This. I purchased an EV for the daily commute ~3 years ago. A family member got angry and railed about how it was already a failed technology as they likely couldn't replace their f350 towing 4-wheelers deep into the woods.
Infrastructure takes time; and you don't have to solve every use case at once.
I am very pro EV...but a little concerned that the one thing we do (Hauling a 5th wheel with a diesel) will get legislated away or cot prohibitive before a reasonable alternative is available.
But for the other transportation needs, when I replace the 40mpg commuter, I'm all for it. When we bought the commuter, due to covid math, it was an $8k purchase plus trade. An EV would have been a $25k purchase with trade and I really didn't want to incur that much debt.
You should probably understand that somebody who uses an efficient vehicle for commuting, and a big truck for real big truck things, is utterly an outlier. Most trucks in america have never left the pavement, and the largest thing they carry is a 40 pound bag of dog food. The vast majority of americans buy the biggest truck they can get credit for and drive it everywhere at 12mpg, usually while boasting "It's got a hemi!" as if that even matters after 1980
There's a lot of anecdotal stuff when it comes to these conversations, You see the folks in the 7 seat SUVs commuting (that was me...but at the time I was also schlepping cubscouts a couple of times a month)...The SUV often got airport duty or the wife was taking her girlfriends somewhere....but during the week...it was me in one seat, driving 22 miles each way.
Also, the pollution is a massive issue in the cities, but a guy rolling coal in pudunk nebraska isn't a threat to the ecology, because there's so much ecology. I hate it, it's reprehensible, but it's leff of a factor...also, we're down in the trenches complaining about our neighbor, when the top polluters globally aren't the cars in the metroplex.
> the largest thing they carry is a 40 pound bag of dog food
No. Sorry. People do work with trucks. Tens of millions of people work in professions that it is necessary. More still do home projects or have hobbies that require high tow capacity like hauling an RV or a boat or other trailers. I drive an F350 to haul my fifth wheel. It actually gets 20 mpg when I'm not towing the RV.
You're misconstruing his comment. Not 'No one needs a Truck'. But, 'Most truck owners don't need a truck". I also will say I don't think anyone is talking about taking the option for owning a Truck away either. There will always be incredibly valid use cases for Trucks (and for a long time still; gas/dies. powered ones).
As you gave an anecdotal response, I'll respond in kind. I actually traded in a Tacoma for my EV. I miss the bed ~5x/year. I didn't need a truck; but i liked the option value. I'll likely get another Truck in the next vehicle cycle in a few years.
The vast, vast majority of truck owners use it in some way that a passenger vehicle is completely unsuited for. That there exist a handful of urbanites who drive a truck for the looks alone does not discount this fact. I see the trope a lot, however, from people who have never done blue collar labor in their lives. I had a Tacoma before the F350, I used it for camping and carried a roof top tent on a bed mounted rack. It was great, I never went camping more than when I had that truck. It was so easy and carefree to take a trip to the woods with no packing or planning required.
Those camping trips are why I <3'd my Taco and will likely get something similar in the future as the kids get older.
> The vast, vast majority of truck owners use it in some way that a passenger vehicle is completely unsuited for. That there exist a handful of urbanites who drive a truck for the looks alone does not discount this fact.
No one claimed otherwise. I feel like we've become a nation of, "This isn't right for me so it isn't right for anyone" bigotry.
None of you are bringing any stats to the table, just a bunch of personal anecdotes. And there is a lot of people in the US, no way any of you know enough people to make a reliable claim about what 'most people do' across that large land. But there must be some statistics on this, no?
5th-wheel + truck can be addressed with a giant battery on the 5th-wheel itself. RVs, camper vans, 5th-wheels, etc. are going to have a lot of cool tech and builds here soon.
> It'll cost more...
Yea, everything will. We didn't account for the negative externalities of using fossil fuels properly. Now we're starting to. You also have the rest of the world being lifted out of poverty and there's nothing we can do about it and we'll have to adjust to simply not being as wealthy.
> Sure, but you should stop selling your product like it can do all of those things and more. Its outright lying.
