The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

> coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck

> It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.

I understand hating on pickup trucks is an easy way to farm upvotes on HN, but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg. The closest that comes to that is the F-150 Raptor with turbocharged V8 which is a preposterous performance vehicle with a racing engine. It is a luxury item. Yet for some reason we don't criticize people with the same disdain who buy and drive sports cars which get as bad or even worse mpg. I guess the Lambo drivers never need to haul lumber.

The F-150 is also offered in hybrid (which gets > double that mpg) and all electric drivetrains.

I will make the equally presumptuous assumption that since you've narrowed your choices to "Prius or Prius" you harbor some grudges against pickup owners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecnS1Ygf0o0 I've been waiting for the chance to use this

The grudges are valid.

The default in America is to make everything out to be individualistic, but the rest of us have to bear the very real costs of the externality of pickups, not just limited to pollution but also safety, land use, etc.

Lamborghini drivers obeying the traffic rules aren't creating a hazard.

Aftermarket headlights blazing directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers are creating a hazard. As is the fact that it takes up a lot of road space and has poor visibility for small objects in front of the hood.

The external effects of large pickup trucks are drastically more than that of a small sports car, in ways that are more immediate than climate change.

Large pickup trucks take up a lot more space on the road and parking lots, are harder to see around, and when they get into accidents they cause a lot more damage and injuries to people both in and out of cars. There is a very different visceral response to a large pickup truck tailgating you with its driver perched above you, than a Lambo or 911 doing the same.

Agreed. It's really amazing what they've done in recent years.

I ended up in a fullsize primarily because I got it cheaper than the midsizes I was looking at. The midsize market is priced really oddly.

Anywho, I was blown away that it's getting me 23MPG. That's what my previous midsize was giving me. That's nearly double what fullsizes got in the 90s.

> there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence that gets 11 mpg

Point but e.g. the 2024 Silverado gets 12mpg in city driving. Go to any office parking lot here and you’ll see a lot of that size truck which have clearly never been used harder than going to Costco - and even the better ones are barely approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.

I do agree that from a pollution standpoint we should treat all inefficient vehicles as the problem but large trucks and SUVs have significant immediate downsides for everyone around them. They’re far more lethal when they hit pedestrians or smaller vehicles, they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues, they take more space to park, and at least where I live there are streets which could previously handle bidirectional traffic but now require someone to pull over to let oncoming traffic pass because there isn’t enough room for two large vehicles. In contrast, sports car drivers pose less risk because they’re low to the ground and the drivers are far more likely to see you and avoid an accident.

> they produce higher tire and brake particulates which are known to cause health issues

Interesting you mention tire particulates, because there is nothing worse for this than - brace yourself - electric vehicles.

https://grist.org/transportation/electric-vehicles-are-a-cli...

I think it's a strange argument: that buying a truck is "worse" than buying a sports car. I think the term "apples and oranges" is applicable here. The former are both vehicles and the latter are both fruit, but otherwise have fairly different cost/benefit.

We're getting the worst of both worlds with these atrocious EV trucks - Big, heavy, and relying on electric torque to be bigger and heavier.

It is also the smugness that gets me. Huge trucks are a signal saying "Fuck you, got mine". Their first strike, I'm merely retaliating

I’m aware but that article is overstating the problem: the issue is weight so the problem comes back to the form factor. Every office worker LARPing as a rancher is making the world worse buying an unnecessary truck regardless of the power train. EV trucks and SUVs are bad, but so are the ICE versions.

> but there is no 'regular pickup truck' in existence

I grew up in deep country. I've owned my share of pickups. When you need them, they're invaluable. When you don't, they're basically the most inconvenient daily drivers you can have short of a box truck, an RV, or a main battle tank. Outside of a fairly narrow range of medium-sized hauling activities, they aren't really even terribly good at carrying things.

I hate talking about things as "it's more than anybody could need" because you end up with needs-based conceptualization of lifestyles with people eating diets of only sweet potatoes, commuting on onewheels, and living in Hong-Kong style coffin apartments. But these things are not only obnoxious main character syndrome demonstrators, they're actively dangerous to everybody in and around them even when they're following the rules of the road.

If I was king for a day, I'd make driving one require a special class of license and tax them extra if they aren't being used for active work purposes like they're intended. They should be in the same class of vehicle as commercial box trucks, because that's what they're supposed to be for.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some type of vehicle fad takes over the U.S. at some point where people just start driving converted box trucks or RVs around as daily drivers, then complain that all the parking garages and train overpasses are too low for their 13 and a half foot tall lifestyle decisions.

I think you just made the case for some flavor or another of socialism.

I'd bet the Tundras get similar in practice. They're rated higher but the turbo is practically always-on in stop and go traffic.

My guess would be the difference in perception comes from the fact sport cars tend to be smaller and sit lower, which makes pedestrians and motorist feel safer and less intimidated around them. In addition their general rarity means most people still view them as novelties rather than something to actually take a side on. That being said though it is 100% true performance engines are the absolute worst in terms of economy/emissions/noise; most truck engines are really just oversized economy engines and have the efficiency to match.

Socialism is good, actually.

It isn't just aftermarket headlights anymore, some are blinding from the factory.

Or maybe we could just not make literally everything a tragedy of the commons or a race to the bottom?

