It's weird to see a new vehicle announced like this that's not an EV. I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).
I say this as someone who will be buying an EV as his next vehicle:
EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:
- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?
- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.
- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.
- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.
EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.
> Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle.
A 5KW generator costs less than 2% of the price of the average new vehicle and is a useful thing to have in a place that doesn't otherwise have any electricity regardless.
Meanwhile you then don't have to buy gas the 99% of the time you're not camping.
Would be best to have a modular generator for an EV, that would allow slower but practical charging while on the go or at rest. This would be basically a series hybrid with modular generator, not popular due to lower efficiency AFAIU. Just explicitly design for lower performance when battery critically low and is charging on the go.
These are called EREVs in China and are fairly popular. Ford has a patent for one in trucks but never built it. It makes a ton of sense. Use the generator to get extended range, but avoid all the moving parts of a driveline.
Stellantis almost built one, I think the Ramcharger?
A couple other companies tried EREVs but AFAIR one was suboptimal (Mazda had one but the motor was so small it was dangerous to use for uphill) and the other was in an expensive German thing.
Where it is challenging is that, AFAIK, a direct driveline (i.e. Honda's system) or close to (THS used by Toyota/Ford/Subaru/others), it is easier to hit a higher Gas-only MPG rating than with an EREV due to the conversion losses on each end.
And, If you compare a BYD Seal 5 DM-i to the Current Prius Prime, AFAIK if you compare euro WLTP numbers the Prime gets better MPG when it switches to gas, and has a competitive electric only range. The Seal 5 DM-I is a little bigger but close enough. The BYD certainly wins on 'price' however it is unclear how much of that is due to a truly simpler design versus labor/material input cost.
There will be a tipping point where production and wide distribution of petrol and diesel becomes unsustainably expensive; it really relies on massive volume to work at all.
There are use cases for public transport. There are usecases for trucks and SUVs. EVs currently seem to be limited to a "city car" role, which is a category that's hard to understand.
There are many great EV cars. But when you have a trailer or caravan we still talk about a heavily reduced range (and often they aren't allowed to pull at all, or weight limits get a problem, at least in Europe)
The interesting thing in the US is that a lot of pickups, possibly most of them, are purchased for regular daily driving. None of the people I know with pickups have trailers.
Dang, if only someone made an everyday car with a soft weather proof enclosed cargo area, possibly you could have the tailgate open up and away as well so it's not in the way. I would think Americans would love to have something more practical than a work vehicle
Sure, I could buy a dedicated more efficient car for the rare days when there is zero risk of rain and I don't need to haul anything larger.
After more than 1cm of rain, the last 500m of the steep dirt road up to my off-grid house in the mountains is completely impassable without 4wd. And I, or my family-in-law, regularly haul large trees, construction equipment, several 100kg of fertilizer, etc. in the truck bed.
Buying a single vehicle, a pre-owned 4wd Ford Ranger made the most economic sense.
> But who knows maybe it’s already full of stuff under there
This is why I'm excited for REO.
I live in a pretty dense city and don't have much storage space in my residence. On the weekends I'm clearing and developing a lot a couple of hours away. My vehicle doubles as storage for all the stuff I need for that and don't want to leave unattended (saws, tools, winch, etc).
I used a Forester for the first two years, which was cramped but doable. The bigger issue was messes. Oil has a way of getting everywhere. I also had one gas spill from a faulty saw gas cap which was both dangerous and a huge PITA to clean up. I also got to a phase where the difference between awd and 4x4 matters, and where I was yanking milled planks around which didn't feel safe doing with the forester.
I switched to a truck after a couple of years and went small. The box is completely full between tools, saws, gas, winch, ropes, etc. When I do groceries I can usually fit some of the "hard" bags back there (cans, bottles) but the rest has to go up front.
A REO would be great for my use-case. The price is low enough that for the price of a new Tacoma or F-150 I could (get close enough to) buying both a REO and a used beater 3/4 ton at the property, which is a better fit for the things I need a big truck for anyways. And I wouldn't be driving a dumb big truck around a very cramped city.
For now I'm stuck with a big truck in the city because owning more than one personal vehicle in this town is insanity.
Maybe in the past, but the size thing isn't really true of the modern line-up. Relative to eg a base Tacoma or especially a Maverick, The Ford Transit has about the same wheel base, is slightly heavier, has worse visibility (for me at least), has a larger displacement engine, and is on a pragmatic level more difficult to maneuver and park. They also have far fewer creature comforts, which wouldn't be a huge deal if they didn't MSRP at $10K MORE than a base midsized truck!
