Pick-up trucks and utility vehicles have their use and their place in the world, but riding up my ass on the freeway in a Ram 350 quad cab while 'rolling coal' and flying Trump paraphernalia is not one of them. tax the ever loving fuck out of them for highway use and fine anyone caught avoiding the regulations in urban areas. Out in the sticks, let them do whatever they want, but in rush hour traffic its a revenue gold mine for state and local police that would make sin taxes on cigarettes, soda and liquor seem like nothing.

The start taxing gambling sites based on gross revenue not gross profits and tap into another ready source of funding for turning around this country and repairing the failing infrastructure and support systems. Come January 21, 2029 here is going to be a massive reclamation project in need of starting...

Year after year, pickup trucks are the best selling vehicles in the US. No politician is going to tell large number of voters that they aren't allowed to drive them or that they will face draconian taxes on them.

People who actually make their pickups work hard—hauling heavy trailers, loads of dirt, sheets of plywood or drywall—need to be able to get a full workday without needing a recharge.

The Lightning can’t do it, which is the only reason I don’t have one. When they solve that problem at a price I can afford, I’ll be first in line for one.

I hoped that Ford would figure out the range per charge issue.

two types of people want F150s:

a) machos that want a pick em up truck to drive around town and look macho but goddamn it don’t scratch my bed or i’ll kick your ass and wanna watch me rev it up? i know you do!

ii) workers that need a medium duty truck to do some type of real job (urban or rural) and the only thing that matters is working all day every day and if it runs low on fuel…well, stop and fill it up and let’s get back to work asap.

neither really lends itself at this time to an ev platform. maybe someday the battery and charging technology will be there to satisfy the type 2s.

At first I needed one to haul a boat. When I finally got rid of the boat, I still needed a truck for household chores.

My Ford Ranger meets my current needs. I would like an EV version if the battery and charging issues can be resolved.

it’s old enough to buy cigarettes and liquor. it has about 250,000 miles on it. it’s the best vehicle i have ever owned. runs perfect. my daily driver, and i wouldn’t trade it for anything.

It is the first year model of the "new" Ranger.

I'll trade it someday for another Ranger.

his “old man” but i pointed at his bald tires and asked “ya’ want new shoes boy? huh? huh?” and he calmed right down.

later we drove to the lake and watched the sunset.

Rollin’ coal out loud tailpipes, not the silent energizer bunny under the hood. There’s no penis envy in lithium batteries like a Ram Tough V12. Cankles just opened ANWR’s Area 1002 to oil drilling. If we don’t burn that oil now, someone else will. Why wait. F*ck the grandkids and their grandkids.

Of course, the employee at the top of the heap who fucked up by betting the farm on EVs still has his job.

when the company goes belly up after being left behind with tech nobody wants. While the Orange Regime is now sabotaging EVs, the rest of the world is moving on with them. Legacy auto is ceding their future to China. Sure they can sell to the US market for another decade (maybe), but they are definitely cutting themselves out of the international market.

Green power and EVs are absolutely inevitable.

Last edited Fri Nov 7, 2025, 11:10 AM - Edit history (1)

It is estimated that at least 74 new mines will be needed to meet demand for "battery materials" (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc) by 2035. Most of those mines will be land-based open pits with various serious environmental impacts-- for example, loss of orangutan habitat in Indonesia, loss of gorilla habitat in Congo, loss of indigenous water supplies in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, loss of sacred Native lands in the US, loss of common use lands in Europe.

On edit: The 74 new mines are just for lithium. They're estimating a total of 354 new mines for all battery materials.

Disappointed to see them here.

The EV industry is moving away from cobalt/nickel and other expensive metals in batteries toward iron and sodium. And while they are moving away from cobalt, the oil industry will continue to use cobalt (once, no recycling) in the refining process. Also, they are now looking at extracting lithium free sea water, so even the future of current extraction methods will change. For every EV bought, 500-800 gallons of gasoline/diesel is unburnt. EVs last longer, are cheaper to run and maintain.

The recycling process for batteries now averages 95%, and that is after they have spent 10-15 years in a car, then had a second life of 10 years as utility storage. I have been driving EVs since 2014, and they simply work. And before you bring up the lack of charging infrastructure, it is no longer 2015, or 2020, or even 2023. Charging infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous. And since 85% of US drivers drive less than 35 miles per day, the vast majority of drivers only need a standard electrical socket to recharge for that amount of use.

