- The body panels were composite but they want to go to stamped metal for production.
- It's based off of the subaru ascent; at least most of the frame and suspension is.
- NMC chemistry, didn't get an OEM name for the actual cell/pouch though.
- Mostly off the shelf Bosch power-train components. Will be interesting to see a tear-down once they're for sale.
- No commitment on how "open" the vehicle will be to modifications. They have designed in attachment points for upgrades but it didn't seem to be anywhere as extensive as what Slate is doing. This makes some sense; they have a more "finished" vision where Slate is intentionally taking the "our vision is for you to buy the canvas from us and then make it your own" approach.
On that last point, I don't think Slate has released anything substantial either w/r/t the CAN bus either. As far as I know, their plan is still a BYOD approach for the head-unit so here's hoping that it'll be relatively straight forward to interrogate the busses from an android or linux device. The Telo had a head-unit integrated so who knows how much control you'll have over the vehicle.
I wonder if there's some business model like a mixture of send-cut-send and TSMC where a "FAB" agrees to stamp out 3000 fenders/doors/roofs and ship them to the customer (who then puts together the cars and paints them and such).
This is similar to what lotus did to help bootstrap tesla...
And hey, maybe tesla's going to have some spare capacity lying around so they could be that FAB... ?
I personally really want this truck to succeed. I'd happily trade in my 10 year old model S for this; it'd make dump runs and trips to the garden / home centers a lot easier than in the S...
I do wish they'd go full eccentric and use a citroen inspired oil suspension...
Press tools for car body panels are extraordinarily expensive, which is why low-volume manufacturers generally avoid using pressings wherever possible. It's just inherently very expensive to carve two huge blocks of steel into a smooth curved shape, so you need to sell an awful lot of units to amortise that cost. Tesla's deal with Lotus only worked because they used a fibreglass body - expensive per-unit, but very low tooling costs.
Desktop Metal are developing a sheet forming solution that requires no bespoke tooling, but it's a slow process with fairly poor surface finish.
Right -- this is why I use the analogy of TSMC -- chip fabs are also extremely expensive, for similar reasons.
What are the relative costs of the making die set, the press, and setting up and doing a run of stampings, and the facility and employees to actually house the whole kit?
As of right now, if you need to make a car and you don't have a NUMI or similar retired automotive plant sitting around, it's going to be expensive.
What about the hydroforming process?
I guess smaller car makers from the 60s that did make low volume sheet metal cars didn't need to pass crash tests.
Probably The Telo people should just team up with ineos....
The process of a 3D model -> dies > panels that match the model is iterative. Tesla apparently cheaped out on that optimization paths and they had lots of issues towards rear left corner of cars, somehow on both Model S and X.
ODMs like Magna-Steyr and Valmet also exist. They take your plan, build some, and send to you on a ship from Central Europe.
except the fab pays the tooling cost once per process and the tool and die company charges once per design.
I've actually worked a little on hydroforming, but unless you're thinking of a different kind, it was labor intensive, and prone to crinkling in bad spots. we basically concluded that we used less time and got a better result with an English. which would probably run at least $10k for a car body, if you could find someone willing to work for that low an hourly rate.
Again, I'm confident that this is not a viable business, and certainly in no position to make it a viable business even if it was...
But places that make windshields keep forms around and make runs of windshields even for low volume cars; obviously there's less recurring need for fenders or floor pans... But there may be some way to financially engineer a "do a run we pay X per unit; hopefully that results in doing another run and paying X, and if we can get to 100X the per unit costs go down to some other target.
But I was thinking, and perhaps they should just make these cars out of ground up trabants or saturns. Tesla has demonstrated that some customers don't actually care about perfect finishes or gaps or whatnot; I certainly would be fine with a car made out of trabant, especially if it meant I didn't have to worry about dents...
Car companies tend to make the engines and the sheet metal body parts themselves; the tool and die setup to stamp out the sheet metal is enormously capital intensive and there aren't services to stamp up a bunch of sheet metal for you.
I love the fantastic designs and form factors popping up in mini-EV truck/SUV space. My worry is for the business feasibility for these. Why isn’t Tesla making these? They have the supply chain and expertise to easily pull it off and they’d be such a big hit. People switching to them for light cargo would be a REAL contribution in cutting use of carbon.
I can think of one possibility. At Tesla’s scale, production becomes feasible only if they can produce X million units. This is because setting up production tooling, supply chain channels, and other associated costs is prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the demand for these vehicles will be relatively low until influential YouTubers in the construction, farming, and rural sectors become advocates and start promoting them.
In my opinion, electric vehicles (EVs) are perfectly suited for this task. They are ideal for transporting heavy items between nearby destinations, such as moving Home Depot supplies to a construction site or Costco products to a restaurant or store. A range of even 200 miles is practical for this use-case and keeps the cost low (MT1 is a beast by my standard).
For clarification, I am all for more competition. But I am also selfish and I really want this segment to become wildly successful . In any case, I really and truly hope they can make the business case work and be profitable/sustainable.
I don't think Tesla's judgment should be the litmus test. They have capacity to produce 250K Cybertrucks / year, currently on pace to sell < 20K and it's only going down from here.
To be fair, the main reason for this is that the CEO of Tesla looked at "people who buy electric vehicles", and spent the last four years turning himself into a caricature of a villain to those people.
At the best maybe it was some sort of misguided attempt to encourage the American right to buy EVs?
If so it royally backfired and just decimated his own customer base right at the time real competition was entering the market. The Equinox EV roundly beats the Model Y head to head on range, price, AWD, etc. The Ioniq 5 is more expensive but is lovely.
The CT sales are <10% of their capacity, per your wording. Do you think Model Y sales are down 90%?
No doubt Elon is destroying the profitability of his company by being a public asshole, but the Cybertruck is a fundamentally flawed vehicle (almost) nobody asked for, which is why it's a flop. By comparison, (refreshed) 3 and Y sales are not off by nearly as much, and some of that is just because they're just refreshes of existing vehicles people have been buying for many years, and there's a lot more competition in the EV market, and overall EV sales are slowing.
Sorry, must have been another thread, not your wording.
Someone pointed out CT production is <10% of their planned capacity. So the CT is underperforming by 90%, but I'm sure 3/Y sales are _not_ down by 90%. Meaning the CT is an outsize failure, even if you take into account Elon tanking Tesla sales in general, and overall slowing or at least plateauing EV sales.
I can't reply to the other person because their comment got dead'd, but the Y and the Equinox have similar levels of self-driving available anyway. GM's Super Cruise is comparable to what Tesla calls FSD.
You are responding to a message about the cybertruck specifically, so I assume you are implying musk's behaviour is to blame for the poor sales of the CT?
The cybertruck fell flat long before Musk's true identity was revealed (maga/nazi affiliations).
Even if tesla was headed up by the most beloved CEO ever, I reckon the CT would still have sold poorly. It's just objectively a very bad, poorly designed and even worse built vehicle. And surprisingly, I feel like it's design aged very very quickly. It does not look next-gen or futuristic to me at all anymore.
There's a lot of reasons the cybertruck is a failure, but I think a lot of it does come down to Musk; not just the cancelled orders because of his politics, but because purportedly he inserted himself into the engineering and development at a far stronger level for this vehicle than the other Tesla vehicles, and a lot of the issues stem from fulfilling his design demands.
At the time the CT was announced there were no other EV pickups remotely close to buyable. If he had stepped back, and let the people who designed the X, Y, and 3 do their thing, it would have been released in 2020, and even with its unique shape would have sold great, and probably would not have developed the reputation for poor quality that the current one has.
I kind of think it's cool that reality is configured such that Cybertruck exists, but only in a very meta way. Lazy-think me: It feels dumb and is probably just bad focus from a company focus standpoint.
Sadly, trucks like these are like the automotive "small smartphone". At first it appears there is a large vocal market, especially if you read the comment section. Alas, nobody will buy it, just like nobody actually buys small smartphones.
A truck needs to have an 8 foot bed so you can haul plywood and lumber. I see this one does allow it by a “mid gate” and folding the rear seats but that’s still a bit cumbersome. And I prefer to have a metal wall between me and the 2x4s in case of an accident.
"Used to circumvent" translation: the laws are stupidly restrictive so they're normally (pointlessly) illegal. And the reason they're not mainstream is because they're illegal.
Here in Ireland al lot of local "last mile" services (postman, deliveries, council services, repair crews etc) are switching to electric vans. It's such a no-brainer and a great application of evs.
I'm actually wondering why pickups are so popular elsewhere. A van makes so much more sense for a travelling tradie IMO - we need more electric vans!
Outside of farmers and heavy machinery workers, trucks are only a status/culture symbol these days. In my town, 1 out of 10 vehicles is a truck... a very clean and shiny truck that has never carried anything.
Partly driven by EU laws, most EU countries have or are introducing (ultra) low emission zones, barring non-electric now or soon from cities. Companies can see the writing on the wall and are making their 10-15 year vehicle investments accordingly.
> Additionally, the demand for these vehicles will be relatively low until influential YouTubers in the construction, farming, and rural sectors become advocates and start promoting them.
This is a surprising claim to me. Can you point to any other vehicles (even something from John Deere or a competitor) whose demand significantly rose in a way directly attributable to influential youtubers in those niches, and which influencers in particular you think would be particularly influential?
A John Deere is not a fashion statement. A car, or a daily commute truck, very much is, for many. (Sneakers, jeans, or t-shirts could be completely pragmatic, brand-oblivious items, too.)
A John Deere is absolutely a fashion statement, lol. You gotta meet more farmers, because the fights I see break out over Case IH, John Deere, New Holland, and Cat are unreal.
>My worry is for the business feasibility for these
hopefully the success of the ford maverick can allay some of this concern - i don't think anybody was really expecting it to be as successful as it has been, but it seems like there's actually pretty decent demand for a smaller truck.
> Why isn’t Tesla making these? They have the supply chain and expertise to easily pull it off and they’d be such a big hit. People switching to them for light cargo would be a REAL contribution in cutting use of carbon.
I get your point but I also think you are being dismissive of their ongoing contributions to cutting carbon use.
Not about the politics of owning one, but they're just ugly as hell no matter where you live. MAGA conservatives that care about aesthetics do exist (e.g., my mother-in-law).
They have to solve a real problem for people hauling cargo, they don’t really do that as they currently exist. They get significantly worse range when hauling than a normal gas or diesel truck, their only benefit is making feel better about their carbon footprint.
I was legit considering getting an F150 lighting for a little while but when I saw how much your range decreases when towing something it became obvious that it’s not really practical. It’s just objectively worse at hauling than a gas car.
Hopefully we see more battery tech breakthroughs that make electric trucks viable work vehicles.