This is the response I hate. Detractors say that to argue against any adoption. It's not a claim any sane proponent (Musk is not sane and no one should listen to him) will make. Will it work eventually for (most) use cases? Yea! But likely not everywhere. Just like there are edge cases Gas or Diesel still don't work well. That doesn't mean to ignore potential where it makes sense.
I bought a commuter car. That's it. When I bought; was more of a novelty as I didn't know anyone else with anything similar.
I repeatedly got angrily shouted at while driving (in a relatively major city), coal-rolled; and heckled by strangers and family members around the dinner table about how poor of a decision I made. 3 years later; I have a nice/fun/convenient commuter car that hasn't needed any maintenance and the trade in is higher than I paid for it. Is it for everyone? No. But that doesn't mean there is a void in value.
I'd never heard of 'rolling coal' before. It's where you modify a diesel vehicle to dump fuel and emit a lot of smoke from the exhaust. As you might expect, people who do this to their trucks are very proud of it; it's usually a 'statement' against environmentalism.
It purposefully wastes diesel which is already much more expensive than gas. It's dangerous for a variety of reasons. It's illegal in the US and parts of Canada, though apparently not well policed. It's stupid.
Picture you're going down the highway not really paying attention to cars around you outside of general safety. Lifted dodge aggressively pulls infront of you; forcing you to spike breaks before it's engine revs and you're completely blind in a giant smog cloud as the truck spews all over you. It's nasty and some seem to hunt EVs to vomit on.
> I have a nice/fun/convenient commuter car that hasn't needed any maintenance and the trade in is higher than I paid for it. Is it for everyone? Is it for everyone? No. But that doesn't mean there is a void in value.
I'm sure you have reasons for downplaying this, but I would follow this with "and told them, in your face losers", or something to that effect.
Saying "saving money and hassle" isn't for everyone is suspicious to say the least. Why wouldn't it be for everyone?
> I'm sure you have reasons for downplaying this, but I would follow this with "and told them, in your face losers", or something to that effect.
Why would I ~ever mention it when it's somehow contentious? Family member in question has a truck that costs ~50% more. Why would I care?
> Saying "saving money and hassle" isn't for everyone is suspicious to say the least. Why wouldn't it be for everyone?
I never told anyone it saved money. I paid ~50% more for an electric Honda Civic. For my area/family group I was a new-tech adopter. I wasn't getting told, "You wasted money!" I was told, "That death trap will explode/catch on fire/not make it through the snow, battery will randomly empty, etc", harangued on the absolute basics on simple fallacies.
You are aware that manufactures face penalties for lying and deception, right? I can't recall Tesla ever being fined for misleading marketing, ever.
> Tesla semi was production ready in 2020
I guess you've never missed a deadline. That's not lying. It's miscalculation.
> and was more efficient than train
A Semi convoy is expected to be cheaper than a train and they re-iterated that in the latest event. No evidence to the contrary so far.
> And whatever other lies musk said back then.
Promised 500 miles. Delivered 500 miles. Turned the impossible (according to pretty much everyone, from Bill Gates, to CEO of truck making companies who joked that Tesla Semi will be breaking laws of physics) into late. Still not lying.
> Musk is prolific deceiver, I dont trust a single thing coming out of his mouth nor his websites.
He doesn't have websites. He has companies that have websites.
> Tesla cars are notorious for its expensive repairs. Its a huge cost and risk switching to it.
Is that why Hertz, that puts the most number of miles on a passenger vehicle has ordered 100000 Teslas, 20% of its global fleet, because it loves to waste money on cost of repair?
Simple answer: the thread has become a tribal flame war. It's not about the content of your comment, but which side you're on.
That said, negative karma on such comments is usually transient, and for that reason, HN guidelines recommended that you don't complain about downvotes. Such cases typically self-correct after a few hours.
In 2017 at the event he said they already had the technology to do truck automated follower convoys today (2017), it was only stopped by regulators. Seems like a complete lie given what we know of how their technology played out and even the single track tesla in tunnels in vegas still use drivers.
