Gasoline cars are the wrong tools for city driving. I live in a big city, and when I step out of my BMW i3 and into my girlfriend’s Lexus RX350,I always think:”This is a good car, but it’s clearly the worse for this task.” Traffic hits me with the double-whammy of both wasting my time and wasting my fuel, whereas when the 405 turns into a total parking lot with me behind the wheel of my i3, I can at least take solace in the fact that my vehicle is in one of its most efficient driving conditions. The RX350 needs regular brake jobs because it doesn’t turn slowing-down into reusable energy. Not to mention, I have to fill up the Lexus at gas stations instead of just plugging in in my garage. But just as EVs are well suited to certain tasks like city driving, internal combustion engine-powered cars are also well suited for certain tasks, towing being chief among them. In 2024, EVs are just not the right tool for long-range towing, and this recent TFL Truck YouTube video makes that very clear.
It’s a tricky thing talking about EVs in 2024. Few topics are more polarizing; you’ve got EV skeptics on one side saying the government is shoving electric cars down our throats despite EVs being worse for the environment than gas cars (an erroneous claim), and you’ve got Elon Musk worshippers on the other saying EVs are a panacea for all human suffering. I was recently on Fox News talking about how hybrids are the most palatable vehicles for the most people in the U.S. today, and that they thus represent a great way to reduce carbon emissions, and of course I got flak from both sides. One side called me a weenie for liking hybrids, the other side said idiotic things like “hybrids are the worst of both worlds.” But being a car journalist means keeping it real, and all these years in the Lion’s den at Jalopnik mean my skin is thicker than a Cybertruck body panel. So I’ll keep it real when it comes to long-range towing: This just isn’t the right job for an EV.
This might seem like a painfully obvious “take” to many, but to plenty of folks, the idea of an EV not being the very best at all tasks is a hard pill to swallow. But this is just how it is in 2024, and the TFL Truck video above — which shows both a Tesla Cybertruck and a Ram 2500 Cummins Diesel towing ATC 28-foot toy haulers weighing roughly 8,000 pounds each — makes that painfully obvious.
It’s not really about the driving dynamics. In theory, an EV makes for a great tow vehicle; they’re well-ballasted and planted (i.e. they’re heavy as hell), they offer prodigious torque, their regen tech offers relief for their friction braking system, there’s no transmission to overheat, and on and on. No, the problem really just comes down to energy density.
I’ve talked about the concept of “Vehicle Demand Energy” before, but I feel like now that EVs are really making inroads into the mainstream, the concept becomes more important than ever. VDE represents the amount of energy needed to propel a vehicle down a road in a given driving condition/drive cycle.
The reason why daily-driving EV pickup trucks works is that around-town/highway driving doesn’t require a ton of energy, relatively speaking. If you want to daily-drive your Tesla Cybertruck or Ford F-150 Lightning or Rivian R1T, you’ll probably get close to your EPA-rated range (over 200 miles), and that’s probably enough. You’re propelling the vehicle plus maybe a passenger or two down the street, going up against bearing friction, gravity, rolling resistance, and — the biggest factor on the freeway — drag. 122kWh of battery capacity is totally enough when VDE is low.
But when you’re towing, especially up a grade, VDE jumps up massively; this is why Davis Dam is typically the “sizing” condition for vehicle cooling systems. You need a lot of power to pull thousands of pounds up a 5.7-percent grade. This is irrespective of whether your vehicle is an EV or if it’s gas-powered (OK, an EV require less cooling drag, reducing VDE, but that’s not a dominant factor that sets VDE).
If you need a ton of power to get up a long grade, you need a ton of energy onboard, and sadly, EVs just don’t have that. A diesel truck like the Ram 2500 in the video above can handle long-duration, high VDE demands by carrying 30-ish gallons of diesel onboard. A single gallon of diesel is equivalent to 37.1 kW-hrs of energy, so the Ram has over 1,100 kWh of energy to pull from. Meanwhile, a Tesla Cybertruck has just 122.4 kWh onboard — that’s equivalent to just 3.3 gallons of diesel. Granted, the Cybertruck is much more efficient than the diesel Ram, but it’s not 10 times more efficient. Which is why its range is so terrible when towing a heavy load.