Vans also don't have 4x4, have much lower ground clearance, no good mechanism for transporting longer stuff, and you can't hose them out nearly as easily as a truck bed. The main thing that those vans are built for is just lots of weight in the van. Great fits for some use-cases, but not mine.
And, again, they're just seriously expensive for what they are because of all the commercial applications.
I did also consider an old minivan or a used van from previous generations when they made the smaller transits. Again, 4x4/awd isn't really super optional in these parts, so pickins were slim.
Unfortunately I'm 5'7 and even the low roof transit is 6.8. So it's paying >$10K more for a pretty non-ergonomic solution.
> seems too small to even be useful for that.
One advantage of a bed when transporting 2x's is that you get the hypotenuse. So the bed goes further than you'd think in terms of load length. The 60/73 beds of the tacoma are certainly better than the mavericks, and those trucks are still smaller/same size as the transit.
But my actual observation is that, in cities, transits just really are strictly more annoying and dangerous to drive than a mid-sized truck. Maybe it's just me, but maintaining situational awareness on an unprotected bike lane to my right in a transit is way way way more difficult than the same in a mid-sized truck.
The shorty transit connects from the 2010s aren't what the modern line-up looks like. Modern transits are heavy long wheel-base vans with surprisingly large displacement engines and unfortunate blind spots.
I do get the animosity about trucks on city streets (...I bike to work and pass 4 ghost bikes every morning and evening and have had my share of close calls...).
But as a bicyclist, I'd rather ride next to a tacoma or ranger than a current gen transit. And it's not even close.
If you bicycle and prefer vans over trucks on your streets, I encourage you to test drive any 2026 transit. It'll change how you ride around vans, even if you're already a careful cyclist.
Wagons (as sold in the US market anyways) are passenger vehicles and therefore have the same problem as the Forester[^1]: your saw leaking some gas or bar&chain is kinda not ok. Or insert any other "thing that makes messes".
The true ideal is a 90's regular cab Tacoma/Ranger or a final gen Transit Connect depending on use-case.
> It's too bad this is america and everyone hates them and buys these dumb trucks instead
A friend with a RAM 1500 truck (a brute of a machine) bought a Harley in a neighboring state, I kept him company during the 8h ordeal. He rented a trailer because the bike was too heavy to hoist on the bed. Hillarious.
It's just a style thing, folks, however silly. Why do Texans wear cowboy hats and boots?
FWIW, transporting (even large) bikes in the bed of a truck is doable and normal. The typical way to do this isn't with a hoist. You just ride or walk it up a ramp and tie it down.
ofc a Forester or RAV4 with a trailer is a far superior solution, especially for interstate driving where the trailer is less of an annoyance.
I’ve seen that on highways. This thing was a fire breathing monster though. King or California something or other. My buddy looked like a teenage jockey on it, but he is a life long rider. I’m sure it could be coerced, but was tough even with the low height U-Haul trailer.
Nope, sign of (relative) poverty. Big trucks are expensive, and having one that has obviously never seen so much as a 2x4 is very effective class signaling. The people who actually need trucks to work with buy the cheapest option that gets the job done and wring every last dollar back out of it.
So true! My Ram 1500 was purchased to pull our travel trailer. It has the tow package and is factory raised up some. I'm kind of old, so I keep a three-step ladder in the bed so I can easily climb into it.
Because of the poor gas mileage, I always wonder at why people drive these gas guzzlers as their main transport. But each to his own. (BTW, some claim safety, but it's probably fashion.)
Yes, the RAM Rampage is comparable to a Ford Maverick which is a unibody vehicle with a truck bed.
The massive truck they likely meant would be a RAM 3500 HD super crew cab full size bed Cummins diesel dually rear axle with a vertical dual stainless steel smokestack exhaust kit for good measure. Which is essentially the largest truck you can get with a pickup bed from RAM, GM, or Ford; and they go for over $100,000 with options.
There are even larger monstrosities with pickup beds built on top of 550/5500/Class 5 truck chassis which are basically a Canyonero from He Simpsons in real life: https://www.elevationoffgrid.com/
My favorite derogatory term for a vehicle type is ‘hausfrauenpanzer’ which means ‘housewife tank’ in German, which is used for a large SUV in Germany, lol.
It's honestly not that many. That's a very expensive truck for a daily driver. Most likely they have a large Airstream camper, horse trailer, or 5th wheel trailer or similar that they pull with it.
Sure, some people just like a big diesel truck for ego reasons. But the cost of them limits most people's ability to endulge that.
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and when I went back to visit the family home a few years ago, every street was parked up on both sides with giant vehicles. It was a sight to behold.