On Tesla's own website since around 2016 they said the cars could operate on their own but they only have a driver there for legal reasons (opening scrawl to the video at tesla.com/autopilot). Complete lie, the Nvidia stack and the software Tesla had for it couldn't do it, nor could several later stacks over the years. Regulators weren't what was stopping them unless they are saying they at Tesla are murderous psychopaths and would kill if it weren't illegal.
Tesla making empty claims on this is even more annoying since Toyota, which has a far more conservative approach to AV announcements, thinks this is near-term attainable for their Hino semis.
Tesla hasn't been fined by California because a.) the threat was a stop sale not a fine and b.) the process is still underway. I mean hey, Germany told Tesla to stop advertising autopilot because it was deceptive. But the only punishment that counts is monetary, right?
Some people are intimidated by success of others, especially if they don't have much going on in their own lives. And some people get excited and motivated by it and want to do more. Those would be the caliber of people who end up working at Tesla or SpaceX or Apple, etc and join the fun.
It's really weird isn't it, how at some point Musk became the new focus of Two Minutes of Hate[1]?
Sure, there are plenty of valid and harsh criticisms to make about Musk. I'm sure he'd even agree with a lot of them. But the level of obsession people have with hating him is clearly irrational. There's more anti-Musk sentiment than anti-Putin sentiment!
It's as if people were left feeling empty by Trump's disappearance and then latched onto Musk as the new target for their manic vitriol.
It may be that once these people have become accustomed to hating a public figure in this way that they have trouble letting go of the addiction.
It seems a lot like what happened in ancient Athens when one public figure after another would become the target of a citizen mob and then be banished[2] or executed[3]. It also seemed like an addiction in their case.
Usually the mob would quickly come to regret their decision, which is likely what would happen if Musk went away. Many of these same people would come to realize the value of having Musk around, despite his flaws, to advance space exploration, pro-environment technology, brain injury technology, etc.
> It's as if people were left feeling empty by Trump's disappearance and then latched onto Musk as the new target for their manic vitriol.
I've has the exact same thought. The timeline fits, and it's exactly the same mob of people. Not saying I didn't dislike Trump, but not spending all my time hating him on Twitter.
I will speak honestly and say that drawing from my own experience, it is because people feel duped.
When Musk came to public notice he was a fast-talking, confident, seemingly self-made rich tech autodidact who had personally created industries through sheer force of will and a vision.
He talked to a certain type of person who grew up with sci-fi and optimism for the future through technological advancement, only to see a disgusting anti-intellectualism and fatalism take over during the Bush Jr. years. He really spoke to me and I thought he was the real deal.
Then, slowly and over the course of years we started learning that he was a charlatan who's success was the result of luck, connections, or usurpation. He promises and promises and a lot of the big promises turn out to be laughably impractical or unrealistic to the point that no person learned in the applicable fields would take it seriously.
We learn about the subsidies that underpins the success, we learn about the terror that he puts his employees through, we learn about how he treats his family, and how he uses real people's lives and serious events as ways to increase his publicity and image with no concern for any negative effects on others.
The real 'ah-ha' moment for me was when he accused the British diver who risked his life and career to rescue trapped children in an underwater cave of being a 'pedo', because they didn't want to use his useless submarine idea.
And all the while, whenever he announces something, the fans and public rant and rave about a new revolution -- "vacuum tube transportation", "going to Mars in 5 years", "exactly like trains, but instead, cars!", etc. When we mention the problems with these ideas, and that Musk isn't really the best person to be advocating things that he knows nothing about, the fans retaliate with personal insults. "You are just jealous"... etc...
And then when he starts to lose popularity he turns 'free speech' and starts catering to a very unpleasant type of crowd (in many people's opinion). When you start appealing to the right-wing because your reputation took a nose-dive, then you are, um, "not a good person".
After a while it becomes a binary thing -- Musk == bad. I have to stop myself from thinking that way, but every time there is a raving fan talking about the new thing he is a genius at, it rears its head again.
Infrastructure takes time; and you don't have to solve every use case at once.