Then there’s the issue of charging, which — as I mentioned before — you’ll be doing 11 times trying to drive 1,000 miles. “You could take up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Supercharger stalls,” Roman says in the video above. Why? Because many Supercharger locations don’t have pull-through chargers, meaning you have to back the truck up close to the Charger, which you cannot do with a trailer hooked on. TFL, as shown above, had to unhook the trailer just to charge the truck.
“I wouldn’t recommend towing something this large a long distance,” says Andre in the clip. “It’s all about the right tool for the right job; this is just not the right tool,” chimes in Roman. “I had another 250 miles range according to the [Ram]…right tool for the right job,” continues Roman.
The two did mention a similar test they did in an F-150 Lightning; Tommy from TFL managed a range of just 86 miles, with 9% battery remaining. Tommy estimates the truck would have done 95 miles before the battery was completed depleted:
Roman and Andrew also mention a Silverado EV test they did. They managed to tow a smaller trailer over 230 miles on a single charge:
How did the Silverado EV pull this off? By just having more energy onboard. Over 205 kWh. Unfortunately, with an EV, if you want more energy onboard, it’s a lot more complicated than slapping in a larger blow-molded fuel tank and filling it with more fuel — you have to install more heavy, expensive, dirty-to-mine batteries.
As batteries become cheaper and more energy dense, EVs will begin to make more sense as serious tow rigs, especially as charging infrastructure improves to include more pull-through chargers that don’t require disconnecting the trailer. Whether they’ll be cheaper is not yet clear; the Silverado not only has a big, expensive battery onboard, but filling up that battery would have cost $98 to fill (about the same as a gas truck towing the same distance) if TFL had used the 48 cents-per-kWh Electrify America charging station, per the video above. Yikes.
Still, it’s worth noting that EVs are cheaper to maintain that ICE-powered trucks, and what’s more, even the giant battery-having trucks (which require more resources to be built) will be better for the environment in the long run from an overall emissions standpoint.
For now, though, EVs trucks are 1. too expensive. 2. require far-too-frequent charging. 3. cost too much to recharge 4. require unhooking the trailer. And I could go on and on with drawbacks; I do think that EVs as serious tow-rigs (and not just casual around-town tow trucks — a role that they’re proficient at, as mentioned in the clip above) will eventually make sense. But that time is not now.
For short-range towing or daily-driving though, where VDE is low, an EV pickup would be great. I drive my low-range BMW i3 on electric-mode everyday, and for commuting duties, I’ll never go back to ICE.
Does This Even Matter? Yes It Does. Because Car Buying Isn’t Logical
You might think that none of this matters. People rarely tow anyway, so we should all still love EV pickups. But that’s not how the human mind works.
The argument “Most people don’t need to tow 8,000 pounds 1,000 miles at a time, so EV trucks are totally better than gas trucks” is about the same as saying “Most Porsche owners don’t drive fast around a track, so a twist-beam rear axle is fine” or “Most people don’t need hundreds of miles of range, so a used Nissan Leaf is fine instead of a Tesla Model S” or “Most Jeep Wrangler owners don’t go offroad, so let’s just make them two-wheel drive.”
People buy vehicles because of their potential. It’s been this way since the beginning of time. People aren’t buying a machine, they’re buying an image, and the image is based on what the truck is capable of, not what most folks will actually use the truck for. So if someone sees that a Cybertruck or an F-150 Lightning can only tow 100 miles at a time before needing to sit on a charger for 40 minutes, they might lose all interest in that truck even if they will only ever use the truck to take their kids to school and soccer practice. It’s just reality.
Images: TFL Truck
When you base your personality/identity on the type of vehicle you drive, it becomes a personal attack if they’re forced to admit some sort of deficiency in themselv… I mean their cars.
Traffic is one of the i3s least efficient situations. It’s just relatively much more efficient in the i3 than in an ICE vehicle.
Start/stop is inherently inefficient in a BEV. It’s just more efficient than in ICE.
Efficient scenario is 35mph cruise with no stopping or accelerating
Highway driving is way worse. The i3 is light, but not that aerodynamic. Does well in LA traffic, which usually involves a steady 15-20 mph crawl.
Both true statements that don’t address what I wrote.
You described traffic as a parking lot. Most would interpret that as stop and go, not a steady 15-20mph crawl. A steady 15-30mph is efficient for BEV/ICE the same.