It is worse at hauling. I can get between 150 to 200 miles while towing my 4000 lb RV with my lightning. What’s nice though is I can get a full charge at my campsite for the night so I never really pay for transportation. Turns out 200 miles per day is good enough for cross country RVing.
For everyday driving, I pay about $8.50 for a “full tank” of charge that gets me around 300 miles. That’s about $100 worth of gas in an equivalent gas truck.
That’s being said I think the ideal truck would have about 2x-3x the current battery capacity of the extended range lightning.
The new huge GM EV & SUV trucks do have way more battery - and weight. The GM Silverado EV Work Truck is EPA 492 miles, tested at 530 by edmonds. So take the common rule of thumb, divide range by half or maybe a little more and you get about 250 miles of towing range. https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/topic/us/en/2025/....
In a couple of recent youtube videos, "Aging Wheels" thoroughly tested a variety of trailers towed behind a variety of vehicles and then also added weight to the trailer to see the efficiency impact of towing a trailer with a lot more weight. They found a 4.3% efficiency drop by adding weight to max out the towing, compared to towing without the extra weight. Weight isn't what matters on towing impact, it's the wind resistance of the trailer that matters much more.
They did a long series of comparison drives (in the about 30 mins video) with different trailers and then loaded them with extra weight to see the impact. It was smaller than you expect. The video with all the tests is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA.
I heard about this on the batteries included podcast where they interview the author of the video above, and kind of give high level summary with some details, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJv-xAqcTI.
That first video was very well done, answers so many questions all at once. I’m going to put effort into making my setup much more aerodynamic. That’s a potential 30-50 miles more per charge there!
It’s pretty complicated. The issue with hauling is that it craters your aerodynamics and explodes your rolling resistance, so you need massive battery capacity. Or to slow down, but most people don’t want to do that.
They are cheaper to run almost everywhere (depending on the cost of electricity versus gas of course). No breakthrough in battery technology needed for that.
They don't run everywhere though. They run until the fuel runs out. At least with
liquid fuels that just needs a short stop to refuel, and stations are everywhere. a recharge takes longer and places to do it are not as common. If you are towing there are places you can't get.
They partnered with Yves Behar for the exterior and interior design, so the current version leans more on the design over function side of things. The interior is getting a whole revamp for the actual units that'll go to customers. One of the things I confirmed is they're going with physical buttons below the screen. The door cards will be slimmed down, and they won't use cork like it currently does.
It's interesting to note that Béhar has founder credit for Telo Trucks, he's not a one-shot contractor. I guess his designs studio is involved with the new version as well.
Still as ugly as last time it appeared on HN, it has none of the charm of a Kei truck. I wish any company would just take the old Ford Ranger designs (2011 and earlier) and make a truck on that. Or better yet, Ford themselves could redo the electric version of the Ranger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV) from 25 years ago with modern tech but the same look.
I believe small trucks were unintentionally killed by CAFE. The regulation gives companies fuel efficiency targets. Prior to 2011, there were separate targets for categories like "passenger" and "light truck", but since 2011 it's been based on a formula of wheel footprint. Manufacturers realized that instead of trying to make current models more fuel efficient they could make bigger trucks instead. It was definitely one of the greatest failures of regulation and unfortunate that Congress never fixed it in 14 years. CAFE was essentially gutted in the recent budget bill.
That regulation certainly didn't help. Though more fingers can be pointed around, I think, for what has contributed in important amounts. What also has to be explained is that the modern giant F-150 is just a massively popular vehicle vs. all other vehicles, even if I and other small truck enjoyers don't have much interest in one. I think the optionality of them helps them sell quite a bit. As one incentive, regulations on car seat requirements often come up in various government complaints, but the F-150s with a dual cab can fit 3 in the back (and under the seats and the truck bed handles whatever else like strollers and so on), so the vehicle can make sense as a family vehicle for a younger and not too poor family. Interest rates on loans being lower until recently also helped not so rich people stomach the financing, though sales have been getting back to 2019 levels so I'm not sure how much that matters. Any other aspirations like towing a trailer/camper, or taking it onto dirt roads, or doing occasional "truck stuff", make it all the more attractive even if the options aren't exercised or can be individually satisfied better by other choices.
That's the natural thing you think of, but then you have the problem that a fuel tax is a regressive tax on the poorest - who are usually also driving less efficient vehicles because they're cheaper, so they're hit twice as hard. But, if you tax vehicles by size, then you run into the issue that a lot of working-class people need large trucks to do their work. It's a hard problem and I've been thinking about it for a while.
Thinking government can help is wrong to begin with. It can't, it can only get in the way. Perhaps electric vehicles and definitely smaller vehicles could've been more prevalent today without the CAFE rules. Other environmental rules prevent (or make prohibitively expensive, same thing) the mines in which rare earth metals for batteries for EVs are produced.
At least the federal EV mandates are gone now (my state's still exists though, sadly). That would've only driven up costs, meaning more people either would NOT drive EVs at all, or would be even more in debt then they are now.
Congress probably isn't functional enough to pull it off, but they could pass a regressive fuel tax and then make up for it with adjustments to income tax. E.g. adjust progressive tax brackets or the EITC.
This is 3860 x 1854 x 1676mm, or 14% x 25% x -16% bigger than Japanese Kei car specifications(3400 x 1480 x 2000mm max.) Closest match in features among Kei cars would be Daihatsu Hijet Deck Van, except that one is 465mm / 18" shorter that this having an awkwardly short 880mm / 35" long bed.
There's a reason limited production vehicles are almost always sports cars. Huge economies of scale are needed to target the budget market that you're not going to get as an unknown brand.
When I scrolled quickly through the landing page looking for the price, I noticed it wasn't there and figured it would be expensive. I didn't think it would be this much though...
This is a breath of fresh air. Modern pick up trucks post-2017 are giant vehicles with high danger to pedestrians. They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
> They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets
When I was off-roading and traveling a lot of dirt trails with my truck I would also wash it, wax it, and keep it in pristine condition when I got back home.
What did you expect? That we’d leave the mud on it forever, never wash it, and all of the side panels would be bashed in? If you’d climb under the truck (as I do for oil changes) you could see a lot of scrapes and dings from rocks, but I avoid damaging the side and front because that’s very expensive to repair.
Anyway, most of the trucks sold today aren’t sold in the off-road trim. They’re sold with features like lower clearance air dams up front for better fuel economy, on-road tires for better road noise and fuel economy, and commonly in 2WD trims. A new F150 can get 25mpg on the freeway even without the hybrid option.
I work remote so my truck isn’t used for commutes. I frequently haul things in the bed. I off road with friends.
Yet that doesn’t stop some people from making snide remarks about driving a truck. Some people love being angry at truck drivers and imagining they’re all just making irrational choices. They won’t be happy until we’re driving to Home Depot or UHaul every other weekend to rent a truck or trailer instead of parking one in our driveways.
It doesn’t stop them from calling me up and asking for help moving furniture when they need it, though. :)
You seem very intent (here, and in the loneliness thread) on projecting your own experiences as the baseline on which things should be evaluated.
It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed. Millions of school pickups happening on massive trucks - and SUVs - are not ceasing to happen because you loaded your own with a pile of grass. People buy them because they’re “safer”, comfortable and look good. This is coming from research data for years now,
and not only in the USA.
It can be hard to relate to changes happening at societal scale that don’t affect your own microcosm, but how else can we be aware of it, and act on, if not through data, averages and trends?
Let's be honest. I only rarely use most of the features of my vehicles.
What's worse? A not in use bed, or a not in use back seat?
I have a truck, because I find it more convenient to have a truck bed anytime I need it, than to have to arrange to borrow or rent one. The bed doesn't get used often, but it's also a reasonable vehicle for driving solo or with one passenger; two in a pinch. Much better visibility than any other vehicle I have, too. Unfortunately, the single cab, 6-ft bed small truck market disappeared, and I got this one used with too big of an engine, so the mileage is poor... when I had a 4-cylinder small truck, mileage was better, but I don't drive that much anymore anyway.
But, I have lots of space, so I can keep a car for transporting a car pool in comfort, a PHEV with good mileage for longer trips that don't need anything special, a small truck for doing small truck things, and an old van with removed back seats that's fun to work on and can carry things that shouldn't get wet when it's raining. The van visibility towards the front is even better than the truck, because it's cabover, but visibility to the back isn't as good... None of those modern pillars that make it hard to see out the sides though.
> What's worse? A not in use bed, or a not in use back seat?
It's more "what's worse? A huge truck with worse visibility, alone, or a car that has better visibility, safety features, and less likely to kill someone in an accident, driven alone".
Obviously if the bed or the back set were the only swap, none of it matters.
And like... yeah there's the calculus of how often you use it etc.
My s-10 is 190 inches long by wikipedia. A same year Honda Accord is 189.5–191.1 in long. The accord is marginally wider.
Driving alone in my s-10 takes the same space as driving alone in an Accord if I had one. And it's easier to see around or through the S-10, so everyone gets more visibility.
The S-10 hood height and length is more than an Accord, so there may be some additional risk there, sure.
Either way, a cabover design like the linked vehicle should appeal. Better visibility to the front, and less wasted space.
You know, for someone who clearly is a bit triggered (reasonably) by dealing with whatever stereotypes and judgements people make about trucks and truck owners, their post is quite positive and respectful. Your reply to it is not. It seems like your argument is “the data indicates a statistical likelihood that someone judging, assuming, or stereotyping will still be accurate.” The factual inaccuracy of prejudice is not the problem with prejudice, the prejudice is
I fail to see how prejudice against waste is a problem.
Prejudice is a bad thing- for things that people can't change, like their race or age. Prejudice against people making bad or wasteful decisions is a good thing.
No, prejudice is bad, full stop. By definition it means to judge someone for something before you actually know for sure that they have/do the thing that bothers you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, that’s not the problem or the point. The point is you can’t, or shouldn’t, view or treat someone as though they have some quality you dislike when you don’t actually know about this individual and only know that a high percentage of them do. You can’t judge an individual this way! If you hate waste (as do I) and you feel trucks contribute to that and that a majority of truck owners don’t make use of their trucks, then great! Speak about it exactly like that. But you can’t simply take any truck driver and say “that individual is wasteful” without knowing.
You can’t do that any more than you can assume my friends and I are criminals and drug dealers because at some point we decided to use Telegram as our primary messaging app, or like ICE can assume anyone standing near a pro-Mexico protest is an illegal immigrant, you cannot attribute a quality to an individual without having actual knowledge of it.
But nobody is here to judge individuals. It’s the other way around - the discussion is around behavioral trends and data, they were the ones bringing in personal anecdotes to counter it. The point is to look at the behavior of of the general population and its impact, not trying to prove that anyone in particular conforms (or not) to the overall trend.
