How the 2021 Ford F-150's onboard generator works

Every option is about trade offs. For my use an LMTV makes sense.

https://www.rvmobileinternet.com for cellular / internet connectivity.

Its actually very hard to travel by normal car or air now, we just like taking the RV, the space, bathroom and kitchen while driving down the road, our own bed...

You really do need to be handy to own one at this point, it's like a 70's American car. Well the engine and transmission and chassis is fine but everything around it, wow. Luckily it is easy to work on and modify.

I have thought long and hard about trying to start a "Toyota of RVs", I think if you could make a solid, simple well made RV you could dominate the market.

Class A diesel RVs are designed for retired couples to drive around the country and live quite well. They plummet in price the first few years and if you're past 10 years old (usually harder to get a loan), the price drops more, often to 25% or less of the new price.

They have pretty beefy systems, with 7kw diesel generators quite common. The engine and chassis will be designed to flat tow a car (or a huge trailer).

And some have pretty interesting features, like tile floors, two bathrooms, in-floor heating, two bathrooms and washer/dryers.

but yeah, choose a good brand.

It's debatable whether the truck+trailer is easier to manage than the RV + small car. Though since we tend to take the RV to state parks and such where we don't need to drive after we park, we rarely take the car.

Plus when the trailer falls apart, which they all do because they're built like crap, you can just replace it independent of the pickup.

But fifth wheel is an overkill for most:

For most of them you need F-250/350 instead of F-150. F-250 doesn’t drive as nice as F-150 when unloaded. Preferably you need long bed (not to hit the cab when backing up). With the crew cab this is the longest truck possible. Modern diesels are expensive to run and maintain, 7.3L Godzilla just shipped, you want to give it couple years to get proven...

Then fifth wheel is harder to hitch up and you loose huge portion of bed space. Also bed is nearly impossible to access when hitched up.

Basically, unless you really need the space, go with 25-30ft trailer and F-150 (with 6 1/2ft bed of course, not this short nonsense).

I can tell you its really nice having the RV be usable down the road for the bathroom and the space.

I tow a 4 door Jeep which is actually much better for getting around and exploring once we are at our destination than a full size truck due it its smaller size and off-road capability.

You could do hydro/aeroponics. You have plenty of fertalizer in the form of human waste, fish waste, and other things.

I'm always confused when I see cars with a bunch of expensive non-functional aftermarket accessories on their car. Like, why would you spend money on that? Then I remember that for me, my car isn't really part of my "self", but for others it is.

Well, one can dream anyway.

There's a reason renting Jeeps in Death Valley is something like $200/day--assuming you have your own insurance that will actually cover how you intend to use it.

The load of the neighborhood looks a lot like a short to your generator. The lineman should be grounding the line because the power company and other linemen kill linemen by energizing things much more often than homeowners kill linemen and he wants to avoid that. Even just momentarily grounding the line shorts your generator. Most linemen are going to assume the line is hot (it often is) and work accordingly so either your genset breaker will flip when your generator tries to power the rest of the grid or you'll break something when the grid forces your generator to instantly synchronize with it.

There was a big thread on a popular VS owned forum that shall remain nameless and they were able to find two instances in North America of linemen being killed by back feeds and one of the stories didn't conclusively say the death was caused by a generator back-feeding the grid.

Yeah you should use a proper transfer switch but it's not nearly as risky as internet commenters make it out to be. The real reason to use a transfer switch is so that the system is stupid proof enough that you can make a different member of your household go plug in the generator when the power goes out in the middle of a hurricane.

We used to pack up our 5 member family and suitcases for 3 weeks at the seaside into a 2. generation Voklswagen Golf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Golf_Mk2

Us and every other family. I suppose the average american uses a 18-wheel cargo truck to go to vacation.

Growing up my family of five were able to comfortably fit all of us plus any luggage/gear in an early 80s subcompact hatchback.

That easily fits in most cars unless we're talking about Smart's or sports cars.

Unfortunately most people can't afford the "right vehicle for right purpose" approach they they pick the compromise that will be sort of a jack of all trades and master of none but cover pretty much all the needs. This comes with some drawbacks (larger outside dimensions, larger fuel consumption, less maneuverable, etc.) and some advantages (larger inside dimensions, more likely to fare better in a crash due to the added weight and ride height).