Pointing out that it’s the efficiency relative to ICE that you’re describing and not absolute efficiency, that’s all.
I agree with the piece by the way. PHEV driver here
“Efficient scenario is 35mph cruise with no stopping or accelerating”
You could say the same thing about an ICE.
Yet that’s not reality.
A BEV is far more efficient in start/stop scenarios because of regenerative braking and minimal power use while stopped. Unlike an ICE – even with start-stop tech. Because in an ICE – every engine restart, braking, and idling scenario costs lost power.
Missing the point completely. Start stop is not efficient, only relatively so. Simple idea, stated simply
You can’t efficiency your way to a good towing range. Since you can’t control what the aero and road load of a trailer is when designing a truck, all the gains in those areas of the truck itself are quickly erased by hooking up a trailer which isn’t optimized for that. This is why low drag highly efficient EV trucks will take the worst hit to range while towing. The only way the problem gets solved (besides just accepting that ice vehicles are the answer for towing long distances) is to just use a massive battery. The Silverado EV and even the Hummer EV seem to do the best in towing tests despite not being very efficient as far as electric trucks are concerned and it’s because their packs are massive. They don’t just get more range because of the size, I’m willing to bet they take less of a percentage hit in range while towing vs not towing compared to other electric trucks as well.
Yup, they are basically functioning like the big block 3/4 ton truck that gets 8mpg regardless of the conditions.
It seems to me that trucks could see a HUGE benefit from going to a PHEV hybrid setup with aggressive regen capability (rare props to Stellantis on the RamCharger, it looks intriguing). You’d be able to run a much smaller, more efficient ICE engine most of the time with massive EV torque when it is needed (or EV with range extender function, when unladen; remember, think of the job you need the tool for) with the capability to recover energy otherwise wasted through engine braking and standard braking. Add in charging capability from EV trailers in development, and you could see real improvements in performance.
This brings up for me the difference in frequency. I only need a truck bed a few times a year so I do not have a pickup truck, I have a cheap utility trailer.
If I would need to tow a camper or boat a few days a year it would make more sense to me to have an old cheap truck for towing and an EV or small efficient car for daily driving than a new 90K 3/4 ton luxo-truck that gets daily driven.
People on these car websites are all about saving money and resale value Über Alles. It is way cheaper to have a small car and an old truck than the depreciation of a new fancy truck that gets daily driver milage.
I don’t think anyone who buys a $90,000 truck is doing it because they think it will save them money.
They’re doing it because those trucks are awesome to drive, capable, and have better resale than most $90,000 vehicles.
Why does the title use the phrase “serious towing” when the article is about long-distance towing? “Serious” is not an accurate word to describe the shortcomings, especially since an EV can do “serious capacity”.
Towing range of 90 miles is not “serious” by any real definition of the word.
Why are EV fans so sensitive? They have plenty of fine use cases, it’s OK to honestly say that they aren’t good at everything.
^
Yep, 90 miles won’t even get you out of your own county in a lot of places.
What is the weight qualifications for serious towing or can a ford lightning not two a small aluminum trailer with say two 4 wheelers more than 90 miles. Here in MN a lot of towing is bringing toys to the cabin. Could it bring a side by side, how about a 19 ft fishing boat.
I don’t think anyone is expecting it to bring a camper or tow a bobcat are they?
My definition is can it tow my 7,000 lb boat 2.5-3 hours to the lake, without a stop.
That’s an absolute unit and definitely “serious towing” I think our 20 ft glastron is about a ton.
It’s a 24′ wakeboard boat. Which is sadly small for our lake. I think it’s right around 6-7k lbs on the trailer.
Coming from Minnesota – with so many lakes its such a foreign concept to me to have a boat like yours and not have it on the water on a lift all summer long.
It spends 90% of it’s time on a lift now these days. We used to use it on smaller nearby lakes fairly often so we kept it in storage close by, but now it stays at our place at the lake of the ozarks unless we need to pull it out for maintenance or a random trip to a different lake.
I have no idea how far it can tow a trailer like that, but a lot more of the range loss is due to aero rather than weight.
Our family cabin is 220 miles from the cities….I would not attempt to tow anything that far with a Lightning. Maybe if you’re only going to Mille Lacs?