The point is you can't reliably tell if someone's choice of vehicle is wasteful unless you get to know them a bit. Snap-judging someone's entire lifestyle in the second it takes to recognize a make and model isn't constructive.
> This is a breath of fresh air. Modern pick up trucks post-2017 are giant vehicles with high danger to pedestrians. They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
That's not a prejudice that's literally how they are marketed and used to a large extend.
The second poster said, he is not using it that way, sure fine nobody said that _everybody_ is using a pick up truck this way, however as the reply to the other post said, there is ample research that the majority of pickup trucks are never used offroad and hardly ever have anything in their bed. Why did the responder feel triggered? And let's not ignore the fact that people driving pickups on the road does have a cost for everyone else, they reduce safety for everyone not in a pick up as well as pedastrians and cyclist, they have poorer milage so are contributing unnecessarily to climate change...
Now as to the point of all prejudice is bad. That's a pretty strong statement. Are you not judging people by their actions? If someone walks around with a swastika (sorry for godwins law, but you made an absolute statement) on his sleeve, is it prejudice to judge him?
If prejudice is bad full stop, even to entirely freely chosen actions, then it's wrong to criticize people for writing prejudiced comments - after all, you're being prejudiced against prejudiced comments, and being prejudiced is wrong.
(Please note that criticising nested paradoxes of tolerance expires after one use per conversation.)
In the UK there was also a loophole that allowed them to be treated as a business expense when bought by sole traders. Many a hairdresser bought a pickup over the years.
That was changed so adding rear seats meant you could no longer class it as a company vehicle (the setup that was most common).
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.
Just want to point out that big pickups are really about the hauling capacity, it's not like their beds are much bigger than a modern Ford Ranger. An F250 can safely pull 10 tons, and a dually F450 can pull 20t. Usually you aren't towing...but when you need to haul nontrivial loads you need a big truck.
What's a reasonable scenario where average citizen need to haul 10, let alone 20 tons, on such regular basis that they need to own that capability themselves? Just rent or hire help. I would imagine that to also require special driving license, even if the car technically can handle it? We are not talking about professional use here, for that, use as big of a truck as you want.
They need it to take their 20 tons of artisanal tomatoes and sourdough bread to farmers market. For backhoe and other heavy equipment that they rent on a daily basis. They help their friends and family move, with the 6 x 12 utility trailer add on, which can be daisy chained. They have large families with boats, jetskis and canoes that need to be towed for fun activities. Haul lumber and tons of stuff from homedepot for the DIY remodeling projects, once again helping friends and families. Volunteering on nextdoor to helpout Ukrainian and palestinian refugees, helping charities with food, clothes, tires, furniture donations and donations of upto 20 tons of gold bars. Helping friends and family buy/sell and resell antique furniture, audio equipment and plasma TVs, lots of trips to and from self storage. A big pickup truck also helps build a big house with a massive garage with its own DIY repair shop. Also, lots of friends with other pickup trucks that get stalled need towing help. Beer, lots of beer for weekend sports watching. Hunt hogs and bring meat home. Most importantly, it helps get away from wife to help a friend/family, which is the killer app.
Let’s cut to the chase here and flip this around. You tell people how often they need to be using the bed or towing things before you would accept their decision to buy versus rent as reasonable?
I go through periods where I tow weekly for months. Then I also have periods where I may tow nothing for 6-12 months. I rented for a bit and it was a huge pain in the ass for many reasons not to mention fairly expensive, can be so expensive to make paying the high price on a truck worth it.
If, as I suspect, you have never had the need to tow. Or do not live a lifestyle by trade/hobby that occasionally necessitates it, just say you can’t relate to the problems and inconveniences that renting poses and quit pretending nobody has thought of this before.
Your case sounds more justifiable, but there is definitely a threshold of use below which buying extra utility doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I believe that a large number of Americans in particular sit under this threshold.
I feel that even with my current vehicle, which is an AWD electric compact SUV — it’s a great, highly capable car but in practice I’ve found that I’m practically never coming close to approaching the ceiling of its capabilities, which makes it feel wasted on me. I could get by just fine with something like a Bolt or e-Golf or a fossil fuel counterpart like a Fit and so once my lease is up I’ll probably be “downgrading”.
You cannot rent a truck with a bed. Try it - nearly all rental 'trucks' have storng use restrictions such that you can't use them as a truck. even home depot trucks are for taking your purchases home and can't be used for other truck work. Even if you can use it, they often check the condition so if what you haul will scratch the bed you are out of luck.
if you manage to navigate that and find a truck that will work - the cost is so high that you are money ahead owning your own truck after rediculasly few rentals.
I regularly rent a Mitsubishi 20' flatbed with 1T lift gate for around $75 a day incl fuel. they don't bother doing the walk around since its 80% dents anyways.
And towing anything is also forbidden. Yes there are commercial rentals but they are priced substantially more than the trucks at Home Depot or other consumer rental places.
When I was renting more often, I found Enterprise had pick-up trucks and you can tell them you will be towing during the RSVP (I think it may be a small extra fee, but mostly they want to make sure they get you a truck with a towing hitch). I still use this option if I need more than my half ton can handle (thankfully not very often). I wouldn't use the bed for anything as they are always nice new trucks and any wear would be extremely obvious and I'm not sure if they will charge me. I will rent a trailer from Uhaul instead, another layer to the inconvenience.
you probably cannot re&t such a truck. Home depot and all rental cars places have a no towing clause in the contract. Uhaul only tows the own trailer by concract.
the few rent for towing places are rare, and charge high fees such that it is cheaper to own your own truck.
Most enterprise locations are no towing. Most uhaul trucks are the same despite that webpage. When hou find otn that can tow the costs are so high that it is almost always cheaper to own a truck you drive empty 95% of the time. You have to run your own numbers but everytime I run them for me I can't justify a car and renting a truck when I need one. (I mostly ride my bike)
That might be a side effect of everyone owning a pickup, so demand is low.
In the Netherlands you can easily rent a transport van or truck for €30+/day. Owning your own would never be cheaper, especially as road tax is based on vehicle weight.
> You seem very intent (here, and in the loneliness thread) on projecting your own experiences as the baseline on which things should be evaluated.
I was pointing out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You cannot conclude that a truck never goes off-road by observing them on city streets. That was your claim, and I explained why it didn’t make sense. I also explained why trucks are not primarily sold as off-road vehicles anyway.
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed
If you read the “studies” that make these claims they use two tricks:
First, they specifically exclude a truck defined as a work truck.
Second, they redefine “using the bed” to some arbitrary threshold, like hauling a large load of loose dirt or hauling something over so many hundred pounds.
If you actually believe that truck owners aren’t putting anything in the truck bed, you’re out of touch.
But why does this one point trigger you so much? If I showed you a similar study that the majority of people with back seats rarely had more than 2 people in their cars, would you become similarly enraged at the people buying 5-seat cars instead of a compact 2-seater?
If I showed you a study that the majority of people rarely use more than 200 horsepower would you start getting triggered by all of the 300, 400, or even 500 horsepower cars so wastefully driving around?
There’s something about pickup trucks, specifically, that makes a vocal minority irrationally angry and triggered. It’s a funny meme to watch because so many comments in this thread are absolutely sure that they understand the situation but they don’t understand basic facts about how you can’t tell if someone goes off-road by judging the condition of their paint, or that using a truck for work purposes doesn’t render it visibly damaged in a way that they can see. They just see trucks, get triggered, mix it with misleading “studies”, and come to believe odd conclusions like “truck drivers don’t use their beds”
Why are you triggered by the vocal irrational minority? You seem quite defensive for someone who is confident and comfortable in the the truck they own and how they use it and maintain it.
Not them, but I find that people who take out political frustration against non-political things quite annoying.
For example, when Tesla was blue-coded, way more comments here were highly forgiving, if not outright glazing. They became red-coded, and suddenly you’d see tons of highly technical reasons they sucked. You can gut yourself into coming up with many reasons this isn’t true, but it’s definitely true.
Trucks have gotten this since the beginning.
It’s not that it’s triggering, it’s just more annoying to have to waste a lot of time reading things that are clearly therapy for the poster more than any sort of interesting opinion.
It's getting harder to find good online discussions devoid of bias and emotions. With user moderation, control goes to those with the most time to waste online, meaning the least happy, productive and social.
Take away the user moderation and you still have bias but you lose the feedback loop. You level the playing field between folks who live in their basements and folks with more balanced lives.
> I was pointing out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
This discussion is pretty much done, but I just wanted to note that I’m not the original poster you were replying to.
> You cannot conclude that a truck never goes off-road by observing them on city streets. That was your claim, and I explained why it didn’t make sense.
No, the claim is that the majority of them are not going off road, not any particular vehicle (yours included).
I enjoy cars, and driving a large pickup is fun. I also happen to think they are not appropriate vehicles for the majority of people, should not be a default option, take up way too much space, and make city roads significantly less safe. This is not an emotional response, just an opinion. If your use of a pickup makes sense I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
And yes, I also agree that 200hp+ ICE cars are wasteful, and even if they are an EV, most people should not be driving something that powerful as it also has an impact on road safety. Similar thing: you enjoy cars, drive well, and own an SRT? Great, have fun! Should the average driver have one? Hell no.
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.
I'm not here to defend brodozers, but you cannot possibly prove this statement. That a _pickup truck_ isn't hauling the majority of the time it is on the road is not some new thing. But of course there are more pickup trucks on the road than ever, so if you argument is aggregate time of all pickup trucks not doing truck things is the highest its ever been is certainly true, but you'd probably have to go back to before the 80s for that number to actually be meaningfully different per truck.
Not sure what you mean by "prove this statement" but answering questions like this is exactly why organizations do consumer research. To wit [1]:
> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
The hauling figure is useless without specifying what they mean.
Usually these “studies” redefine hauling to mean something specific like hauling loose dirt or something extremely heavy.
If you can read a quote claiming 2/3 of truck owners don’t “put something in the bed” more than once a year then and not realize that something is wrong with these statistics then you’re missing something.
The question is not whether they "put something in the bed" — it's whether they use the bed in such a way that the trunk or back seat of a smaller vehicle would be unsuitable.
The Telo appeals to me. I've resisted getting a truck because I like a smaller vehicle and don't want to have undue impact and because I've listened to arguments like this before.
But I was offroad last weekend. I move sheets of plywood a couple of times per year and either need to beg my wife to help or sit around waiting at Home Depot for the truck to be available. I have stuff to move for robotics comps that I'm always barely able to get there by cramming it in my car + begging a couple of parents to help out. Dealing with the bike rack is hard. Ordering things like Ikea furniture for delivery is expensive, latent, and not exactly low impact iself.
