For the record, I think within the next 10 years that will change but I don’t think 5 ton EV trucks are the answer.
The whole story has salient parallels — parts suppliers were either reticent or inexperienced, fuel was cheap but not widely available, motors were slow, investors put money in before the market was there, founders lamenting the state of the modern laborer, early adopters stuck needing parts for vehicles orphaned by suddenly defunct manufacturers, and the guy getting all the money and attention is a wealthy idiot making self-crashing death traps who relies on free advice from his witless fans to avoid failure and profit. There's even a cameo from early EV manufacturer Electric Vehicle Company in 1899.
Tangentially, this is evocative:
> In the uncertainty of what the public would want, a great many strange contraptions were put together. Joseph Barsaleaux, a blacksmith of Sandy Hill, New York, built a motor horse. In his device, the horse moved on a single wheel about two feet in diameter, with the wheel attached to the shafts just as was a live horse. Reins attached to the mouth of the horse served as a steering gear, because the machinery was inside the horse and had to be regulated some way. The contraption weighed about 550 pounds, had a cruising speed of six miles an hour, and attracted some serious attention.
EV makers should probably stop trying to make mechanical horses — EV motors and cars that aren't competitive with ICE equivalents — and find a form factor that better suits both the market and the current state of the technology. Class 2 ebikes and small carts feel closer to that answer on short runs, but the long-haul equivalents are still missing.
Hell, Winton in this story is a bicycle manufacturer who makes his first horseless carriage from bicycles.
I think it's substantially less likely that there will be any vehicles from the first couple decades of this century running 100 years from now. And it's an important part of sustainability, cost of ownership, etc.
It's hard to see the point in owning a vehicle from this century unless manufacturers start building them to be good transportation tools instead of what they appear to have become--a means to sell a financial instrument (a car loan), an ads serving platform, and a data collection mechanism. For me personally that is really the biggest barrier to owning an EV.
She plugged it into my house the first night. We realized the next morning it wouldn't hit 100% until after she was due to return the vehicle. She picked up the car at the next airport over and drove the scenic route to our house. All of the chargers on that route were adding miles slower than 1 per minute, which means one hour of charging per hour of driving. She barely got here before sunset.
I can understand how that could ruin someone's trip.
... except the EV is objectively better, not worse.
Literally the only thing an ICEV can claim superiority on is refueling time. And even that comes with big caveats: it only applies to road trips, and even then it's unrealistic. Around town, refueling an EV takes essentially zero time, far less than an ICEV. On a road trip, the ICEV does refuel faster, but in real life road trip stops are typically 15-20 minutes anyway, and that's enough to refuel a modern EV.
What's exciting is that while EVs are already objectively better, the underlying technology is still evolving quickly and the future is very bright. We're already able to do things with EVs that aren't even possible with an ICEV, and this is just the beginning.
There’s no single dimension of experience to rate these things on. I know several people who want an EV, but have been, fairly, dissuaded by their EV owning neighbors, especially when “per dollar” comes into play.