Normally I'd say that if you have a specific driving need only 1% of the time, rent rather than try to tack the feature onto your car's requirements. There's no point in driving around with those drawbacks 99% of the time for that 1% when you drive with the advantage. But something like the safety advantage is there all the time, unless the manufacturer really screwed up someplace else.

The biggest problem and misunderstanding lies with the CUV/CSUV segment. They are somehow viewed as "SUVs" but actually have almost all the disadvantages of a SUV with almost none of the advantages. Compared to the equivalent hatchback they sport a slightly larger body that increases drag and fuel consumption, and decreases maneuverability, bigger wheels and raised axles that just eat up more interior space, and probably have little to no safety benefit because the added weight contributes almost nothing to this (a Mercedes GLA weighs ~100Kg more than a normal A-class hatchback).

In single-vehicle collisions against approximately immovable objects (trees, barriers, etc) though, that mass is no longer an advantage, and if the crumple zone doesn't function as well because of the frame design in a larger vehicle then you'll be worse off.

It's probably also worth mentioning that heavier vehicles tend to be more susceptible to rollover. More importantly, traction scales sub-linearly with vehicle weight, so stopping distance, the ability to not slide off a curve, and whatnot all have reduced performance. That increase in the chance of an accident matters.

It might be the case that most accidents are completely unavoidable multi-vehicle collisions where one would want to optimize with a heavy, sturdy vehicle. That's a bit of a different argument from just pointing out that heavier vehicles suffer lower acceleration when colliding with lighter vehicles.

Several times in my life I've had to roll-start a (manual) car with some regularity[0]. You don't have to getting it going to even a brisk walking pace if it's a small (< 2 liter) four cylinder engine. If you clutch out and back in pretty quickly, it'll start if it'll fire. If the battery is too dead to run the ECU and/or plugs, you're pretty well dicked unless you can find somebody to jump you.

Now, neither of these applies to an F-150, since you can't get one with either a manual or a four-banger, but practical experience indicates that for at least some cars, it's got to take less than 9000 joules to start the engine.

In rough numbers, if you have a 1500 kg car moving 1 m/sec, you've only got 750 joules to work with. In all cases, I wasn't trying to do this in the dead of winter.

[0] On 2 different cars:

1) I left the headlights on two days in a row and discharged the battery pretty deeply. I got it back after a couple days of driving my short commute.

2) I had an intermittently bad connection between the battery lug and the wire running to the starter motor. I finally figured it out after it did it at night and I could see the sparks with the hood open. That was after 2 or 3 months of bump-starting the car at least once a week :-)

The guy there didn't even realize they sold a correctly sized one for Subaru Outbacks, because they're typically for e.g. larger pickups or similar.

For $50 more, you're getting a much nicer battery: AGM internal structure, higher reserve capacity, higher CCA, better durability, some deep cycle properties (i.e. it can get drained down lower without damage), and so on.

I mean it is 10 lbs heavier, while fitting into the same physical space, that's the AGM structure within the battery. The new battery has been great, but the alternator is still not kicking on until freeway driving.

I think that's a little extreme of a claim. It definitely sucks, but I've been without A/C for several days after hurricanes in New Orleans and Orlando. I wouldn't care to repeat the experience, but it's not the end of the world. Humans lived in those regions for thousands of years before A/C was invented.

The hard part is that modern homes in the South aren't designed to be livable without A/C. If you've got an older home like a shotgun house, you're in a better state because it's designed for natural airflow.

Ford is advertising that you can literally do this on the 7.2kW version. It remains to be seen if the marketing folks are talking out of their ass or not.

If you have something to run that needs constant motion besides the current, a motor-generator might be useful. That can convert pretty directly. I'm thinking like the outboard drive shaft on older midsize tractors.

If you're just skipping the NEMA wall outlet and going to 40v DC that's different. You might want too go with a non-isolated switched mode there for efficiency. Still, an inverter above 20kHz and transformer at high frequency in an RCC or resonant forward configuration shouldn't have terrible losses and the transformers at high frequencies can be small and multiple for different output voltages if necessary.

I think the design goals regarding space, weight, cost, flexibility, and reliability really come into play here.