Yah, 90% of the time I need a car, but 10% of the time I need a little more and there's enough friction around making it work that I would pull the trigger on something like this.
On the other hand I don't think I could say "frequently" to any of those questions.
1. An ideal society would be structured such that you wouldn't need to buy a truck you use as a car 90% of the time. But that society doesn't exist here, and you shouldn't feel guilty about living by incentives you didn't create. Maybe you do need a truck!
2. But we're not talking about people who compromise to make 10% of their trips more convenient; we're talking about people who never use their truck for truck things. A car would be better choice for them 100% of the time, yet they still drive a truck.
There’s a quote from some consulting firm that goes around claiming 2/3 of truck drivers don’t “put something in the bed” more than once a year.
It’s a laughable claim for anyone who thinks about it for more than a second.
The way they usually get to these numbers is by redefining what “hauling a load” means to be something extremely heavy or for loose fill materials. So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
The company in question has been doing their survey for two decades. It’s a private data set, but has been reported on by multiple serious news outlets which will have their own data scientists looking over the data, e.g. Axios: https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
You can also verify the data is coming from real drivers, by searching for “New Vehicle Experience Study” and seeing all the posts from users who receive the survey and think it’s some kind of scam.
> So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
Even if that’s the case, the truck owners doing this probably don’t need a full size truck. A 90s-era small truck or maybe even a kei truck would suffice, and yet more often than not the trucks in question are the likes of F-150s.
Agreed, unfortunately small trucks are increasingly harder and harder to find. A 90s truck also won’t have the amenities that a modern truck has.
I think if they are just hauling mountain bikes, they could get a small hitch installed and purchase a high-quality bike rack. A roof rack can carry 2x4s very well.
A rack mount on a normal European-sized car is perfectly sufficient for a couple bicycles, I have one, and a trailer for my enduro motorcycle, or a fridge, or anything else I occasionally transport. Anything bigger and I'll rent an actual truck.
> So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
If that's all you're doing, anything more than a Maverick is overkill. Bike racks and wood delivery are a thing. Shit you can fit a mountain bike in the back of a sedan. I see people doing this at trailheads all the time.
Those suburban moms don't need a Yukon to take their two kids to soccer practice either.
I dislike the whole "justify why you like X" thing. People can always find the flimsiest of reasons why they want to prohibit things they don't like and then demand others justify why they should get to keep what they have. Just simply liking something never seems enough for those fighters against joy.
I really don't like pick up trucks. I also think most of their practical uses can be achieved with other vehicles. But that shouldn't concern me. If the owner of the car gets joy out of it, then that should be enough. I don't have to like what others like, and they don't have to like what I like.
>If the owner of the car gets joy out of it, then that should be enough.
For most things, yes, absolutely! However, considering the dangers of huge trucks it is very valid to have concerns about them. An exaggerated analogy: if the owner of a gun gets joy out of free firing it into the air that should be enough.
Respectfully, if you don’t know how long a 2x4 is, I think it would be very reasonable to look this up, as it will make you much better equipped to make this argument.
I generally agree with what you are saying, and frequently haul 2x4s without my truck - but the solution to that is a long flatbed trailer, not a Thule hitch attachment.
it does depend a lot on what you buy it for, but obviously 8' is a good benchmark.
But honestly... at 8' I'm not sure why you're bothering with anything (unless you're getting a lot of them), i usually just threw 8 footers in my Honda Fit and closed the hatch.
Ironically most pickup truck beds are shorter than 8' and most likely a 8' piece of lumber would have to lay diagonally sticking out over one of the edges.
Still good for occasional piece of furniture, lots of lumber, or plywood.
The shortest bed f150 you can buy is 5.5ft, with a 2ft tailgate, trivially hauling 8ft with just a few inches overhang with the tailgate down, and easily doing 10ft lumber.
Again, I think pickup trucks are idiotically oversized and dangerous to pedestrians, but arguing against them by repeating things that anyone that uses a pickup knows is nonsense is not helping win over any detractors.
To be clear, I am not arguing against pickup trucks. The reason I bring up the bed length is a personal pet peeve thing. I have some amount of OCD going on, and I will be damned if I will ever approve of a truck that can't fit a piece of lumber in its bed without leaving the tailgate open that can fit into a Ford Fiesta with the trunk closed.
I am fully aware of why and how people use pickup trucks and I have no beef with that on cultural grounds. But if I were to get one it would be a long bed truck and I would sacrifice the cab space if needed.
Exactly, because my car can do that. You can put your shopping in the flatbed but you wouldn’t claim you were “using” the flatbed or “hauling” a pint of milk and a load of bread…
> A new F150 can get 25mpg on the freeway even without the hybrid option.
As a non-American it's super weird that this is considered a good thing. That'd be considered utterly atrocious in most parts of the developed world.
I completely get that a truck is absolutely the best tool for the job for many people. But it's pretty obvious the OP was pointing out the people who own a truck and use it to get from home to their desk job.
It's not good in 2025. The fuel economy of a modern sedan (eg. a Toyota Camry) is around 50. It's just this one poster who is defending trucks saying it's good.
The average fuel economy for cars on the road right now is around 25mpg.
You can also get a 40-50mpg brand new sedan here if you want, but they serve different purposes.
You can also get a hybrid F150 that gets better mileage.
You can also get a fully electric F150 that doesn’t use any gas at all.
I was trying to make a point to counter the silly assumptions throughout this thread, such as the person who keeps claiming trucks are “incompetent” at being normal vehicles.
> You can also get a 40-50mpg brand new sedan here if you want, but they serve different purposes.
They don't. Your average truck is hauling a person from home to work to grocery store to home 10% of the time. 80% of the time it's parked. 90% of the remaining 10% is also covered be a sedan
I'm having to convert to US gallons to Imperial here but...
My old ICE car was getting approx 50mpg (which is approx 41mpg for you) and was considered poor for its age. My new one (hybrid) is 60mpg (approx 50mpg for you).
For a fairly modern car (e.g under 10 years old) in the UK you'd expect at least 40–50 MPG (UK) / 33–42 MPG (US), and even that would be considered on the lower end. Most modern cars are either electric or hybrid here these days so you'd expect 60–100 MPG (UK) / 50–83 MPG (US).
Few modern gas cars will get over 50 US MPG in city usage. 35 MPG is probably a better estimate for the hybrid fleet which is still much, much better than gas cars of a decade ago.
That's exceptional fuel economy for that car, typical looks like 25-35 MPG. If you are more skilled than average (I'm guessing so), don't have too many short trips, and live somewhere relatively flat no doubt it's doable. Edit: while I was looking I checked out the Prius and RAV4 and it turns out median reported MPG is around 49 and 39 so maybe my intuition is tainted by living in a hillier than average area.
25 is terrible highway mileage. When I (USA) had a pickup truck as my daily commuter for a few years 5-10 years back, I got ~22 mpg on "city" roads, and >30 mpg on highways. And that's not considered good.
This is a deeply emotional response to someone making the completely obvious point that the vast majority of trucks are grocery haulers. That's not opinion - it's statistics.
Nobody wants to tell you you can’t buy a truck, but the rest of us shouldn’t bear the negative externalities of every person who wants to buy a truck - especially when the facts show most of those people would be served (practically if not emotionally) just as well by a smaller vehicle.
Why should we subsidize truck (and SUV) ownership? They ruin roads, are vastly more dangerous, require wider lanes, have worse visibility of pedestrians, pollute more, are louder, and take up more space than other options. Yet we don’t make SUV owners pay for any of that. We subsidize their gas, their road repairs and expansions, their car insurance, their storage space, their car payments, not to mention ignore the injuries, deaths and discomforts they cause.
My 2011 VW Golf gets 40mpg… so I’m not very impressed by an F150 that 99.9% of the time performs the same job (carrying one person and no cargo) getting 25. (Even if this isn’t your experience, the facts show that for most people it is)
You should be free to make your own decisions! I support you in that. I can believe that your lifestyle justifies owning a truck, even though that doesn’t generalize to most SUV owners. I just don’t want to pay for other people’s lifestyle decisions. It’s like we have socialism for truck owners, but market capitalism for people who need healthcare
My truck is used purely and solely for truck shit - getting in and out from where we live, which is absolutely impassible with anything other than a high 4x4 with mudder tyres, and hauling everything from trees to gravel to water to batteries - there’s almost always something substantial in the bed.
It gets washed maybe twice a year, as it ends up filthy within 20 minutes anyway - and the panels all have scratches and dents from forging through brush.
For car shit, I have an (electric) car which I park on the main road.
The idea of waxing my truck is up there with the idea of waxing my legs.
25mpg is still insanely, obscenely profligate when a reasonable vehicle (say a Renault Clio) gets somewhere between 50 and 70. That will make some people angry and it’s hard to see that as entirely irrational.
I completely agree and I personally consider it ethically wrong to buy an ICE at this point in time. There’s still a premium to pay for an EV, but the excuses are rapidly evaporating. What this tells me is that for all the lip service people give about the environment, fundamentally most people don’t really give a shit.
In the U.K. I see many pickups owned by hairdressers (judging by the livery) in suburban areas. Something tells me they’re not transporting generators around with them…
People addicted to online forums love to comment and upvote posts which trash talk trucks. People who own and enjoy trucks are busy leading fun and productive lives and can't be bothered to waste their time with online arguments.
Yea, it's not like men have a natural preference for tools, liking to repair things, cool toys to carry on the back, or think "why get a mini-cooper when I can get an F-150 to carry my hunting gear, tow the boat". It obviously all culture-imposed gender preferences.
Vehicular elephantiasis is largely the result of perverse incentives from emission regulation. Make something big enough and it fits into different more lax categories. The way we do emission and mileage standards might do more harm than good unless you’re an oil company.
Maybe, but it's clearly worked it's way into fashions as well. The F-150 lightning doesn't have to worry about emissions categories, but it's just as elephantine as the rest, including a child-killing vision-obstructing front hood and grille whose only purpose is to enclose a frunk.
I’ve driven plenty in Europe. Those small cramped roads can’t handle big vehicles and parking anywhere is non existent or highly inconvenient. I bet that’s the main reason European cars tend to skew smaller.
I have a Subaru Forester. When I drive a sedan everyone shines their headlamps into my face. I parked my Forester behind a sedan and drove back and forth. My lights were not in their cabin.
So other people drive in a way that is not compatible with my driving because I don’t want headlamps in my cabin. Occasionally there’s a lifted truck behind me and it brightens my cabin.
In those moments I fantasize about placing retroreflectors all over my rear seat headrests but then I pull over and let them past and the moment passes.