Thats the market I imagine these are targeting – folks with cabins in brainerd/alex etc with a fancy cabin, a lund pro v and a side by side. Even those folks most of those toys maybe make a pilgrimage once a year, lots of that stuff lives at the lake once it get’s up there so it’s really just pulling it too and from the launch again.
I bought a Lightning and 100% agree with this.
I’m not saying EVs are good for long distance, I just want precise words. Current title is confusing. I live 8 miles from the coast and 15 miles to the national park. People do serious towing here but they have little reason to go more than 100 miles or drive more than 50mph.
Is this still worthy of a story in 2024? This might have been news when the Lightning came out 2 years ago, but we still need to talk about it?
Uh, yeah. People still argue about it, so it’s worthy of an article that talks objectively about what tool is right for what job.
Those numbers on the Silvarado are not that bad. What would be useful information would be how far you could tow a trailer to the campground with only one normal fast food stop of something like 20-30 minutes. Once at the campground there are RV plugs to use.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Campground electrical systems are notoriously bad. On hot days where everyone is running AC they often undervolt and will trip electrical protection systems. Throw in some full-blast electric truck charging and the whole thing may fall over.
Also, IIRC even a 50 amp RV outlet is much slower than your average car charging station. Not a problem for multi-night stays, but if you’re just overnighting it’s possible your 200 kWh battery may not be able to pull enough juice from a 50 amp outlet to fill up completely. Never mind the many sites out there with only 20/30 amp service.
Who is getting to the campground 200 miles away at night and leaving first thing in the morning? Even this hypothetical masochist could fill 40% of the battery in 12 hours with 30 amps or 18 hours with 20 amps. As long as the campground was less than 150 miles away from the house this would still work as an overnight trip with no stops.
I would expect some campgrounds are going to need upgrades they will use to justify higher fees.
I have, multiple times. Some of the places I visit are more than a day’s drive (especially with a trailer, which tends to make for more tiring driving) so I stop somewhere overnight and then resume the trip in the morning.
If you need to tow that much that far, why not just get a Tesla semi-tractor? It’s supposed to tow 80,000 lbs for 200 miles, so just imagine how far it can go when only towing 10,000 lbs!
Are those actually in regular production? I know they have a few out in the wild, but I think the numbers are still crazy small. Plus they are far more expensive than an ICE truck, and I shudder to think how long it would take and how expensive it would be to charge that Tesla semi using something like electrify America or similar charging station.
They use a different charger than NACS or CCS1. They use a megawatt charger and charge their massive batteries in around a half an hour. Tesla had them with Pepsi and Frito Lay in my area and now Walmart is getting deliveries. They had been working with Pepsi for feedback on the trucks. There are only a couple of megawatt chargers outside of the truck yards they operate out of currently.
Oh ok. That makes sense. Yeah I have never seen one, and honestly forgot they even exist.
Yeah, when it comes to buying for potential, that thing’s got it in spades!
100% on all of this. Seriously considering a PHEV for my next commuter, even though I love stick shifts. But also, I tow a travel trailer ~5000 miles a year, so an electric would be a poor substitute for that vehicle. As for the person who suggested hotels, that is no substitute for boondocking in the mountains, desert, or forest. A tent is miserable in the rain or snow, although I have done that too. The future may be different – who would have expected viable electric commuter cars back in 1980? – but right now, towing needs an ICE.
There is another way to approach the problem… ask yourself about the alternatives to having to tow.
For example… Instead of towing a camping trailer, why not consider just using a big tent or staying in a cabin, motel or hotel?
Or if you have a horse trailer to tow horses to do horsey things with, consider the alternative of slaughtering them for their meat!
Then after you do that, you can sell the horse trailer and the truck used to pull it and use that money to take a nice vacation.
yeah, but many want to do what they want, so no
.
..
I actually got the joke, tried to have fun the joke, and got kinja’ed. So, …
You’re joking right? This has to be a joke.
Yes… I’m joking about the ‘using horses for meat’ thing…
I mean comparing a tent to a trailer is equally crazy though, I am a tent camper, because I don’t have a tow vehicle, hate towing things anyway, and mostly am just a cheap bastard, but anyone who wants to use a trailer hates tent camping. And hotels are fine in certain instances, but many places I go are at least an hour or more from a town/hotel, and that adds 2 hours to my day that I could spend hiking or sitting around the campfire just driving, and that will never be an acceptable trade off to me. I also am very limited in the times of year I can go out, when it’s 90 all night long, a tent is miserable where a trailer can be nice. When the lows dip into the 30s overnight it’s the same. Not to mention the fact that I can’t shower and really shouldn’t shit in a tent, I think my wife would be a bit upset if I were to try that… People definitely overbuy on these trailers much of the time, but tents and hotels are not valid replacements.
