The thing is overpriced. It ought to be cheaper than the gasoline version, but it's not. The legacy automakers treat electric as a trim line - electric comes with every overpriced accessory they can load onto the thing. The base F-150 electric has dual motors and costs $50K. The base F-150 in gasoline costs $35K. There's still that $15K electric premium.
But, yeah, I electric cars are cool, and sometimes are people splurging for that feature, but I don’t see it for consumers traditionally buying trucks. If anything it’s an anti-feature almost for them.
Probably close to an hour saved at petrol stations over the same period.
You're talking about value to the consumer, the parent is talking about expense to manufacture.
I'm still not sure what the gp is referring to. They could be making a moral argument as far as I can work out.
Sure, if Ford still wanted to sell them they could find a way to make cheaper batteries or sell at a loss for a while.
You've already accepted that ford doesn't have a monopoly, so assuming we're agreed on the same basic tenets of free market capitalism they do want to sell them, and are already trying to find ways to make batteries cheaper.
You can't just hand wave away all that complexity.
Just because EVs aren't as cheap as you personally think they should be, doesn't mean ford isn't trying.
People are used to paying some 10-20% for "extras" but 35k + 15k?! that's a big leap.
The F-150 Lightning is pretty useless as a truck, with the largest battery storing as much energy as 4 gallons of gas[1]. If you want a truck get a gas or diesel truck, if you want fast and electric you have better options that don't waste electricity hauling around a heavier vehicle and unused truck bed.
[1] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-elect...
And yet… gestures towards US car sales figures
And? You're comparing apples and oranges. I don't care how much energy my vehicle can hold, I care about how far I can go with that energy.
You're making a 'feature' out of an ICEs inherent inefficiency.
All new supply chain
All new tooling
All new mfring procedures
All new distribution and sales channel
More than your usual front end costs. It kinda adds up
It's essentially very difficult to make a cheaper electric pickup truck because batteries are expensive and you need to have a lot of battery capacity to move a big, boxy pickup truck ~300 miles on a single charge. If you trade off range, people won't buy it (it's already hard enough to persuade pickup truck owners to buy something that has very little towing range and for which there aren't good charging options for a truck with a trailer in tow) and there isn't a lot you can do to make up the range by lightening or streamlining the vehicle without increasing costs. Maybe economies of scale could help, but it's hard to imagine economies of scale without increased demand, which is hard to imagine without lower costs, etc.
The gist of the problems EVs face right now is that the energy density of batteries do not compete with fossil fuels.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
[2]: "In what has been called 'the tyranny of the rocket equation', there is a limit to the amount of payload that the rocket can carry, as higher amounts of propellant increment the overall weight, and thus also increase the fuel consumption."
The rocket equation's only metaphorical here because the rocket equation's tyranny is really about how much reaction mass you have to carry, not so much the energy store. Chemical rockets kill two birds with one stone by extracting energy from fuel+oxidizer then using the waste products as reaction mass. But you can go with a nuclear powered rocket that gets all its energy from uranium and just uses plain water or something as reaction mass. The rocket equation's 'tyranny' is that your rocket constantly has to accelerate the reaction mass it plans to use later.
Cars - electric or gasoline - do not require any reaction mass, though.
Rockets need to produce >1g of acceleration or they don't get to leave earth.
Thus, you need to install more batteries to compensate for the increased workloads that a truck would forseeably experience, but you need more batteries to convey those batteries which requires bigger motors which requires more batteries and herein lies the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.
At some point you need a breakthrough in energy efficiency or energy storage density because you hit an upper practical limit on how much energy storage you can haul around.
ICE cars and trucks must also technically contend with this, but in practice they do not because fossil fuels are so energy dense that we almost never meet that upper practical limit.
Rockets it’s exponentially worse. Which is why the saying.
Economy of cars is weird. As a manufacturer You sell today for a single price. But you have to account for free, expensive warranty work for many years. And recalls. And you have to manufacture, stock, and make available random parts in somewhat predictable but somewhat not quantities for decades.
So a gadget that may have cost 50c to produce technically, will be priced at 8.99,for any of the above reasons - subsidize warranty costs, storage costs, etc.
Basically, I wish most car parts had only 250% markup!
All those cars do 0-60s in 5s, differentiation is in range and newer brands always mysteriously do better in that column. Can't be just lower Cd or magic especially when Toyota has been shipping Prius since 1997.
That explains why they seem on overcharging for an electric car. Because right now, demand is above supply.