facility, or both as would be the norm for non-Tesla cars. For sure the two in the showroom were brand new. I now suspect many on the lot were used. I sure hope all the cars I saw weren’t awaiting repairs; that would be signs of a disastrous backlog.
As you can see, there are very few other locations in the greater Miami metroblob. One I know for sure is in a high-end mall, and the others are probably free standing storefronts or are conventional car dealership / repair facilities repurposed to Tesla style.
Nope. A lot of them will just be waiting for pickup. I had to have mine serviced recently; they fixed the problem within half a day, but I wasn’t able to pick it up for a few days after. They didn’t care. I showed up when the center was closed, but the keycard was inside and my phone unlocked the doors. So I just drove off, same as with any other parking lot. The service ticket was already closed without any intervention on my part.
And, of course, it all depends on their service radius. It might be quite a lot. My local BMW dealership built an entire multi-story parking structure to store the cars coming in/out of service. Probably a capacity of 500+ cars.
Electric snowploys for commercial use are not a thing. No electric vehicle is going to run for 8 hours under heavy load.
Our city spent millions on electric buses. In freaking Canada. In Winter, the buses are out of charge by 8:30 in the morning. That is, if they are running at all. 60% of tyr electric buses are in the shop at any given time.
People still don’t seem to understand how little energy is in a battery compared to gasoline. Electric cars work by being highly optimized. It doesn’t take much to kill their range.
There is 33.7 kWh of equivalent energy in a single gallon of gasol8ne. A Cybertruck battery has the energy equivalent of a little over 3 gallons of gas. For sheer range that works out because of regen braking and the thermal efficiency of electric motors vs gas motors.
But when you are moving heavy loads, running heaters off the battery, etc., that efficiency doesn’t come into play as much. In winter for example, the thermal efficiency of a gas system goes up because the waste heat can be used to heat the vehicle. In an electric, there’s not much waste heat so you need the battery to run heaters. And also, the battery needs to be heated.
The use case for plowing with a pickup truck would be residential or light commercial. Clearning driveways, parking lots, lanes, loading areas, that kind of thing. Not as a full time snow plow.
Yet there are a lot of guys today who do that. Many are landscapers who have a pickup hauling a trailer in the summer. Most small & medium sized parking lots are done by pickups, as well as many private communities, like were I lived, too. We had one stake-body truck from the landscapers, one bobcat for cleaning out the tight areas but most of the roads were done by sub-contractors in F150s or their Ram or GMC equivalents
A pretty neat walkthrough of the body shop for the Cybertruck:
They’re using 1.4 mm and 1.8 mm stainless. The doors get 1.8 for extra crashworthiness (and it takes 75% of the impact energy). Supposedly, due to the improved alloy, these are as string as the initial 2.5-3 mm panels.
It’s much smaller than an equivalent stamped shop. The panels are laser-cut, then go through a press brake to fold them. It has some air-levitation system to avoid marring. They laser-weld a stamped piece to the back to complete the door, and it goes through a “brillo pad” process to get a nice brushed finish.
On the idea of snowplowing which I was curious about earlier, I was chatting with my snowplow guy just now and asked him about the feasibility of using a Ford Lightning or Cybertruck in his business. He just laughed. He said that after a snowstorm he typically spends about 8 hours driving through snowy streets in the cold, plowing heavy loads of snow one after another. There is no freaking way that an EV truck could even come close to doing the job. He sounds like he’s not an EV fan to begin with, but I agree that an electric truck just couldn’t possibly do the job. And he plows residential driveways, not large commercial lots.
Without saying anything about whether it actually is practical, I’m not sure why an EV skeptic would be any kind of authority on the matter. Even people who should know better are often filled to the brim with anti-EV propaganda and beliefs about them that haven’t been true for 10+ years. And people who go out of their way to consume propaganda sources are even worse. We’ve seen plenty of that bullshit on this forum alone, and it gets even worse as you go down the rabbit hole.
Heavy loads aren’t a problem at all for EV trucks. Most likely, they can handle these better than any ICE. But what’s unknown is how that translates to miles of plowed roads.
At any rate, it’s absurd to assume there’s no middle ground between “light enough to shovel by hand” vs. “plowing for 18 hours a day with a full-size truck”. EV trucks will fit in the middle somewhere. Exactly where, we’ll have to see.