Besides, a HN truism is “Yield to gross tonnage”. I liked that. It makes sense that HN users who believe that if you’re big others should get out of the way also get large cars.
“The cemeteries are full of people with right of way” so smaller vehicles should get out of the way of larger vehicles or risk death. It’s a good lesson. Can’t say it’s false.
I guess there should be rules about the height of headlights. It seems like exactly the sort of safety and compatibility problem that standards exist to solve.
US mainstream belief is that standards can be enforced at factory but no laws should be enforced on individuals. I act in that ecosystem. Not worsening it, but not sacrificing myself to it.
What is also obviously true is that road damage scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass, and that therefore vehicle taxation should increase at a similar power, so that the drivers of the 3-tonne trucknutted Canyoneros stop freeloading on the community.
Also the arms race of collision survivablity. I have no interest in driving a big truck, but with all the other big trucks out there I’m seriously tempted just for my own safety…
The big trucks are not evaluated for safety to the same standard as other vehicles. They aren't rigged with exploding gas tanks anymore, but the feeling of safety is mostly psychological.
That’s not the safety risk. The safety risk is not being in a big truck and getting hit by one. It’s not so much to do with the vehicle’s safety features as to (1) mass; and (2) height of the cabin.
That’s part of the issue. The safety ratings of a pickup truck do not incorporate the risk of the front end causing fatalities in collisions.
The feeling of safety is part of that - drivers think they have better visibility due to seating position. They are also more likely to roll and spin out than other vehicles.
I've been looking at the GTK Boxer since it was first announced. The modularity means you can bring the kids to school then swap the rear module for one more suited to transporting raw materials, you just need a garage equipped with a 15t crane to do the swap at home in just a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn_WblYc4xk
It is much safer to be in a big truck hitting an another big truck, than in a small sedan hitting a big truck. Physics of momentum beats out safety features. Actual studies do show this: it is safer for the occupant of the truck in a two-vehicle collision.
More trucks on the road make the chance of fatalities overall higher. You often find articles saying that fatalities go up when you introduce a truck, and that is true. But that's because trucks are more likely to kill pedestrians or drivers of smaller cars, NOT because of risk to the truck driver. []
It would be better if there were fewer trucks on the road. But if everyone else is buying a truck, it becomes your selfish incentive to do so as well, for the safety of your* family. It is a tragedy of the commons situation.
[*] The exception is single-vehicle accidents, e.g. rollovers. Those are riskier and more likely for the driver of a truck, but also less of a concern in suburban driving.
Those effectively don't exist anymore. The fine multiplier was reduced to zero, so there's no penalty for violating the standards, retroactive back to 2022.
> I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
It’s about having one vehicle that can do it all. Maybe you’re noticing when there’s one human but you don’t really know how else that person is using the vehicle at other times. Trucks can haul people, things, do road trips, etc. pretty well.
I'm shopping for a truck atm because I need one. I am pretty routinely overloading the towing capacity of my Land Cruiser, and a decent flatbed pickup would obviate the need to hook up the trailer most of the time. Being able to tow/haul 3-4cord of firewood logs in one go would be super convenient, I'll use that capability at least once per year.
And if you're thinking "why not just rent?" I'll ask when was the last time you saw an equipment trailer rental with a winch capable of hauling logs up onto it?
Paradoxically, at least in the context of this thread, my motivation to own a truck is safety and efficiency. A 12 valve Cummins pulling the GCVWR of a 1994-1998.5 3/4 ton Dodge will get right around 10mpg and do it safely.
I admit there are many of you out there, and have no problem with folks who need a truck for truck use cases. That's what trucks are for. I take issue with those buying them for non rational use cases (status, etc), "Pavement Princess" vehicle duty cycles.
You’re spamming this same study throughout the thread without realizing that is uses a different and much stricter definition of “hauling” than the average person.
Could it be possible that while you can cram something in the backseat of a car, a truck bed might result in less damage to vehicle interiors and the object being moved?
It's a tool not a baby. Are you buying vehicles several times the price and encumberance because you can't fold down the rear seats and lay down some tarp?
You make it sound like it would be unreasonable to dunk on people wasting our society resources.
Why not hit on people driving 4 seat cars when they drive alone most of the time? If it affects me it should be normal that I voice an opinion.
Those cars use public space, roads, bridges that are affected more the heavier your car is.
That also drives up the motor power needed which in turn increases public air pollution.
> This is a hilarious take for anyone who has spent any time living outside of a big city.
People outside of big city need big trucks about as often as people in the city.
Source: lived in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina.
Living outside of big city doesn't mean you're immediately a farmer who needs to haul tons of forage or lumber. The absolute vast majority of people don't.
I live in a big city and two children under 10 have been killed by large pickup trucks within a half mile of my home in the last five years. Two that I know of anyway, because I'm acquainted with the families. One had been modified with a "bull bar" making it more dangerous to pedestrians.
>based on the evidence and data
>Evidence and data show that cake taste better than bread, why are they starving? Let them eat cake
I really wonder what kind of world people live in who write such articles and what kind of world people live in who seriously read them. It's hard to believe that they live among us, there must be some separate island in the ocean or something like that where they can write their articles in complete isolation from the rest of the world.
Ehh, vehicle affordability rapidly accelerating away as the middle class evaporates solves the problem if people can’t make financially rational choices themselves. As of this comment, the average price of a new full-size pickup truck is around $64,000, while the average price of a new mid-size pickup truck is about $42,690. This is before tariff impacts are baked in. Doesn’t include operating costs (fuel, insurance, maintenance), putting monthly payments around $1k/month (at least). Let them drive studio apartments around I suppose, if they can get financed and not repo’d in the near term.
Would you cry for me if I wanted a Lambo but couldn’t afford it? You would not. This is different? Everyone is entitled to wildly conspicuous consumption? I argue no.
>affordability rapidly accelerating away as the middle class evaporates solves the problem
But that complete bs. Vehicle affordability is not in any danger, average price of a new pickus trucks depends on the amount of money the population has. Even if the middle class completely disappears, people will just drive cheaper pickups.
>Would you cry for me if I wanted a Lambo but couldn’t afford it?
But they could. And that the reason why "the average price of a new full-size pickup truck is around $64,000"
I’ll see if I have access to the Cox Automotive pickup truck specific repo stats as soon as I’m not mobile. Based on the auto loan delinquency and repo rates, the evidence is fairly robust that people cannot afford these price levels. They get off the lot with the vehicle, certainly, that’s super easy due to easy credit, but then the clock starts ticking on when the car gets repo’d.
(~100M Americans are sub 700 FICO subprime, 33-40% of consumers depending on credit reporting agency providing the data)
The original comment is just about how "irrational" it is.
And truck owners pay more - for the vehicle, for tires, for registration, for gas, etc which are all taxed by the public to reflect their greater usage of public roads.
You would need to argue that trucks have a disproportionate impac. For example, if I commute 2 hours to work in an Accord, is that a greater negative externality than owning a Truck a commuting 15 minutes?
I suspect the answer is no - a truck is some small multiple of a smaller vehicle.
What I see in this thread is that the narrow demographic here is merely expressing a preference - they don't like trucks, and they wish that could be imposed on others. Ultimately, you need to convince your fellow men in an election.
Pickup trucks weigh about 1.5x as much as a sedan (comparing Camry to F150). Due to the fourth power law, they should be taxed about 5 times higher than a sedan simply for road maintainence. I don’t have the numbers, but I doubt that is so. Toll roads typically charge per axle, and as below, gas tax is probably only about 2x. Ironically, EVs should pay more tax for maintenance since they are usually quite a bit heavier—though the OP truck is still ~600 lb lighter than an F150.
Fuel economy is about half in a pickup vs. a sedan, so they pollute that much more. Gas tax obviously scales here, but do the other taxes? Does gas tax go towards remedying the pollution impact at all? I don’t know.
Then there’s the safety impact on pedestrians and other vehicles. I don’t have numbers here, sorry.
Also, if you consider the externalities of cars in general, there's the additional issue of designing our communities around them rather than around the people who live there.
This quote is kinda a meme by now but here's SimCity lead designer Stone Librande on how the team had to make parking lots unrealistically small for the game to be enjoyable [1]:
> When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
If you spend any time looking at parking lots on satellite maps you quickly realize parking lots are nearly always at least twice as large as the building they are for.
Indeed a max-load trailer truck is equivalent to 10,000 cars in road wear. However the benefit of them (since they transport goods for many) is somewhat outweighed. Regardless, that doesn’t obviate taxing personal vehicles at all, nor heavier vehicles more than lighter ones. Some quick searching shows there are about 60x more personal vehicles than trailer trucks in the U.S.
Most race cars aren't electric though? That analogy makes no sense.
If you buy a product that comes with a ton of negative externalities and then don't use the single feature that distinguishes it from other products, people will rightly judge you.
> Most race cars aren't electric though? That analogy makes no sense.
No, they aren't. I attend a significant amount of track events as a driver and I will see maybe 1 electic car every few events. Besides the lack of charging infrastrucutre at most race tracks, the one positive of instant torque/power is significantly outweighed by their overall mass and significant heat generation.
The latter tends to result in a Tesla S being unable to last more than 20 minutes at Laguna Seca or Sonoma before the battery pack overheats and reduces power output requiring the car to exit the track.
The comparison breaks down since, in race car terms, the great acceleration isn’t enough to offset the negatives that make electric cars poor race cars. So in a sense it is pointless cosplay. Even the acceleration might be working against itself since the great acceleration comes at the cost of the battery pack expending more energy, contributing to heat build up.
This isn’t to say the heat problem couldn’t be managed, but one of the biggest issues with race cars generally is heat management so starting from a platform with a unique and significant heat problem isn’t ideal. Then the weight and overall longevity of the battery pack comes into play.
To tout the acceleration without discussing the drawbacks involved in delivering it or the practicalities of leveraging it suggests that it’s such a great feature that the drawbacks either don’t exist or don’t matter.
They also produce no tailpipe emissions and tend to have a lower carbon footprint, more storage space, a quieter cabin, no "hump" for the driveshaft, etc. There are lots of reasons you might choose an electric car other than the acceleration.
On the other hand, a truck's single distinguishing feature is the bed.
Ironically, I don't think ignorance means what you think it means. It simply means not knowing something; it's not, for example, an attitude in itself.
It means exactly what I think. This dunk on truck drivers based on seeing them in the city is ignorance. Trucks are multimodal. Seeing them in one mode does not mean they aren’t used for another.
A lot of modern “trucks” are pretty crappy for actually hauling anything. A few months ago I had the pleasure of loading some furniture into an Escalade. The outside is huge, but the inside is remarkably small. The height of the interior floor is also ridiculous, so it’s extra difficult to lift anything into the vehicle. I don’t think most full size pickups are a lot better.