They weren't all the most expensive trucks, and many were noticeably older. Things in our town went up and down with the cycle of the car industry.
That’s what one would expect, but in some parts of the US it’s not uncommon to see dilapidated houses with a shiny tricked out F-150 that’s never worked a day in its life sitting out in the parking lot…
I think for some it’s an identity thing more than anything else.
> But the cost of them limits most people's ability to endulge that.
Sounds like you’ve never been to the US. Thanks to cheap credit, every hillbilly and redneck has one of these. Which feels like about 60% of the population sometimes.
I have lived in the US my entire life. And yes pickup trucks are part of the "country" or "rural" identity to some extent but most people who live in rural areas actually use their trucks as trucks frequently. They pull trailers, or use them to haul furniture, appliances, building materials, trash... all the stuff that has delivery services in the city but you have to do for yourself if you live in the country.
I can't identify with this. You see these trucks everywhere. There are far more of them than there's any reason for - other than the whole weird only-in-America "light truck" regulations that relax emissions requirements for these trucks. Basically, a big reason we see so many of them is that the US simply refuses to take global warming seriously, instead basically saying "we're going to stick it to the planet as hard as we can, damn the consequences."
And when I said hillbillies and rednecks, I'm not talking about the actual people using their trucks for what they're supposed to be used for. I'm talking about the pavement princesses which wouldn't actually haul anything in their trucks because it would scratch the beds. They have the hillbilly redneck mindset without doing the work that justifies it. The truck is an emotional support vehicle for them, or a gender affirming vehicle. And there's no world in which you can honestly say "there aren't that many" of those in the US.
4 trips a year picking up a heavy excavator or tractor so you dont have to pay a tradesman a gazillion dollars and it pays for itself. "But just pay someone to haul it or rent a truck" lmao good fucking luck down my dirt roads
American trucks are built for towing -- it's one of the reasons they are so big and heavy and expensive -- so I get where the "trucks are for towing" wisdom comes from.
But it's still funny to me. Because in my mind one of the main perks of an open bed is that you can do so much before having to deal with a trailer (which are super annoying, especially in cities, especially without off-street parking).
Which I guess is just to say: maybe there's a market for a truck that can't tow much, because maybe there's a portion of the market that wants an open bed but doesn't need to tow a massive camper or whatever.
How people use the vehicles that they buy is pretty well understood from the market research done by the car industry. In the US, the widespread use of pickup trucks a passenger vehicles is a known fact.
An odd thing is that my family visited a rural part of England last year, and we saw very few pickup trucks on the roads and in the towns. On a walking tour, you see a lot of farms up close because the paths go through farms and along fence lines. The farms had utility vehicles including light trucks, but they also had regular passenger cars.
There was a phase where these ghastly large pickups with four doors were common. Never had a drop of mud on them, but they were available tax free as a “work vehicle”, so no income tax on it.
They are ridiculous in the lanes round here, and invariably are in the disabled parking spaces at the shop as they are too large to fit in normal spaces
There isn’t much need in the UK. Farmers use tractors or vehicles like the classic 4x4 Land Rover, Subarus, etc. None of the roads or the infrastructure are designed for American size pickups, especially not the countryside. If people need to move something big, they hire a van.
People are also extremely sensitive to fuel costs and an enormous car that guzzles gas and can’t be parked on a tiny village road is a downside. Bear in mind gas in Europe is like $8/gal and salaries are much lower.
The statement car of choice for people who don’t need the functionality is the modern luxury Land/Range rover (ie the Chelsea tractor).
And a lot of people have occasional need for a truck but don't want to or can't afford to own more than one car, so they use the truck for all their driving.
some guy left a few hundred pounds of steel in the loading area of my workshop for stupid reasons. maybe about $80 worth in scrap. he kept coming by and claiming someone was going to pick up it up, and getting really threatening about us stealing the value from him. the scrap yard is 200 ft away. he drives a big jacked up truck. after a couple weeks of this I'm like 'look, I'll cut it down, and we can throw it in that truck of yours and you can roll 200ft down the road and we'll be done with it'. he was incensed, his bed liner would get all scratched up.
after that I dragged it out onto the curb for the meth addicts to sell.
Exactly. People are optimizing for the most capability on one car payment. And for a lot of them that looks like a pickup but it also drives what people buy in the SUV market as well. This has bee known for decades. Like it's literally defining principal behind the 4-dr jeep and the proliferation of 3rd rows in midsize SUVs. The fact that you're still getting downvoted for saying it speaks volumes.
I find it somewhat amusing that this attracts a lot of ire, but most of us would prefer a 2,000+ sq ft suburban home with a lawn when we could live comfortably in a 500-700 sq ft apartment, like people do in most European cities.