I think the relevant question is how much fuel does that take. I really have no idea.
An EV can run for a very long time if it is slowly driving up and down neighborhood streets. An EV is not going to run very far if it’s spending most of its time doing full power snow pushes.
The question to ask the plow guy is “How many gallons of gasoline (or diesel) does your truck burn in an 8-hour plowing session? How many tankfuls is that?”
That will let us know how much energy he’s using. Which we can then compare with the energy available in an EV. With all the usual caveats, but at least we’re starting the raw facts, not the conclusive / dismissive opinions of the partly informed.
Good point, but as it happened, I was also trying to negotiate this year’s contract, and got him to come down a bit. It would be awkward in those circumstances to ask him how much diesel he actually uses! What I can tell you just from observation is that when there’s any sort of decent snowfall, that truck works damn hard, with lots of pounding, pushing, and roaring of engine – and back in the days when I did it myself, it was hard work!
EVs have a lot of torque, for sure. What they don’t have is a lot of endurance (cite: they can’t tow heavy loads very far).
On the other hand, they’re very efficient at converting energy into useful work. An ICE truck is likely to be operating in a very inefficient regime here.
Regardless, it’s impossible to know if an EV truck is appropriate here without either a detailed analysis or an empirical measurement. Unfortunately, it looks like neither the F-150 Lightning nor Rivian support a front-mounted plow. The Rivian seems like it might be a bit too delicate for the job, too. Too early to tell with the Cybertruck.
It’s a question of whether you’re plowing your own driveway or whether you have a snow removal business. No one signs up for “Snow removal but not over 2in of snow or areas larger than 25,000 sq feet” contracts. If you own a cybertruck (or other electric truck) and need to clear your drive, it’s probably fine. For a snow removal fleet vehicle, it’s a bad choice because eventually it’ll need to do 18hrs of real work.
Buddy of mine always said that there’s no quicker way to fuck up a perfectly good truck than to put a snow plow on it.
That still seems like a false dichotomy. Not all snowplow services have fleets. Some are just contractors making a few bucks in the off-season and clearing driveways for $50 or $100 a shot.
And again, “2in of snow” isn’t the relevant part here. The EV truck can push just as hard–probably harder–than an equivalent ICE (so, a match for an F-150, but probably not an F-250). There’s a good chance they could actually plow faster overall. It’s really just about endurance, which is unknown. But it may still be sufficient for some commercial use, even if it isn’t the 18 hour a day types.
Sure, if your snow removal is the equivalent of a kid with a lawnmower doing a few yards on the weekend when you feel like it and not under contract then I suppose it’d be fine for that.
The only place I lived where it snowed, substantially every “snow removal service” was one rural guy in a rattrap rusty pickup who had fliered a suburb and gotten his mobile number out there. If it snowed, he got called. Each burb had a different collection of these dudes. All cash.
This low-tech informal system would not get the interstates plowed, nor the city’s boulevards. But that’s not the market these dudes were aimed at.
Would this half-assed “system” of half-assed workers with half-assed tools work in e.g. Buffalo? Not a chance. Might an EV truck, and especially a 2025+ model years EV truck fit in here? Technologically probably yes. Economically probably no.
That’s about what I’m saying. If your snow removal is getting a call a couple of times a year to clear a few driveways or private roads at your discretion then this vehicle will probably do fine just like many other trucks will do fine. But then you wouldn’t be rating the cybertruck’s snow removal potential as a primary motivator for buying one.
I’d you’re plowing snow “for real” with zero inch contracts in an area that potentially gets real snowfall, it sounds like a bad choice because you’re going to struggle when prolonged snowfall happens.
I find the snow plowing discussion a bit curious. I don’t know the last time I saw a plow on a pickup. Almost all small-scale snow clearing around here is done with skid-steers. The pickup just has to tow the flatbed with the bobcat on it to the job.
I thought it was interesting to learn that the cybertruck can charge other vehicles. I know the Lightning can act as a power source as well, but not sure it puts out the higher voltage (ct has a 240V outlet) to get a faster charge.
I got to play around in a Cybertruck the other day. I have to say it looks better in person and the materials (interior and exterior) feel high quality. The bed is surprisingly big. Unfortunately it is so basic on the inside it just doesn’t feel right to pay $60k for the most basic model.