Also, check out the underside of most of these monster vehicles. The approach, breakover, and departure angles may be awesome, but that’s only because the definitions assume uniform height transverse to the driving direction. If you drive these things over any substantial bump that the wheels don’t go over, the differential will bottom out. Oops. This means that, for many practical purposes, the height of the vehicle and the absurd suspensions don’t buy nearly as much capability as they might appear to.
I wouldn’t consider an Escalade a truck, just a luxury SUV. A Hilux/Tacoma, Tundra or F150 are trucks. And they pretty capable of doing all the things. My Tundra might be one of the best cars I ever owned.
What fraction of modern light trucks do you suppose are ever driven in a technically competent manner off-road, even once, by their original owner?
I bet a larger fraction, albeit still small, are driven around construction sites with crud on the ground, with a driver who pays approximately no attention to what they’re driving over. In which case a monster suspension with a dangly differential is probably less appropriate than a low vehicle without any dangly bits in the middle.
(I’m obviously excluding trucks that are used a loading docks. If you are planning to load and unload at a loading dock, you want your truck to load and unload at loading dock height.)
This. I have had a 2016 F-150 since late 2017 - I'd never owned a truck before. I can go get mulch, take an entire bed-load of stuff to the dump (couches, mattresses, etc). When we go on vacation within driving distance (usually up to 500ish miles for us, we can bring more or less anything we want without concern for space. We took my wife's SUV 2 weeks ago on a 700 mile trip (her mid-sized SUV is much newer) and we had to pack very carefully compared to when we take the truck. Our son plays ice hockey, his hockey equipment stinks (yes it gets aired out...he's still a stinky teenager), but it's never an issue because with the truck, it's not in the passenger compartment. We live in the south but drove to Pittsburgh through 2 snowstorm there and back...lots of SUVs stranded on the road...my 4x4 F-150 made it through without any trouble. When my father in law passed last year, we moved all of his things out of his apartment with my truck. I let my neighbors borrow it when they need to move something large. The only thing that sucks about it is parking in store parking lots. That and buying a newer (not brand new) costs 2x what I paid for my 2016 in 2017. I've toyed with getting rid of it for something smaller, but it's just too versatile for me to give up.
> Maybe you’re noticing when there’s one human but you don’t really know how else that person is using the vehicle at other times.
95% of big trucks I see on the road have one person in them and beyond my anecdotal experience we know statistically that most vehicle trips involve 1 person. It's not super hard to extrapolate from there.
I'm not even particularly "anti" truck, though I do think the increase in size and weight has gotten totally ridiculous.
In a sane society "knowing someone with a truck" is all you really need. In a highly individualistic society "having a truck just in case" is the dominant precept
Fully agreed. Although to add, I literally never met someone with a truck, and in fact never owned a car myself either, but rented a car and also ranted a van plenty of times during a move, even with a driver.
Same reason I don't own an airplane, I just rent one with a driver if I go on holiday trips.
Big caveat: I've always lived in a (capital) city of my country and I have no kids yet.
But by and large I think renting for the 3 day a year use-case makes more sense than owning 365 days of the year, even if you have no friends to rely on.
This. I learned as much when I was clobbered by a distracted teen and my SUV ended up in the shop. I use it a lot for moving people, things and towing (like daily). Nobody would rent me a SUV and allow me to tow with it, only commercial truck rentals at ridiculous rates.
And for the truck driver haters three things:
- Are you speaking from experience or projection? Stereotyping doesn’t work. After owning a large SUV for 25 years I can say with conviction that the price is worth the utility to me. No question.
- I would LOVE to also own a small electric scooter for small trips. The cost and poor quality have put me off for years but it’s inevitable I’ll end up with one soon.
- Our next sedan will be electric as well, and probably weigh more than the SUV.
Eh perhaps if you rent a recreational vehicle from a company that caters these cars 90% to tourists . I've rented plenty of cars for towing, even with the trailer, from the same company. There are lots of companies that specialize in renting out vehicles for moving, construction etc. There is a market for everything.
I'm curious what the population size is of the place you live (order of magnitude). I fully appreciate not every place in the world has such companies with rental offerings.
If you own a boat, jetski or horse trailer etc, and live in a small metropolitan area with few rental offerings, those I think owning a car makes sense. And if it's a large enough boat (so not a jetski, which a regular car can tow), a medium/big SUV or truck is the most sensible choice.
Meanwhile only about 10% of the US population lives in a metropolitan area of less than 100k people. About 65% lives in an area with >1m people for example, where I'd be quite surprised you can't find regular rentals to tow things, my city has plenty and it's <1m people.
And only about 10% of households own boats, and only a fraction of those are stored on-land, and a fraction of those are larger boats that require a sizeable car (SUV/truck).
Meanwhile 80% of cars are either trucks, vans or SUVs.
So statistically the vast majority of people that own SUVs/trucks, do not own a boat or something equivalent that needs an SUV/truck to tow, or who live in a place where there are rentals that allow you to tow whatever you want if the car is rated for it.
And even then you get to the point where the question is still whether you need to own one, or know someone with one.
So I think the point stands: most truck/SUV owners don't own because of their use-case, but because of other reasons (mostly personal style / branding / feeling). Yes of course non-ownership of an SUV/Truck is not an option for 100% of SUV/Truck owners given their use-cases. But the vast majority of SUV/Truck owners statistically don't own something that needs an SUV/Truck to tow, or live in a place where you can find rental alternatives.
I've done this research in 4 different large metropolitan areas, including Chicago.
There are a handful a major problems:
1. They don't guarantee a specific make, model, or configuration. They guarantee a hitch receiver, but they don't guarantee minimum payload capacity, brake controllers, tow mirrors, axle ratio (important for towing), or engine configuration (also critical for towing). This alone is pretty much a breaker. Again, a truck isn't any use if it cannot legally tow your configuration.
1b. Rental trucks are almost always lowest trim levels. They're not going to have a tonneau cover, advanced safety features, or creature comforts of the truck you own/lease.
1c. They do not guarantee fuel capacities or offer extended range tanks. This can be a major problem when you're towing in the middle of nowhere or in mountainous areas.
2. They do not guarantee they will have inventory available when you need it. Everyone wants to go camping and move during major holiday weekends, so it's neigh impossible to actually rent one during peak times. This argument holds against any sort of "just rent from a niche provider". Renting doesn't work if somebody else is renting the vehicle you need during the time you need it.
3. It's wildly inconvenient to actually rent a truck. For example, Enterprise does offer truck rentals - but they come from truck-centric rental locations, geared towards business and commercial use. They basically only operate during standard business hours. That means getting a rental truck requires taking time off.
Some companies offer fleet rentals that basically solve all of the issues above - except these are really more like leasing programs. You can get a month-to-month rental, but prices are pretty absurd. Not to mention, you still have a truck sitting in your driveway for the part of the month you're not traveling.
> * a truck is just a car that misses a roof over the back part of it
Respectfully, a truck is not just a car missing the back part of it. It often has a lot more power, is lifted, has off-road springs, larger wheels, low and high speed gear box, roll cage for the front cabin, raised air intake - the list goes on.
Most people, though, do just need a car with a removable back.
I did this for a while. You’re leaving out some ancillary details: time driving to and from home depot to pick up and drop off the truck, needing a truck and no rentals available, picking up a rental truck and there’s some issue with it, something happens out of your control that requires more time with the truck but you can’t extend the rental… all things i’ve encountered.
At some point the number of times i needed to use it picked up (hah) which multiplied these inconveniences enough that it became worth it to just pick up (hah) a used truck.
I use it exclusively for hauling work, but that usually entails at least one trip without a load, which may lead people to incorrectly judging me for driving it unnecessarily.
You don’t know that. You’re making assumptions. But even if that were true, so what? Maybe it is important to that person’s quality of life to have the truck for weekend adventures or chores.
If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs. Most people buy trucks as a lifestyle choice, not as a practical one.
That’s not to say there aren’t real uses for trucks, or people who use them for their designed purpose.
That’s also not to say people should be required to purchase only vehicles that meet their basic transportation requirements. People drive sports cars even without ever going out to a track.
Trucks (and full-size SUVs) specifically push some pretty crappy externalities onto other road users, so it’s not exactly crazy to be annoyed with people who buy and drive big trucks a personality trait.
I'm sitting here smh. Everyone in my (rural) neighborhood owns a pickup truck. Except for the one dude who towed a skid steer with an Escalade. Those trucks are often towing trailers, hauling messy crap, etc. and don't look any different than any other truck on the road.
Hell, I just unhooked a horse trailer less than an hour ago and the year-old truck that was hauling it looks like it just drove off the showroom floor.
It is wild to me how heavily downvoted this comment is.
I bought by Ford Ranger off my in-laws who literally own a farm, and it got more damage from being parked under a tree with nasty sap for too long then it's 7 years handling hauling and field work (the lesson being, I really should've been washing it more frequently then I was... And then it would really clean and so obviously isn't used real work or something).
> If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs.
I generally beat the crap out of my truck and the exterior looks just fine.
It's really not hard to avoid damaging your exterior. In fact, you have to have a total accident or be completely negligent to cause actual damage. Stuff goes in the bed of the truck. The bed had a bunch of nicks and dings in it, but you're not going to be seeing that while casting judgement.
Heck, go take a look at the work trucks. Find something like a welding truck, an electrician, or a plumber. These are all trucks that people literally use every single day for work, tossing stuff in and out of the bed. They just don't look that beat up. That's because it's just not that hard to avoid completely destroying your vehicle.
>If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs. Most people buy trucks as a lifestyle choice, not as a practical one.
No you wouldn’t. Off-roading, hauling things, and towing trailers does not require destroying the finish or exterior of the truck in any way.
Yep. Trucks that actually get used as trucks look like it with dings, scratches, and scuffs because they’re tools, not toys.
Ironically they’re also often old small models that owners have been keeping running forever because they’re cheap to fix, practical, and easy to park unlike their embiggened modern counterparts.
> Trucks that actually get used as trucks look like it with dings, scratches, and scuffs because they’re tools, not toys.
Not really. Lots of people use trucks and keep them in pristine condition too. Beds have liners now to keep them looking new. And you aren’t getting random dings on the outside unless you drive into things.
The amount of effort required to keep them pristine scales with the quantity and intensity of the work performed, no? The most serious truck drivers probably aren’t going to have time to buff out every little mark when it’s going to get covered in them again on the job tomorrow.
People who drive a truck for work aren't going to crash it into things all the time, what are you even talking about? Do you regularly crash your car into things while driving it? Like on a daily basis?