About that buck convertor... I'm just a hobbyist when it comes to power supplies but since a buck convertor tends to use semiconductors I'm thinking a 400v input might be an unusual design. The highest input voltage rating I find for a "high voltage" DC buck convertor is around 140 volts. If you tap the battery a quarter of the way through you could do that, but then you're loading that portion of the cells more than the rest. I can find 700 volt "AC bucks", but there again you're talking AC power. Everything I can find that bills itself as a 400v capable down-stepping DC to DC buck convertor has an isolated portion labelled, which means it in fact has at least a 1:1 transformer somewhere connected to the buck. If you're talking about flipping mechanical relays quickly instead of transistors and diodes, you're going to have a lot of noise, slop, and reliability issues aren't you?

The hybrid truck could run an inverter off battery (in theory), and cycle the engine on and off. A dirt cheap generator (Predator 8750 from harbor freight) runs 8–12 hours on ~5 gallons (the spec sheet doesn’t give tank capacity)

How many gallons per hour does an idle truck burn?

They fit a niche. I saw plenty of trucks and other big vehicles driving around a city of greater than 2 million people.

I have hauled multiple loads of mulch, other landscaping stuff and animal feed when helping my parents at their home/small farm in the summer.

I have moved in and out of college dorms/houses with all of my belongings (including my TV, kitchen equipment, lots of electronics lab equipment that I purchased to resell as a side-gig in college...)

All using a 2005 Buick LeSabre.

And when I'm not doing that, it's basically a spacious luxury vehicle on the inside. What's not to like?

Many have a comparable cabin to SUVs for two rows. So essentially if you buy the "Crew Cab"-style you're buying an SUV but instead of a traditional indoor trunk, you have a much more flexible outdoor one.

I'm not saying everyone needs a pickup truck, but what I am saying is that it makes just as much or as little sense as a similarly priced/sized SUV, and maybe more in certain circumstances. Even for non-pros (assuming a smaller/cheaper pickup, like the F150).

I've lived in both places, and in Europe the default assumption is that you'll have no way to transport stuff (e.g. Ikea furniture, large TVs, DIY supplies, etc) so everyone offers inexpensive delivery. In the US, a lot of places won't deliver or it will be expensive so either owning or having a family member own a pickup is very valuable.

It is one of those things you cannot know until you live in the US.

Also if you want to haul toys like jetskis, boats, quads, motorcycles, campers, you need a truck. Tons of rural americans have those.

Countries often implement backdoor protectionism through things like vehicle emissions regulations.

In America, the American auto makers weren't competing effectively for anything smaller than an SUV - and when CAFE standards were set, requirements for SUVs and trucks were made much laxer.

And the auto companies' marketing responded rationally: If you're paying for the hero in a movie to drive one of your vehicles, better make it the SUV or truck if possible.

Europe, meanwhile, had auto makers who were disproportionately successful at making diesel cars - and promptly set emissions standards that were barely possible to achieve unless you knew that everyone else was cheating and you needed to cheat too. And decided tax gas and diesel by volume, when diesel happens to have 20% more energy per unit volume and higher emissions.

What I don't care for are the SUV designs that have basically recreated the minivan with 3 seat rows and they're really not as good for hauling people as a minivan is.

The biggest reason is probably purchase price. An F150 Raptor (the only model I could find a price for) is $100k in Britain, versus $60k in the US.

You do see quite a few pickups in Europe, especially as commercial vehicles. But the Toyota Hilux, Mitsubishi L200, VW Amarok etc. outnumber the American trucks at least 10:1.

And very few trucks are owned by "regular" people. Much better to get a Land Rover Discovery or a Toyota LandCruiser, and throw the big unwieldy stuff you need to move in a trailer.

(As an aside, we used to have a Chevy Avalanche with the 8.1L Vortec. That was a fun car, I'll agree, but you had to close your eyes while filling up with petrol.)

Then you have pay the yearly $675 green tax and $1.51 per litre of diesel.

I would say that taxes are constraining how many people are buying this type of car.

Edit: more taxes.

I stand by my Mazda, though. 2014, 110k and it has only needed a replacement alternator.

There seems to be a bit of growing pushback on this since it causes a ton of deaths and injuries due to speeding, drivers not paying attention, etc.

Although a lot of the larger, more dangerous streets in cities are run by state level Dept of Transportations whose only care in the world is how quickly a car can get from point A to point B, and won't downsize streets even though their standards say it is acceptable.

There are lots of videos, etc out there on the insane size increase of driving lanes to accommodate these massive vehicles speeding through areas.