The carbon footprint of an EV is recouped in less than 1-2 years of driving (11K-15K miles). The carbon footprint of ICE cars is NEVER ongoing and never paid off.

and I will say that no one is seriously talking about extracting lithium from sea water. You may be thinking about lithium brines, such as those found in South America, the Salton Sea, and SW Arkansas. Meanwhile, there is a lot of pressure to develop new open-pit lithium mines in Nevada, Portugal, Serbia, Canada, Australia, South America, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, etc; nickel mines in Indonesia; cobalt/copper mines in DR Congo, and so on.

we have to extract minerals from the planet in order to exist. The issue is, how do we do it in the least harmful and most sustainable way possible? Do we keep producing vehicles that use a fuel that can only be used once, which when burned harms our health and destroys our biosphere, or do we use a fuel that can be made sustainably, with and order of magnitude or more less destruction, with fuel storage (batteries) that can be recycled at a rate of 95% plus?

Does the production of personal/mass transportation hurt the environment and people. Yes, most assuredly. The question is which damage do you prefer? X or 100x?

Much less what it will do in 20-30 yr.

All the mines proposed for EV production will cause less damage than 2C of warming from fossil fuels. For example, at that point a rainfall tipping point is crossed and almost ALL of the Amazon rainforest dries up and burns to grasslands instead.

Literally hundreds of thousands of species will be lost in that one example.

You want them to build hundreds of thousands of them anyway?

Jim Farley deserves a trillion dollar pay package like Elon. What screams success louder than failure?

(and ML…i kid i kid)

Properly educated consumers DO want them. They have excellent range, are very cheap to run, and last quite a long time. The only people saying consumers don't want them are the same people saying consumers don't want green energy. And it is true, that if you lie to people about EVs/wind/solar capabilities and long term cost, people do not want them. But only if you lie to them.

The Lightning has only been available a few years, has had very little advertising, and very little education for the sales people. However, during those years, sales have increased every year. I can see the fire slowing down building them, but not cancelling the model. That is just giving up and going back to short term profit at the expense of the future of the company and humanity.

I’m sure they would be more than happy to double the production if they sold.

The next question is how much should the government subsidize what is essentially a luxury vehicle because it’s “green”? It’s not like this is particularly practical for work use either, not one that justifies the extra premium paid for the EV.

They were expecting to make back their investment in only a few years? It usually takes 5-10 years to make back money on a new model. Also, exactly how hard has Ford advertised the Lightning? What fraction of the gas version of the F-150 did the Lightning get? I talked to dealers in my area about it and they all tried to steer me to a gas/diesel version, repeating all the tired canards about EVs.

Slightly over 2%

And again, Ford has done little to advertise the model, yet sales improved by double digits year over year. Yes, they lost $13 billion, but they were also woefully late to the transition game. Now they are throwing away the entire investment to go back to climate ruining ICE. While they (temporarily) make their shareholders happy, the rest of us suffer more an more each day.

if you actually use them for work

EV SUVs will for the time being be a niche market. They’re still too expensive to be mainstream. I think it works for Rivian, because they have marketed itself well as the Tesla alternative.

Several of their models are also larger than say the model Y (and Tesla’s haven’t even refreshed their builds in a while), but to be honest the only people I’ve seen driving them are doctors and other wealthy people here in SoCal. I’m sure it helps that rivian’s CEO isn’t a Nazi.

I think for now, plug in hybrids for medium to large sized trucks and SUVs will help with range anxiety. Ford may have had more luck then, but there are a lot of engineering trade offs there too, possibly reducing the utility.

network of charging stations were never built.
Whatever happened to that infrastructure
plan?????

The law and funding passed in 2021 with the Jobs Act. It took over 2 years for the first one to be opened up and by the end of 2024, only 44 were built and opened in 12 states.

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48351/R48351.1.pdf]

I'd love one, but for that reason, I'm out. I don't have $50k for a pickup truck. I have $30k for a pickup truck.

Those are selling very well

F-150 base is $40k. Lightning is $50k. No options. $40k is a bridge to far for me with no options. $50k is not even on the map.

Most folks I know trust their ICE to do the job, and won't spend more for an EV, truck if on an EV truck at all. ICE parts are relatively plentiful, ICE maintenance tempo and cost is familiar and better understood by all, and there's the relative ubiquitous knowledge base in every city in the US on how to work on and maintain ICE vehicles. Hundreds of EV's "freezing to death" off Lake Michigan in winter a few years back didn't boost confidence, either. I was just saying, despite all that, for me, it's cost. +/-$10k has real impact to me financially, and as such I'm out for now.

We just got a Land Cruiser - north of 80K.

AKA 4x what my parents paid for the house I grew up in.