Also I tend to think that they are often rather expensive and not as robust. So people who drive them do not want to damage. As repairs tend to be expensive too. So in general they avoid accidents, unless they are going to speed off the road...

You mean like the police in America? Or elementary and high school? Or fire brigades, interstate highways, border security or the thousands of other things you rely on every single day that are 100% socialism.

>approaching ⅔ of the mpg of the pickup my grandparents bought in the 1980s.

It's for your own good, peasant. That 1989 S10 (or whatever else got mid 20s around that time) had basically no crash protection let alone ABS and ESC and.... and... and.......

I didn't realize ICE vehicles don't have tires. News to me.

There is a slight increase in tire particulates, sure. A small increase. There's also a lot less brake particulates. And get this: there's no tailpipe emissions either.

That’s comparing cars to cars. Trucks are worse.

Yes but some people need regularly-scheduled reminding.

A slight increase? Particulates increase with the 4th power of weight, and EVs way a significant amount more.

That's been debunked. Tire particulates are mainly linked to weight, and electric cars tend to be heavier than comparable capacity gas cars. But:

- gas cars emit more brake pad particulates - EV have lower rolling resistance tires so at equal weight, they emit less tire particulates

So if comparing a pickup vs an EV, the pickup is heavier and will pollute more in terms of both tailpipe and tire particulates.

Go digging into the details of the comparison in the article above. They're comparing a Model Y to a Kia Niro FHEV.

https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/do-no-harm

The Model Y has +89% more volume. Its considerably bigger car with more torque. It's not a good comparison. And even though its 32% heavier and has a ton more torque, its tire wear was 26% greater. You're arguing it goes up by the fourth power, but it wasn't even a 1 for 1 increase on a car with considerably more torque. And besides, their testing shows the tire wear particulates for their comparison gas car as even higher than the Y.

I don't think it's malicious in most cases. As a counterpoint, most family members I know with absurdly large cars, either dimensionally or in terms of seat height aren't very confident drivers and the large vehicle makes them feel "safer" especially if they have kids in the car. I recognize it's not always the case but they didn't buy a large car to lord over other people on the road they did it for emotional piece of mind. I'm willing to bet a lot of people however wouldn't be willing to admit that that's why they prefer a large car out of some perceived weakness or the like.

Now I think I know where you're pulling that fourth power from. You're probably thinking of road wear which does scale like that. But that's road wear, not tire wear, and doesn't result in the same airborne particulate issue here.

And even then, it's small potatoes compared to actual big trucks and busses rolling on the roads.

I was thinking about road wear. I had thought the same equation applied to both tires and the road. Why wouldn't the increases in wear on both increase in the same way? (You seem to know why, so honest question, not snark)

It says the Kia has 50% as many emissions even once you add the tailpipe emissions. Because the larger Model Y tires offgas more.

Let me reiterate it again. The Kia is a much smaller car with way less torque. It is a poor comparison from the get-go. Go find a similar sized vehicle with a similar amount of torque. But this study is pretty heavily biased, so they chose their cars accordingly.

But let's continue on and see what it is you're trying to point out.

> Kia has 50% as many emissions

You're now talking about the VOCs table at the bottom. This is a pretty bullshit test overall.

> Large samples from one tyre on each vehicle were also taken and placed in a ‘microchamber’ heated to 20 degrees Celsius, around the temperature of a vehicle certification test, and held at that level for the same duration of the on-road EQUA test – around three-and-a-half hours. The off-gassed VOCs were analysed and quantified, and then scaled up by the relative surface area of the sample to that of all four tyres on the vehicle. The results are shown in the table below.

So, this isn't actually testing the tires under load on the car at all, they're just baking a small piece in the oven and scaling the resulting VOCs to the size of the tires. This test isn't testing the car, its testing the tire. There are no controls over this test. It's just a tire of an unknown age from one car with a part cut out and a tire of an unknown age from another car with a part cut out. The brands and models are pretty different, which could lead to pretty radical results.

If I put brand new tires on that Kia and used some pretty old ones on the Tesla those numbers would look radically different. Even two different models of tires from the same manufacturer could yield vastly different numbers. If you used the exact same model from the exact same manufacturer made at the same time the car with bigger tires would have the worst emissions, which says absolutely nothing about whether that's a tire going on an EV or a sedan with a hybrid engine or a truck with a DEF delete getting 6 MPG. See how that's then a pretty poor test?

Seriously friendo, read the studies you're wanting to use to talk about these things. There's so many absolutely bullshit studies trying to get you to think one way or another. Don't just go "table says 57%, ev bad!"

I don't fully know but it is probably something to do with the fact tires are designed to be more malleable and flexible than roads. The tire is also flexing and pushing on an air cushion while the road itself is being pressed against and having to flex with the ground.

Also, almost all the particulate emissions are due to the abrasive nature of the road-tire interface tearing apart the tire. Tires are a cheaper and simpler wear items than roads, something is going to give, so we've decided we'll replace our tires more often than tearing up our roads. Just like if you ever got road rash, the road is going to tear you up far more than you're going to tear the road up. So, while the road forms cracks and what not from its repeated stresses it's not coming apart like dust nearly as much. Don't get me wrong, some small, tiny amount of it does but not nearly as much as the tire.