I’ve had to park the truck in downtown San Francisco a half dozen times. I’m pretty good at fitting into tiny spots, but it devolved into Austin Powers-style 100-point turns a few times. That’s with cameras, proximity sensors, power fold mirrors, sticking heads out the window, etc. I take the car instead of the truck whenever it’s possible.

As someone who’s visited Europe a few times, I can say that your big city delivery truck drivers make it look easier than it is in the US. I’ve seen more than one back down an alley at speed after folding back their mirrors to make the truck fit!

An American pickup truck is comparable in size to a European-style delivery van. (Eg: the common Mercedes ones, or the things where the driver sits over the engine.) US delivery trucks are much larger. Our streets were made after automobiles were common, so they’re wider than they should be (I prefer to walk!). That makes driving a truck easy.

Parking spots tend to be under-sized, however. Also, there aren’t consistent rules regarding “compact” or even full-sized parking spots. Some compact spots can’t fit an American sports car (it will be over the lines on both sides, but other compact spots are 2 feet wider and 4 feet longer than a full sized pickup truck.

On threads like this, that gets repeated often. There are probably dozens of nearly identical posts here already. It's just about as common as insinuating the people who drive trucks must have small genitalia. Awful lot of projection going on.

So, can you back that up with something other than your intuition? All of my neighbors have pickups. and we all use them routinely for things only pickups can do. Please don't suggest that it would be financially better for me to rent a pickup every two weeks to tow my RV. I've already done the math.

Come on, you know that's not the case.

Poking around online, it looks like the original hybrid pickup truck that I worked on was discontinued in 2007, and the second version of the hybrid pickup truck, with a somewhat different design, was discontinued in 2013. I can't find any current hybrid pickup offerings, so it looks like they dropped that capability, and with it the higher capacity 110V system.

Personal automobile ownership is more than double what it was in 1960 (410.37/1K in 1960 vs. 831.9/1K in 2018). Needless to say, our birth rates are just a tad lower today than they were at the height of the baby boom...

And that's just in the USA. Look up rates of automobile ownership throughout the world. There are massive variations between countries with similar economies and similar brithrates.

And to head off the obvious explanation for the explosion of car ownership in the US being negatively correlated with population growth, notice that other developed economies also experienced a gender revolution and that this lack of strong correlation exists even if you measure car ownership at the level of households instead of at the level of individuals.

The hypothesis that cars => population growth just doesn't bear out in the data, even after correcting for a lot of possible confounds. The two are, at best, uncorrelated.

(Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth)

> That's an insane analysis.

After looking at the data, I think you're completely wrong. But of course your hypothesis was not even close to "insane".

This is just whataboutism.

Externalities from all vehicular use should be internalized. I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise.

Yes, but we need substantially wider roads and more roads when cars are a primary commuting method. It's often the case that trucking is simultaneously the largest source of wear and not the largest contributor to road budgets.

> it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff.

How are rural areas any different?

Those peaches from the Walmart in northern WI were probably grown in the exact same Georgian fields as the peaches from the corner store in Chicago. For manufactured goods made in $asian_country, trucking stuff out to Montana from the coast is going to cause a lot more road damage than hauling it from a barge to some store in the bay area.

The amount of road wear&tear probably correlates more with your distance from the major ports than urban/rural. That can go either way.

Unless you live in Iowa and your diet consists mainly of corn and ethanol and you furnish your home with Amish furniture^1, you're benefiting from trucking routes at least as much as anyone in "the city".

There are very few "self-sufficient" communities in the USA. The closest you get .

[^1]: This is a joke :)

As opposed to all the rural subsistance farmers who build all their own stuff? I'm sure there's a handful such people out there, but everybody else has their food and stuff trucked in just as much, with a 30 minute car ride added on top to haul things back to the ranch.

No, the rate of oil being yanked out of the ground has become so abundant this year--especially when contrast with the rate of use since a staggering amount of us are staying at home--that the price went negative. (And it only went negative because futures traders did not want to actually take delivery of the physical oil they'd "purchased" with their options contracts.)

The quantity of fossil fuels available to us on this planet is decreasing while our use of them continues to wreck the atmosphere we rely upon. A large component of this is personal transportation (alongside industry).

I'm specifically talking about directing behaviours that remain legal.

I don't expect governments around the world are gonna ban the F-150.

As for things like cap and trade, you're right, that's an alternative mechanism. At bottom it's the same, though: assign an economic cost to the behaviour, and then use the market system to manage the behaviour.

Still, your point is well taken!