The perfect truck?

Um, no lol. Kinda like having maybe a tenth of a tank since you can only use it to charge going down hill. If you try to charge it on level ground you will use more energy charging than you collect!

 

Where there is a will... There is a way. and necessity is the root of all invention... right?

 

Yeah... It's called cold fusion. Battery tech is simply a bridge to when some smart fucker comes up with the future power source. It's not battery, nor oil, nor solar nor wind.

Somebody will figure it out. I spent ten minutes trying one time and i was stumped so it's not me.

 

Serious question....
Alternator for a car keeps a battery on a vehicle charged right? The only thing the car does on battery alone is start, correct?

 

wow a whole ten minutes. Hawking would be so proud

 

This thread is well timed, as I’m rewatching The Martian right now lol.

An electric truck would be very cool though, granted it has an acceptable range. Whatever the tech may be.

 

Really all we need is a small plutonium reactor and some solar panels. Curiosity has been on Mars since 2012 and no one has refueled that dude. Makes those of us dropping ~$2.50/gal at the Maverick look kinda foolish I suppose. Then again I’m not sure I want all of us rolling around with a small plutonium reactor... also, what would happen to the high mileage hot dog and late night nacho economy?

 

I'd much rather see the Toyota Murai fuel cell technology in a truck than crap limited range pure-electric.

Edit: I'm biased. I worked for an EV manufacturer. All aboard the hype train!

 

The Nissan Leaf does kinetic energy charging.

 

Curiosity has also only covered about 12miles in 5 1/2 years...

I am jealous of $2.50 gas though.

 

Yeah, driving 12 miles on a planet 140 million miles* from earth over 5.5 years isn’t really that impressive I guess.

As for the $2.50 gas, I have a Kroger rewards card and we buy lots of groceries.

*best case 33.9 million is as close as we get, but 140 million is a good average

 

@BortisYeltzen don’t get me wrong, a rover powered by the heat generated by radioactive decay on a planet that far away is super impressive, it just doesn’t have much bearing when compared to powering a truck with over twice the mass and a far higher weight on this planet.

 

I guess my point is that we have way better technology available. I get that there gaps in technology and development costs that consumers can’t absorb, but long term people will look back at internal combustion engines and scratch their heads at why they were the default technology for over a century.

 

Not at a significant enough rate to make it anything more than a gimmick.

 

Not really. It's just natural progression, like horses to steam power to coal power to gasoline power to... what's next. Every machine has it. Every living thing has it.

Evolution.

 

Interesting thread @BortisYeltzen


Biological "evolution" takes tens of thousands of years. Cultural evolution happens faster, but is a social phenomenon and our bodies don't really change.

The "Industrial Revolution" has been with us about 200 years, and has taken us from using our physical bodies and brains doing most/all the work to machines doing much of the work. Machines will eventually do most of the work, what that means for humans is debatable.

Somewhere in the discussion of electric vehicles the subject of autonomous vehicles needs to be introduced, since these technologies go hand in hand.

The perfect truck- does it have a steering wheel and brake pedal?

 

The Atlis people do list autonomous drive capable as a feature on this $45k base price wonder truck. Along with a bunch of other stuff that I can’t for the life of me figure out how they’ll pull off at that price point. Guessing the King Ranch equivalent of this truck with every feature listed will be around $150k+. Which seems crazy but I know people that drop $75k on trucks like it’s nothing.

Then there are all those people paying $15k “market adjustments” for TRD Pro’s and even more for Raptors. I’ll have to be content to let them be the early adopters.

 

It also just occurred to me that the manual transmission fans will be left out on this. Wonder if anyone is working on a manual transmission version of an electric vehicle? I mean it makes no sense from a practical perspective due to the way electric motors and gear boxes work, but the die hard MT fans don’t care and want to row gears.

 

I think 1 of the first Tesla Sports Car had a gearbox that let you shift gears

 

If you guys are still wondering if a "perfect truck" exists, you don't have to go far. just ask a Gen2 owner lurking in the Gen3 forums about his truck.