Like..you get that mud and dust just wash off, and the reason to wash them off is that once dried they can mess up the paint over a long period which then gives you a rust problem you really don't want?
The people I know who drive trucks are doing things where constant small bits of damage are inevitable. Think kicked up gravel, tree branches scraping against the body, unintentionally bumping up against the truck with equipment, etc. Damage is frequent enough that it’s one of the reasons they find buying a new truck difficult to justify and would rather buy something that’s got some visible wear and tear on it already.
I do know that because I see the same trucks driving around my neighborhood with Jerry cans and recovery boards 7 days of the week!
Best case you’re looking at 28.5% weekend utilization which isn’t that bad, much better than the 1% I joked with, but how many people do you know taking an offroad adventure every single weekend?
So what? Yeah I don’t really care. It’s mostly hilarious watching them try to park.
Does it have to be an off road adventure specifically? I feel like most people will want to get two vehicles in their family that can do many things, since that’s what they have room for, rather than more. A truck could be used for off road stuff but it could also be used for taking kids and gear to their games, or for a weekend camping trip, or just for commuting. It can do whatever you need without needing to rent a different vehicle or borrow from a friend or whatever. That’s peace of mind and flexibility. I don’t even own one but I do appreciate that aspect.
Not to the same ability. Sedans and mid size SUVs have far less space, and also less ground height. If you’re traveling on gravel roads or camping, most sedans and smaller SUVs aren’t ideal. If you have kids, space fills up quickly even for small trips. If you’re moving something larger (like drywall or a TV) it may not fit at all in a smaller vehicle. Even most full size SUVs also have less space than a full size truck (even one that isn’t one of the larger models).
The argument Telo makes is that you can have high utility in a smaller vehicle designed well. I was my own GC for a site-built home and sub contracted out many parts of it. I did it while owning a 2 door Mini SE. Only twice did I need to rent truck from my local Home Depot to haul some unwieldy and heavy debris. Most stores will deliver what you need (lumber, large pipes, insulation, etc) because consumer trucks are rarely large enough. I would not have been able to load any significant amount of lumber into an F250. That leaves large vehicles for recreation or family space. I hope car manufacturers rethink vehicle packaging now that EV motors and batteries allow for different confirmations like putting the motor in the wheel hub.
And, the sub contractors - the ones doing the work (immigrants) - they had a wide variety of vehicles. I took note that some had Camrys, Prius, old Golfs, small picks ups like Rangers, and some older mid size trucks that were visually heavily used. Else, they used commercial trucks or vans. When did I see the prestigious full cab F150s or Silverado RTs? When I originally interviewed GCs which is when I noticed they drove their clean and new trucks.
They did a good job maximizing wheelbase given the small size, which is very important for safe and comfortable towing. I look forward to their launch and some real-world reviews and drive tests.
The vast majority of dirt roads are fine. I put hundreds of miles on my 1996 Honda Civic hatchback in the Cascades with no problems many years ago.
If the road existed in the 1990s, it's quite likely accessible by a mid-size SUV. Similarly, if families of 4 could go camping with cars from 1950-2000, you can today as well. In fact, you can get more compact tents, etc. today.
Trucks and huge SUVs come in handy if you want to bring lots of modern toys like gigantic prestige coolers and 4x4s.
I have multiple times driven a Mustang Mach E (a heavy, very low ride height EV) out to a friend’s property an hour off of anything resembling a road, down multiple dirt switchbacks into the bottom of the Yuba River canyon.
You can do all those things with a vehicle half the size. Modern F-150s are industrial vehicles. They weight 5000 pounds. They and their large SUV cousins are a menace to pedestrians, normal-sized vehicles, and the road itself.
The other day, I was just remarking how my minivan makes a better pickup than most pickups for most tasks. For years I've wanted to get another truck (had an old Dakota that I had to sell when kid #3 was on the way). Practicality reigns, though, and I'm extremely satisfied with the usability of the van.
Getting a cheap minivan with an ugly, worn out interior that’s been through the rigors of family and ripping the seats out seems like it’d be a great cost saving hack for a number of businesses that people often buy trucks or small commercial vans for.
The people I know with pick-ups don't use the bed half the time "in case it rains today" and have to tow a covered trailer to haul anything that wouldn't like to get wet.
I agree generally, but blame the makers I guess. One important thing to remember is bed length. Trying to haul plywood or 2x4s with a 5 ft bed is a joke, and not easy with even a 6 ft bed.
The old, small rangers used to have a 7 ft bed option! I believe the longest you can get today is 6. So if you want a longer bed, you're kinda forced into the full size fold.
I don't know how well they'd actually sell, but it'd be neat if they at least offered something maybe a hair bigger than maverick sized with a 7 ft bed.
Where I'm from, people often own a car for their commute to work, and rent a van when they're moving. Their regular car is way less of a hassle for other people than the van is, but that's okay, cause the van is just for a few days.
I now own a truck. I’m actually
regretting not getting a bigger/heavier duty one. The biggest limitation is payload capacity. Payload is anything that puts weight on the vehicle - occupants, dogs, gear, food, supplies, bed covers/caps, etc. You must legally be under payload capacity or you can risk fines or liability in an accident. A lot of people are willing to push these limits, but cops pay a lot more attention to people towing/hauling.
If you want to actually tow with your truck, you need to allot a good portion of your payload to trailer weight (and hitches) that rests on the truck (tongue weight). This can range from 200lbs to 1k+ lbs, but is typically in the 500 to 600lb range for something like a boat or travel trailer. It can easily go higher if you load the trailer up with stuff.
A typical light duty truck might have 1500 lbs of payload capacity. Four people and their belongings can easily add up to 800lbs. Add pets, bikes, travel gear, food, etc and your suddenly well over 1k lbs of payload. You literally have no capacity to tow anything but the smallest of trailers.
So what do you do, well you get a bigger truck. You don’t need it all of the time, but it just doesn’t make sense to own a vehicle that cannot legally handle a family road trip.
Before people say “rent”. That comes with its own major set of issues. The biggest being little to no ability to tow with a rental vehicle. Most rentals flat out prohibit towing (even if technically capable and equipped). Those that do allow towing, generally limit it to 1st party trailers (U-Haul truck can only tow u-haul trailer).
I don't think this generalization is quite fair. I'm sure this is true for some folks and their social circles, but for those of us who engineer and know our way around a Home Depot, the capacity is a game changer. I used to have to rent or borrow trucks for my projects.
Not to mention Christmas trees, moving, helping friends out, etc.
Depending on the survey 63-to-75% of truck owners use it for towing once a year or less (i.e in reality never). So yes, the majority do not use it for towing.
To be fair I'd misremembered the load carrying figure and the load figure for 1 time a year or less is 32-35%
> The typical number of times an American non work truck is used to haul a load each year is zero.
If you specifically exclude work trucks and define “haul a load” as filling up the bed with loose dirt or gravel or something then I could believe this.
I haven’t put a cubic yard of anything in my truck bed this year but hauling a cubic yard of anything is a rare occurrence for someone who isn’t doing landscaping.
But you have to really stretch the definitions if you believe that people never put anything in the bed to haul.
Hm, sounds like you don't really need a truck... The world is racing to +4C and you're over here defending 25mpg gender affirming care mobiles - you're on the wrong side of this one buddy.
I noticed the lack of a "crumple zone" the instant I saw the image.
...and a moment later, I also realized it's usually a solid engine block that sits there. I shudder to think of what actually happens when that zone "crumples".
Back to the Telo MT1, it's great that they redesigned it from the ground up, around it being an EV -- it's like the Phelps Tractor having reins, and then somebody asking "why does it need to have reins if there's no horse?"
The engine is designed to move based on the design of the frame rails and mounts -- it is pushed under the passenger compartment, absorbing and deflecting more energy.
I'm sure the Telo is designed to modern standards and would perform similarly. I'd be more worried about expensive damage to the vehicle in less personally dangerous collisions.
Decades of research, innovation, crash tests and rule changes have been put into improving safety in head on collisions. It’s not like you’re the first who wonders what will happen with engine block. It’s designed to go down.
Although I don’t know about American trucks. I think they are meant to wreak havoc on every single person involved.
My neighbour designs the crumble zone on Volvo's heavy duty trucks. They at least spend a shit ton of effort (continuous, multi-decade) on making anything hit by the truck having as little effect as possible (at least).
Quite a challenge with heavy duty trucks shipping tens of tons of stuff, but anyway.
> ...and a moment later, I also realized it's usually a solid engine block that sits there. I shudder to think of what actually happens when that zone "crumples".
I believe the engine drops down and the rest crumples inward, at least in theory.
The risk to pedestrians is pretty much a non-factor in this. It’s going to come down to business / agriculture adoption where I see the largest market opportunity. Think service technicians such as HVAC, plumbers, construction. If these can make financial sense in terms of ROI and cost of ownership then Telo can make it. Currently the base price of $41,500 is a bit on the higher end, though of course will save dramatically on fuel and maintenance over industry standard vans and light trucks.
I want a tiny car. The problem is that road design is unsafe so people buy bigger cars so they are safer when they get into an accident. I've seen the aftermath of a Chrysler Fiat getting into a collision with an SUV and lets just say the Fiat driver had much worse day than the SUV driver.
I don't think you thought this one through... if anything you're making the opposite point you're (I believe) trying to make.
I'm writing this on a macbook air that sizes up to <2.5% of the weight and volume of a desktop computer you're describing (screen, case and peripherals). It's also idling at about 2-3 watt, which is also <10% of the computer you're describing. It also produces much less sound, it's entirely quiet.
So size, weight and power usage and noise are way down.
The idea that I'd use a pentium 3 instead is ridiculous for these very reasons (heavier, bigger, noisier, using more energy), even in private use, and especially in public use.
It's also the reason why bigger, heavier, noisier and more energy-consuming cars, are also ridiculous to many people, particularly those not driving them and having to face them in the public sphere.
Why is it wrong to have a powerful vehicle if you don't always use it for tasks demanding that power, but it's okay to have a surplus of power for low-demanding computing tasks?
Same reason I don't want to have dinner in a restaurant next to someone trying to cut their steak with a chainsaw: at best they are being incredibly obnoxious, at worst they are going to maim me. Just because it is better for your once-a-month weekend lumberjack trip with the boys doesn't mean it is an appropriate one-size-fits-all cutting tool for day-to-day use.
Contrast that with someone having a needlessly powerful computer. How does that impact the rest of the world? Not at all, it only impacts the owner's wallet. Someone's needlessly-powerful computer has never killed a child, or taken up four spots in public. Heck, it'll even downclock when idle, so there isn't even any extra power use to be worried about!