Years ago when my kids were young, I was thinking about having a camper like what my family had when I was young.
So I priced everything out… the cost of the camper, maintenance, getting a larger vehicle that could tow it, the higher costs of owning that larger vehicle… and when I tallied it all up, I decided it made way more sense to do a combo of using a big assed tent and using hotels/motels.
And in a lot of parks I’ve gone to, you have the option of staying in a cabin for a bit more money. Plus those same parks have ‘comfort stations’ where you can shit/shower/shave.
And I agree… don’t shit in the tent.. unless you have a separate tent set up for that purpose.
So I don’t think my tent/motel/hotel-instead-of-camper idea is as crazy as the slaughter-horse-for-meat idea.
After all… there is a lot of meat on a horse… where are you gonna store it all???
And even if you have a place to store it, there will be so much you’ll be eating it every day for 1-2 years!!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/8jeqsl/request_how_long_would_it_take_to_eat_a_horse/
There is a need to match a vehicle with a task, that’s logical enough.
What I found disturbing was Bruce Meyers’ other buggy in the title and no further mention of towing one. )-;
If only EV trucks had some sort of range extender in the bed or on the trailer. Then they could have the best of both worlds.
But then you’re giving up valuable space in the bed and or trailer. That doesn’t seem ideal.
It could take the place of the generator in a camper. You are correct about the in bed option but it sure sounds better than waiting around for 7 hours charging.
You’ve hit the nail on the head David. It’s all about the right tool for the right job.
I make the point to everyone that tells me “EVs are useless because they can’t tow a 3 tonne caravan 1000km through the Simpson Desert” that firstly, neither can your Land Cruiser, unless it has a huge auxiliary fuel tank. And secondly, that’s a non issue.
For your American or Australian household that typically has more than one car, the solution is easy – keep your massive pickup or SUV for leisure and get an EV for commuting. That’s how I intend to approach it soon.
I think though, and I say this as someone who loves my camper trailer – I think perhaps we need to adjust our expectations of what we do with our leisure time. No matter which vehicle you choose, towing a 2.5 tonne transportable house behind you every time you go “camping” is never going to be sustainable. Maybe if camping in tents is too basic, it’s time to explore that amazing invention, the “hotel”.
I love my tent that is tall enough to stand up in and big enough to have a cot, table and chair in with me, and sets up in about 2 minutes. It all fits in the back of my jeep.
Your Hotel suggestion makes a lot of sense versus driving around in a $150K in truck and trailer and 8 mpg. That is a LOT of hotel rooms, like 1000 nights.
Or don’t take a house everywhere. Smaller trailers do exist. They even manage to make camping more accessible thanks to being smaller. Being able to position a 15 foot long trailer across a 20 foot wide site for a great view is awesome.
The weight and size are far less of an issue than aerodynamics. I get SIGNIFICANTLY worse MPGs towing an empty 14ft enclosed trailer than 7000lbs worth of Benz and flatbed. We’re talking about 14L/100km vs 18+
I should have specified as A frame popup trailer that folds down to 5.5 feet tall. It’s a 25% range hit to my current tow vehicle towing it.
For something larger, TrailManor makes 20 foot and larger collapsible hardwall trailers. They have a similar range hit.
There are campers that can make EV towing in its current state somewhat better. For a box trailer, well, only so much can be done for a brick on wheels.
Holy hell, for 50K CAD, I can buy a HELL of a lot of fuel for some of the cheaper options that better suit my budget.
Oh man, I just watched a video on that trailer. I’d rather be kicked in the junk when I woke up every morning than completely assemble my trailer every time I wanna stop.
