Depends where you live, I guess. There’s a lot more snow out west than there is here in southern Ontario. In the winter, pickups with plows are all over the place here.
I think pickups with blades are mostly a rural thing. Acreages that need to clear their lane after a snowfall, etc.
In Edmonton, all the snow clearing seems to be done with graders, bobcats, skid-steers, big front end loaders, etc.
Come to Massachusetts; it seems as if every third pickup I see in snow season has a plow mounted. Yes, the landscapers have big dump-body trucks and Bobcats for cleaning commercial lots, condo complexes, and so forth; the government has loaders and big trucks for plowing the roads; but there’s still plenty of work for the pickup posse.
I see the pickup tow the skidsteer, unload/unhook, one guy drives the plow truck, one guy drives the tractor. Tractor guy is responsible for making the big snow piles in the snow bank area. Depends on size of area, of course.
In my condo complex, the plow truck does the driveway and the Bobcat clears the area in front of the under-condo garages where the plow truck can’t go. Plus a couple of guys with shovels to clear the stairs to the front doors.
Yeah but aren’t you in major snow country? Pickups with plows are very common around here and it’s not just a rural phenomenon at all.
My anecdotal observations are that pickups with plows are used for basically all residential and light commercial work around here. Really huge parking lots like those around big malls are typically serviced with Caterpillar type earth movers like big front loaders mainly because they tend to have to create big mountains of snow in some remote corner of the lot. Highways and most municipal roads are cleared by dump trucks with huge multiple blades, though some areas use graders for city streets.
Then there’s how they do it in Montreal:
ETA: Click the blue text, not the image.
I live in more northern climates with lots of pickups with plows…also ATVs for sidewalks.
I find it more annoying than curious. Most folks that have plows stuck on the front of their pickups are using 1995 K1500/K2500s or the Ford and Dodge equivalents, not 2023 whatevers. I know there are actual fleets of snow plowing trucks that are newer, but the bulk of them are the guys using used pickups for this. These edge cases in e-vehicle discussions gets old.
I have an e-bike. I also rode a “real” century this year (miles, not kilometers) and didn’t ride my e-bike because it couldn’t handle that ride. I guess it sucks?
The F-150 has a 240v outlet as well, but it’s limited to 30 A. Not bad at all, but the CT is 40 A, and can handle 11.5 kW total along with the 120v outlets. The Rivian only has 120v outlets.
Yeah, the Cynerteuck and the F-150 should both be able to act as shore power for a trailer with the 240v 30A plug.
That’s important because you can’t run AC on battery in most trailers. So if you want to boondock (camp in places with no electrical power) in summer, a Cybertruck or F-150 is really nice, if they have the range to get you where you are going when pulling a trailer.
I bet Tesla gives serious consideration to making a Cybertrailer self-powered chassis. Put an RV on it, or a tool hauler, or a flatbed for a bobcat or whatever, and now you can tow without losing as much range, and the trailer can use regenerative braking. Currently, if you are towing a triler over hills you have to pay the penalty to haul the weight of the trailer up the hill, then you lose that energy to heating the brakes when you have to use them…
A trailer wouldn’t have to have a huge battery. Even if the truck has to pull half the weight, you still get regen braking in the trailer to recover some energy.
I’m not sure about this, actually. The truck might actually have enough regen capacity to handle a decent-sized trailer as well.
Part of the reason the Semi has 1000+ horsepower is so it can get full regen on downhills, even with the trailer. And tests showed that it recovers 90+% of the energy. Ideally, the Cybertruck would be similar. It would require some care with the traction control system so that the increased mass doesn’t cause stability problems, but it should be doable, especially on the tri-motor version that has rear-axle torque vectoring.
Still, an interesting idea to have an extra battery in the trailer. Or even an ICE generator system.
Two thoughts on a putative Cybertrailer which is overall a darn good idea.
Ref @Dr.Strangelove … semi’s are different from smaller pick-up truck/trailer combos.
Very small light trailers don’t need to have their own brakes for stability. But once the trailer gets to being long enough or a big enough fraction of the tow-vehicle weight, the trailer requires brakes for stability’s sake, not necessarily for total retarding capacity’s sake. Many single-axle trailers have no brakes, whereas most dual-axle trailers do.
You’re not going to be able to fix stability issues just with smart motors & steering on the tow vehicle. You might be able to expand the envelope of stability a bit, but not much. If the trailer is big and heavy enough, the only way it’s going to stay behind the tow vehicle under heavy braking is if it’s retarding itself too.