Ultimately, life in highly developed countries is largely about the wants, not the needs, and different cultures emphasize different wants. The tech culture of the SF Bay Area doesn't glamorize big trucks, but it glamorizes making millions of dollars with no regard for privacy or social impacts of the tech we build.
Gas vehicles suffer from that range reduction, too, as my brother-in-law learned the hard way last weekend during a road trip we took to Idaho and back (wherein he was towing a camper-trailer).
My pickup truck burned 9 miles per gallon when I towed a 35 foot RV. Consider the energy flux and you'll quickly see how hopeless it would be to tow with a battery powered truck.
Not everyone who owns a pickup tows with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a minority of owners who do. Some just need them for hauling plywood, others because they like the aesthetics.
Unfortunately, to Americans, that really doesn't matter. Even if they're not as fit for purpose, they prefer pickup trucks to minivans. It's a cultural thing.
(I realize you're probably being responsive to the word "need" - it's more what they claim they need than actually need. They could use a Japanese kei truck.)
I was hearing elsenet from someone who was planning to buy a Japanese kei truck until he borrowed one. Apparently with more than about 300 lb in the bed they feel dangerous to drive- combination of instability and poor braking performance.
Am American. Need work vehicle that can move some stuff that might be fairly big. Minivan is solution. It does the job very well.
If I needed to move more stuff, then the best answer still isn't a pickup truck. It is instead a full-size van (Transit/Express/Sprinter/ProMaster).
Kei trucks seem cool, but they're still trucks. Whatever's in the back is open to the elements, looky-loos, and thieves. Those concerns are greatly diminished with vans.
(A pickup truck with a cap on it that never comes off is a lot like a minivan is, but with more steps.)
Depends on what you're hauling also. I'm not interested in doing my regular trash or recycling runs with a minivan, for example, but most of what I do haul would be fine with a minivan.
The recycling is in inexpensive stacking totes that have lids; the same kind of totes I sometimes pack in tight for cross-country jaunts. They stay stacked and they don't leak.
Food waste gets composted outside ("it's old, get rid of it"), or goes down the garbage disposal ("i'm just trying to prep dinner here, not save the world"), or frozen in a grocery bag for later trash runs (meat and grease that doesn't want to go down the drain or be composted).
The bagged trash that accumulates here is essentially just non-recyclable plastics that are dry, and an occasional small bag of frozen food waste. This stuff does not leak between home and the dumpster at the shop.
And, I mean: Why not? It's just a car, and before being in the car these things were inside of my house (which is a far more valuable and permanent thing to me).
The venn diagram overlap between people who say "but minivans" and who hand wring hard enough to start a fire when someone has the gall to actually put 2000lb of stuff in a minivan or put a butt in every seat is too close to a circle for my liking.
Also minivan owner. In terms of weight, it's pretty similar to a RAM 1500 in its ability to handle the gravity of its contents. I regularly move about a thousand pounds of stuff across the country without any issues.
I wouldn't expect it to work with 8 full-sized American adults over that kind of distance: The adults would kill eachother, removing load as it happens. But it seems fine for quick trips in town.
Being enclosed, as it is, does suck for moving things like sofas, but: On the rare occasion that I have needed to move a sofa, truck owners have always lined up to demonstrate the superiority of their road-going machines.
(And that's all fine. I didn't want to move the sofa by myself, anyway.)
I agree though I kinda wish it was a hybrid. Maybe down the line that will happen. The price point is a valid point and it ticks all our boxes - 4WD, manual transmission, not huge. I've priced out components for one of my trucks and $21500 is not gonna buy all of the running gear. I expect that none of this truck's drivetrain will use custom parts and that all of the critical drivetrain parts will come from existing supply lines for simplicity and ease of hitting their "repair in your driveway" messaging.
The guy is probably gauging interest through reservations and prepping his lie sheet (marketing data) to present to existing supply chain providers to try to earn discounts on volume orders.
I hope it all works. We will likely reserve one or maybe two. Our existing small truck, a 4WD Ford Ranger with manual transmission, is long in the tooth and I'm tired of dicking around with it.
Kind of like the Local Motors Rally Fighter, which was a kit car that kept costs down by using parts from existing cars instead of designing their own from scratch.
A bit like that. I don't see a new vehicle manufacturer spending the time or capital to develop drivetrain components when there are already trusted manufacturers with decades of experience and products on the shelf that already function perfectly together.
I expect this guy will be looking at reliability data for various components, popular aftermarket upgrades, etc and designing a drivetrain that already uses popular components known by the automotive community to be reliable. Otherwise he will have a hard time hitting the 500k mile target I think I saw on the site.