I think it’s worth clarifying why EV range is so dramatically affected by towing. You’d think that putting Trailer X on an ICE would reduce its range by the same amount as Trailer X on an EV, but that’s not the case. Reason is aerodynamic drag. EVs are very aero-efficient, so the percentage increase in drag with a trailer is greater than that of an ICE, which is already draggy – I’ve done back-to-back tests which proved this point, and also effect of weight. Then you end up needing 100% of the charge to go anywhere, and the 80-100% charge takes a long while. It’s also a big battery, not your 60-80kWh roadcar jobs. And then as you mentioned drive-through charging and it becomes a real hassle. EV towing is a lifestyle choice, and most people have places to be, things to do and that doesn’t involve micromanaging their vehicle’s energy demands.
I don’t think the relative change in range versus an ICE vehicle is really the main story here. An ICE vehicle is going to see a significant drop in range, as well, it’s just that the initial non-laden range is already so high due to the fuel capacity (and of course, the refill time is key).
The Cybertruck will tow about 95 miles when loaded up (as we saw here), and, per Motor Trend, it does about 225 unladen. So that unladen figure is like a 20 MPG Ram 1500 with 11 gallon gallons of fuel in it. When towing, you might reasonably expect that Ram to do 9 MPG, which is 99 miles of range on those 11 gallons — so not terribly different.
The reality is that gas trucks have become very slippery. A Ram 1500’s 0.36 drag coefficient is actually competitive with that of EV trucks (with Rivian ahead of everyone).
Interesting seeing you here on TheAutopian. Welcome
Odd to have a test that in any video only includes 2 of the 3 most common fuels.
Speaking of videos – I took vacation and it seems the videos track us now?
Definitely interested in how the ramcharger performs. I can’t ever see buying a Stellantis product, but love the concept & would like to see it catch on if it works.
Our F250 stays parked unless we’re moving at least a ton of something, since it gets 8MPG whether empty or fully laden. Horses for courses.
My dream rig would either be a 3/4T longbed version of the RAM Charger series-hybrid, or a plug-in parallel-hybrid with an electrically-driven front axle and gas-driven rear axle. You get your long-range towing power from the gas engine with your obligatory 4×4 and merging power from the electric.
“Traffic hits me with the double-whammy of both wasting my time and wasting my fuel, whereas when the 405 turns into a total parking lot with me behind the wheel of my i3”
This is why I lament the loss of the comfy cruiser. I as much as any car guy want a fun sporty sedan that’ll carve mountain roads. But when I used to commute daily I’m just sitting in a parking lot. So give me a comfy couch-like bench seat to kick back in while my vehicle does the mundane task of handling the stop/go traffic.
Glad to hear the i3 is working out for you. I was close to getting one before my wife said the magic words “what about a convertible?”. Dropping the top to soak in some rays while huffing exhaust fumes from the traffic makes for an oddly relaxing commute.
With the legalization of pot, there are a lot of fumes making that commute more relaxing these days.
This. I’m firmly in the “will always own a convertible” camp, and since I live in Michigan, I also need a winter vehicle capable of making the 9hr drive to the NJ border for Christmas. This means neither vehicle can be EV at this point… C’mon Tesla Roadster?
Convertible guy here. I’ve got my ICE convertible. We’re planning to buy the new Chevy Equinox EV (as soon as GM starts building them with a sunroof) as my wife’s primary. I also have an SUV for those long distance travel use cases. Fortunately, I’m in a position to have 3 cars.
I really want to throw a 20-30hp electric motor on the Dana 44 axle in the back of my Jeep MJ, put a battery pack under the bed in the void opposite the gas tank, and basically run a simple hybrid setup. I’d control the motor for torque and regen with a dial mounted just under the shift knob. It would help get going and give the extra boost when the 4.0L isn’t spicy enough, and allow me to regen to regain some of the lost power when braking.
Thank you for this honest review about EVs. I think everyone should get what works best for them.
Counterpoint: EV trucks are excellent at towing for short distances. If you are towing to a lake, it’s great.
But aero is the killer. There are some reasonably aerodynamic trailers out there, so if you’re going long distances and need to do so with your Rivian, get something with an extremely small aero footprint. Even then, you’ll be stopping a lot, and if you’re in a hurry, it will be terrible.
Note: Some on the Rivian Forums see consistently pretty good (under the circumstances) kWh/mi for boxy trailer towing, but it’s still <150 miles of effective range.
Source: own a Rivian R1T. Would not be my choice for a long-haul tow vehicle.
That’s not a counterpoint. That’s a main point I make in the article.
Love the R1T. Great truck!