Plus of course whatever the various regulations say. If the regs say e.g. “any trailer over 3000# gross weight capacity must have integral brakes”, well there’s your answer. Anything over 3K# will have trailer brakes, and for an EV tow vehicle it’s surely better if those trailer brakes can be at least partly regen, not pure friction.
Ref @Sam_Stone, I think one potential obstacle is GVWR. At least under US regs, the total weight of tow vehicle plus trailer needs to be less than X pounds or else it takes a special driver’s license to operate, may be taxed differently, or …
Given how heavy EVs in general are, and EV trucks in particular, there may not be much headroom under the ordinary vehicle GVWR rules for a trailer at all. Much less a dense one with a hefty battery pack / range extender built in before we start discussing the trailer’s useful load.
For darn sure the engineers and marketers at all these EV truck makers are already doing their noodling along these lines. So we should see these sorts of trailers emerging soon. Or not.
We may also start to see changing weight and engineering regs with carve-outs and exceptions for EV-based trailer designs. But not yet.
It’s brutal on the truck. I’m on my second truck and I just do my own driveway.
It IS hard work. And stressfull for myself. My truck is chained up on all four and has a winch on the back, but you can still get stuck. If you do stick the thing, you are going to have a very bad rest of your day.
The TFL people do an “Ike Gauntlet” towing test, where they go from the Eisenhower tunnel on I-70 down to Silverthorne, and then back up. It is 8 miles (one way), at a 7% grade. They typically will attach a trailer near the maximum towing capacity of the truck. Then they measure the number of brake applications required to maintain control on the downhill part, and the ability to maintain 60 mph on the uphill part.
I think they’ve tested all of the electric trucks except the Cybertruck. Below is a link to the F150 test, which does very well. They regain 7% of the battery on the way down, and use 16% of the battery on the way up. I know in some of the EV towing videos they talk about trailer brakes versus regeneration. I don’t think they ever have to use the friction brakes.
Even going back to the Model X test, I think all of the EVs have been great at towing, except for the issue of limited range. Regenerative braking usually does a better job than engine braking at keeping speed under control, and they all have so much power that uphill is not a problem. The Silverado with its 200kWh battery, or whatever, gets pretty good towing range.
There’s surely some part of the parameter space where plowing with an electric truck makes sense, but I think that even just the back-of-the-envelope calculations you did in post 367 are enough to show that it’s a fairly small part of the parameter space. 20 km of plow distance at full capacity just isn’t very much, especially when you consider that someone whose business isn’t plowing snow still has to do whatever their regular business is.
how do we feel about that? … IIRC, inductive charging has some 30% losses … negating any economies over ICE trucks … also what kind of electric field strenghts are we talking here - in order to stay in the same ballpark as cable-charging?
The brakes are controlled by the truck, though, which can decide when conditions warrant application.
While it’s possible you’re right that improved stability control can only marginally expand the envelope, I’d be surprised. It’s not all that different from the inverted pendulum problem, which has also been solved quite comprehensively by another of the CEO’s business ventures. Also recall that the Cybertruck has front-and-back steer-by-wire, which further increases the possible degree of control.
I wonder if they have load cells in the hitch. That, plus load analysis from acceleration, can tell the truck quite a lot about the configuration of the trailer and how it needs to respond.
I think a lot of these people are doing landscaping and construction in the warmer seasons, and are just trying to make some extra money when the weather dictates otherwise. The 20 km was very conservative, IMO, basically assuming the truck is at the traction limit. But even that would be sufficient if you’re just clearing some long driveways. 8x 500-foot driveways at an hour each and $100 a pop isn’t bad money for a snow day.
Sure, like I said, there’s some part of the parameter space where it makes sense. But I suspect that most snow-clearing is either done by the property owner with a small tool (shovel or snowblower), or by a professional who spends all day on it, not by the guy who does a few neighbors’ driveways and nothing else.
In any event, all this means is that an electric truck isn’t the right tool for every job, which, of course they aren’t. Most folks with trucks don’t do any plowing, anyway, and even if we’re stuck with gasoline vehicles doing all of the plowing for the foreseeable future, that still leaves 99.9% of vehicle use that can be electrified.
Given the likely price of the Cybertruck, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy a used ICE pickup for a lot less to take the inevitable beating? One doesn’t hitch a racehorse to a plow, after all, not unless you don’t have anything else and can make do with the inferior performance.