He needs a dependable I4 engine mated to a dependable 6-spd manual transmission, mated to a dependable transfer case that sends power to the wheels through dependable differentials. I bet one could pull data from off-roader forums and configure something in a couple of days for their marketers to build interest.
I agree on both points. They are testing the waters and trying to get a foot in the door. Starting with a gasser only configuration gets them into production with enough interest from people who would like a smaller truck at a lower price point.
I don't think any reasonable person expects the price of the 2-door truck to be $21500 when it finally is produced. That price is guaranteed to rise between now and the delivery of the first vehicle in 2028, it it ever happens. For potential customers it is a signal that they are committed to delivering a quality vehicle at a low price point. If you read the privacy policy, the reservation agreement, and payment terms it is all laid out in plain english.
Once they get vehicles on the road and a dedicated owner base they can determine whether there is interest in a hybrid drivetrain model. I understand why they aren't offering it right out of the gate. I do expect that they would be willing to consider it in the future should they ever make the leap from marketing vaporware to manufacturing.
There is a market for it. Cheap. Good range on a tank. 4WD. I've got a 2016 Tacoma TRD Offroad. It's only got about 115k miles (bought it new). I'm not planning on replacing it - toyota hybrid numbers for their trucks suck and an in kind replacement would cost me almost 2x what I originally paid (yes new tech, blahblah). $35k in 2015, $70+k now. Gas isn't going away and rural areas (I've lived in a few) often don't have charging options.
I was at the Toyota dealership today. A TRD off-road with TRD Off-Road Upgrade Package and other goodies has a MSRP of $61k and the tag hanging from the rear view mirror said the no haggle price was $54,608. Still a lot of money and it is a huge truck for the passenger and cargo payload.
> I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).
Yeah it’s interesting to see how they do. The big and award winning electric truck from Ford is already discontinued. If we’re talking about US pickups how many other ones are battery powered? If anything, I would be more worried about Slate given what happened to Ford Lightning.
There are a ton of people that want an affordable ICE powered truck, for a variety of valid and invalid reasons. The market is there, but they're going to need to be smart about how they do this if they want to capture that market.
> Here, we demonstrate a covert communications method in which photon emission is rapidly electrically modulated both above and below the level of a passive blackbody at the emitter temperature. The time-averaged emission can be designed to be identical to the thermal background, realizing communications with zero optical signature for detectors with bandwidth lower than the modulation frequency
It sounds like maybe they're modulating the emissivity of a diode up and down so that over time, its IR spectrum looks like black body radiation. Only someone looking at the intensity of the thermal radiation coming from the diode at really fast timescales (kilohertz or megahertz) would notice that there was a signal being transmitted.
This looks great! I've been using ThumbsUp[1] for a similar purpose (creating a gallery of photos I can push S3), but adding album and photo captions required some un-ergonomical tricks. I'll try this out!
I appreciated the Pluto.jl mention! Going from Pluto notebooks that understand data flow to Jupyter notebooks where you have to tell the computer which order to run the cells in is always baffling to me. Why doesn't Jupyter know the run order and dependencies already? The way Pluto handles dependencies between code cells is really just so nice.
Yup, slight mix-up. Gravity waves are waves in the ocean and atmosphere (or other fluid bodies) where Earth's gravity is the restoring forces that causes wave propagation. Gravitational waves are the waves in spacetime caused by powerful astronomical events like black hole mergers.
Sure, all the water in the ocean is affected by gravity.
However, there are many different types of waves in physics, usually described by some form of wave equation[1]. And for some of those, body forces[2] like gravity doesn't play a direct role.
A relevant example is acoustic waves[3], which are the propagation of changes in pressure. In that case, the only thing gravity is doing is confining the water to a single body through which the acoustic wave can propagate, it doesn't affect the propagation otherwise as such.
Cool! It looks like the Wansview Q5 has a similar SoC/camera/wireless setup as the Wansview W7, which as an installer guide on the Thingino wiki [1]. I wonder if that same installation process (but with the q5 firmware) would work. For $16 I'm inclined to try it out.
> The analog ones are easy to play with. You just need a DAC to drive their VCO and then can sample the I/Q pins with an ADC
Do you have any reference or notes on how to access the IQ pins on one of these devices (ideally one of the FMCW ones)? I've been wanting to play around with one of these 24 GHz or 60 GHz units for coherent radar but it seems like most of the boards only report on distances over serial links. If there's an easy way to tap into the analog IF signal after down conversion I'd love to see how to do that!