I can’t read, and sometimes my stupidity makes me sad. Sorry DT!
Eh, maybe it was my fault. I made a few tweaks to make it clear that for shorter distances, they rule!
Thanks for commenting and reading!
Disclaimer: I really don’t care for the Cybertruck.
Secondary disclaimer: I don’t care for RVs/toy haulers.
While I understand why the Cybertruck fares less than the diesel RAM for this test, both of those results are abysmal. Is anyone okay with paying that much to tow ~85 miles? It’s not even a problem of fuel costs, as this was filmed in Texas where gas is cheap… My problem is: why does anyone need to tow so damn much?
I could carry everything I need in my van (shelter in the form of a tent, cooler/fridge, mattress/sleeping stuff, etc) with some mountain bikes in place of the car in the toy hauler, and the same 85 miles would be between 3-4 gallons, or around $9-12 for the same fuel prices. Extrapolating over a year’s worth of driving and you get a huge cost difference. Is it really necessary to tow what is bigger than a house for the lower 95% of the world population?
This isn’t even accounting for the vehicle purchase price difference; a good van or small truck with a cover is less than half the cost of these trucks, and the equipment cost compared to the trailer are tiny. I think the whole thing is just ridiculous.
/End rant
Eh, I can haul everything I need – including 2.2kwh of battery (thanks, totaled Honda Insight and its very awesome SCIB batteries!), solar panels, a fairly sizeable gazelle tent, shower, 12 gallons of water, Starlink, etc., in my Toyota 4Runner, and can thus in turn take the setup nearly anywhere, and I’m only range-constrained by the 3rd-gen 4Runner’s abysmally small gas tank. Perfect for working from the road, perfect for one or two people with little concern for creature comforts and for whom entertainment can readily be provided by getting out of the car.
But – my sister has 3 kids. A van wouldn’t work for her (and most vanlifers are either returning home or eating a motel cost every 3-7 days). If she wants to travel the US and show her kids all the majesty of the country, she’s looking at either $120-200/night for a decent hotel room that can accommodate all those people, along with paying for food and sundries, or eating the $50 or so in gas or diesel to get down the road another 100 miles and another few bucks for food. She did that express journey in a fairly sizeable trailer, being pulled by a Chevy Duramax.
Different strokes for different folks. Some people may not like to have fun in the same way I do, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less fun for them.
No, but with a handle like Patches O’Houlihan, whose line about the necessity of drinking his own urine every man over the age of 30 can probably recite on demand, why are you asking? Nobody needs 600HP passenger cars or 160MPH sport bikes, either, but fortunately necessity is not the driver of purchasing decisions for most people. And if we legislated according to perceived need, we’d all be driving the Washington, DC equivalent of Trabants. I get annoyed as the next guy when I get stuck behind somebody in a CruiseAmerica rental RV whose driver doesn’t know what the turnouts are for, but at the same time, I’m all about people getting out and seeing the rest of the country, irrespective of the manner they choose to do it in.
Well, it is sterile, and I still like the way it tastes.
While there are a lot of references to RV’s and boats, which are are life style choices, there others of reasons that one needs tow things. Prime examples would be moving equipment and materials for construction or moving animals and agricultural products.
Yes, there are folks who drive HD trucks for status symbols, or it fits their images of cool, etc. But there are a lot of rural or tradespeople where this is important. And in line with this article, EV’s just are not able to fill role with current technology and infrastructure.
As they say, different strokes for different folks. When I go hunting with friends, I go for a week and stay in a tent. My friends go for a month and stay in trailer. Could they stay in a tent for a month? Sure. But they prefer not to. A hotel isn’t practical because the area where we hunt is at least 2 hours from the nearest hotel and getting up before dawn at the camp site is hard enough.
Since towing heavy things for long distances is a sort of specialized task, it makes sense that most vehicles, both EV and ICE are not well suited to the task. Now, if you need to tow heavy things shorter distances, something like a Ford Lightning or a Tesla Cybertruck could make sense in some cases.
To me, the lightning is an excellent home depot run truck. The range hit wouldn’t matter much on that short run. But it would be easier to live with the rest of the time.
This is what sells pickup trucks I assume. Sure you got RV guys and whatnot but most F150s out there with hitches I see are pulling a 20 ft fishing boat or a trailer with a riding lawn mower and few dozen bags of mulch.