Because accomplishing the same task with a more powerful (i.e. larger) vehicle is a) more polluting, and b) more dangerous for other road users; two things that are not true for a surplus of computing power.
Nope, it's not! It's more than the bare minimum I need, and also larger than an appropriate moderate size (let's not shift the goalposts here) because - unlike a vehicle - operating a larger-than-appropriate home is _barely_ more polluting, and no less dangerous, so my indulgence has negligible negative externalities.
Thanks for playing! Wanna try again?
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For anyone else reading this, the issue that monkeyelite's comment had was the false equation of "it is good to prosocially take others' safety and comfort into account when making choices about personal behaviour and consumption" with "one can never use or consume any more than the bare minimum". This is a classic approach that the American right uses when criticizing any prosocial policy - the immature that the only choices are selfish indulgence and bare austerity. It's possible to be comfortable and even lavish while being a considerate member of society. Using/consuming/polluting less is always good _in isolation_, but can and should be measured against the benefit that it accrues to you _and_ the externalities imposed on society.
The obvious counter-argument there is "I don't care about other people, I want my big truck, and I don't care (or, I actively like) that it endangers other people". Which, well - if that's your viewpoint, you're welcome to hold it, and others are welcome to judge you for it.
Because by and large the apps and programs you are running on your computer requires lots of resources just to open and allow you to do your low-demanding tasks.
People by and large don’t really know what they want, they purchase based on vibes and manipulation. If people in general really wanted these trucks they’d be more popular outside of America. The truck has been a boiled frog, slowly growing in size and people haven’t realised it. Also Americans in general have a bit of a cultural issue with ego, individualism and all that, which doesn’t help.
Even Tacomas are larger than they used to be. One day not too long ago when I was running errands I came across an early 2000s Tacoma (before they got bumped up to midsize trucks) and was almost dumbfounded, because it’d been so long since I’d seen a truck that size. It’s a great size, but nobody makes them like that any more.
I’d like a small truck for DIY house projects in a suburb, but even the “small” Ford Maverick is nearly a foot longer than a 2000 Tacoma and the 2025 Tacoma is about two feet longer, both of which would be awkward to park and maneuver on the tight streets around here. Their increased height is dangeorus with all the kids running around, too. So, well, I don’t have a truck.
The Telo and maybe Slate are the first two modern trucks that I could realistically consider. Hoping for an R3T that’s sized similarly to Rivian’s upcoming R3 (which is comparable in size to a VW Golf) but that’s probably not going to happen.
Can’t legally register them in my state for now, would need to register it in a neighboring state, which is a lot of trouble for a 25+ year old vehicle.
One thing I'm really happy about with the rise of EVs is that they seem to be unlocking a fresh wave of innovation. This is in part because at a fundamental level, they are much simpler and easier to manufacture and more flexible in terms of design, so they are far more accessible for the startup ecosystem to break into. I'm really looking forward to what else we see emerging in the next few years once all the basic EV technology is commoditised.
I am glad to see EV companies doing something different, aesthetically. In this particular case I do not like it -- at all -- but I much prefer a high-variance aesthetic distribution to the genetic every-car-looks-the-same world we have now, sans a tiny few exceptions.
The side compartment under the bed / in front of the rear wheel is pretty cool too.
This is cool I guess but I don’t get why some of these electric car companies have to design cars that look like toys. Rivian and this. It looks like a golf cart with a flatbed. I think an electric kei truck would have a huge market in the US but the design needs some work to be taken seriously.
There’s something to be said for being distinctive, but you can do that while not looking silly (Lucid is a good example). And simply being a small electric truck is enough differentiation anyway
They had a ton of design constraints, and looking like a toy wasn't one of them. This is what their solution to those constraints (such as more range via a low coefficient of drag) looks like. Very few people are capable of evaluating a vehicle without their biases influencing them, such as what a masculine truck needs to look like.
Not trying to offend anyone as this is a matter of taste, but I can't help finding the American "masculine truck" ugly and cringeworthy.
Maybe it is me being the from European Alps and having close contact with people who actually have to drive vehicles in challenging terain (for forest work and hunting). And those cars are typically the polar opposite of the pseudo-masculine big truck: You want them small, because where you go there are trees and rocks that won't move out of the way just because your car looks masculine. You want them light because you are moving across badly maintained forest roads, etc. You want them ugly because you will be scraping more things than you like. And unless you have need for moving bulk loads like water containers for alpine cows regularly a closed back is much more practical, at least in this climate (if you need to move such a thing, get a trailer).
Over here these trucks are relatively rare, and likely smaller than their American variants, and mostly driven by a certain type of man as what appears to be a fashion choice.
Maybe it is a cultural or generational thing, but to me a car is a tool and I don't connect a lot of my identity to it. That doesn't mean I don't like a specific car or don't like to be able to mainrain one myself etc. It is just that I like functional efficient machines and a big tank weighing many tons that you drive in mostly alone is the opposite of that.
That said, mountainous forest work is obviously a more prominent use case in the alps than it is in the US.
US trucks that are owned by individuals are not primarily seen as tools. 70% of US truck owners have only one vehicle, so their primary purpose is to be used as a luxury barge and family hauler. Not much different than the huge cars that Americans preferred to drive in the 1950s and 1970s. There has always been a thread of huge cruiser style vehicles in American auto culture and this continues today.
When it comes to work, towing capacity and generic American suburbia workloads tend to dominate (large houses with big projects, longer drives, etc).
Not saying that these tanks are a "practical choice", but they are perhaps better viewed through the lens of luxury barges.
Hunting is a good point, but from what I've gleaned it's a subculture that sort of stands alone and has a huge "gear" component. I think that it's somewhat common to have small specialized vehicles for that use case, like ATV style vehicles of various sorts. Ex: last time I was in North Carolina I saw someone with this dune buggy thing suited for that... and it was being hauled around behind a massive truck, naturally. Off-roading and hunting culture also overlaps a bit, and there is a legitimate off-road culture that is quite separate from the Big Truck culture. These people will often have two vehicles, so the Big Truck would be used for the aforementioned luxury cruising and status, while as you said, a more suitable vehicle is used for the actual rough terrain.
They do have a fairly unique status power in much of the US. If a small business owner drives up in a sports car, they may get jokes, but for some reason driving up in a new GMC 2500HD is sort of seen as a mark of a "working man's success" instead of being flashy and showing off. It's something you can drive up and meet clients without about how you are going to look. That said, I'm speaking from experience in southern and midwest culture, but that's where the majority of the US population lives. When I was in New York you would see these monster trucks much less often, and as you said the driver was often much more ostentatious I'm trying to flagrantly stand out rather than subtly rise above without getting called out as one does in the midwest.
Thanks for shining a light on this for me, helps me follow the line of thought, especially your part about how it is seen as a sign of success to own a specific new car etc.
Most urbanite Gen Z students I teach don't have (need) driving license and don't plan to get one. Owning a car is somewhat a useless luxury in most European bigger cities, since you're much faster and more comfortable with bicycles and public transport anyways. The occasional family trip or bigger transport can be done with a rental or car sharing, if public transport doesn't cut it. This results in the car being seen much less as a status symbol, except for certain migrantic or economically strained subcultures. But you won't be able to impress your say average Berlin Techno-girl with a flashy car, in fact it would likely achieve the opposite effect.
Where I live hunting isn't really that much of a sport, more a mix between a regular job, a hobby and tradition. So while there is expensive gear (hand-engraved traditional guns that sell for the price of a luxury car), most people just use whatever. From what I have seen in the US hunting (like literally everytbing else) is much more gear-focused over there.
To 99% of consumers in the US, kei trucks look like toys, so I'm not sure that's the best example.
Honestly, if you look at the truck market, it's dominated by masculine designs like the F-150. Arguably this has created a gap in the market for designs that are more compact and approachable. It may never be the majority, but TELO looks perfectly suited to address that niche.
I find it amusing that people are discussing the masculine design language and how men driving trucks are overcompensating (OK, not so much in this particular thread), but for as long as I can remember, it's been women that have always told me that they prefer bigger vehicles.
Personally I find the increasingly large bulbous noses tacked on to the front of US trucks ridiculous. The fact that these "codpieces" are empty on EVs is such a wild metaphor that it seems like an intentional parody.
I'll grant that the Telo may have gone a little too far in the other direction given that they have issues with the aerodynamic drag of the front wheelwells, but it still looks slightly more sensible than a normal truck.
This looks like a kei truck, who by definition looks like a toy.
Seriously though, it has the same shape and look of any kei I've seen. Like others, I wish for a 90s era Ford Ranger or Tacoma, but between safety requirements and capability demand from people that's probably not practical.
It's aesthetically not pleasing in my eyes. They even have a comparison with ford trucks on their page and all i'm thinking is yeah i'd take that ford instantly over that thing.
I was thinking a while back about how you could roll coal in an EV. Maybe a huge Tesla coil throwing lightning everywhere would be analogous? Or a giant Jacob’s ladder?
This is a bad marketing idea to compare a golf cart like this to a Toyota Tacoma. There is practically zero ground clearance and a unibody frame, this will high center in places where I regularly drive my Tacoma. Tacoma wins on ruggedness, lower total cost of ownership thanks to a significantly lower price and having limited depreciation.
Unless these are priced at under $30,000 for the AWD, these will flop commercially.
If the CAFE standards could be fixed, we could get ICE and hybrid trucks that are smaller and more affordable, the EV route is too expensive and the products are strange.
I know the CAFE standards are bad, but isn't it just a tax if you miss the target? Anyone know how much would it cost a car company per vehicle if they made a modern version of the '80s Ranger or Hilux?
One thing I have learned.
If you own a pick up like vehicle
You will be helping even people you barely know
to move. and your extended friends and family
whenever they buy something too big to fit in their car
(Not sure if this is just me, but) I find this truck so aesthetically displeasing?
Somehow, most EVs have curves and "bounciness" (and why such odd headlights??) in all the right places to make it look childish. I find the Tesla sedan extremely aesthetic though, that might be the one exception. The bigger Teslas (especially in color white) remind me of pandas for some reason.
I really like the idea of taking advantage of there not being an engine bay in the front, and moving the driver position forward, and eliminating the unused length of the engine bay - but this looks very unsafe for the driver in a crash, with no crumple zone to speak of - not to mention it turns a simple fender bender into a front axle replacement (though with modern cars and their sensors, there's no such thing as a cheap crash anyway)
Looks good and a step in the right direction (speaking as someone who thinks the modern day trucks are getting too big for the danger of those driving alongside them on the roads).
I wonder though if the interior trim can be ordered without this felt-like material. I can easily see that being stained or dirty in a short period of time. I am sure there is.
People tend to focus on demand, but just getting vehicles like this into production at a profitable cost often turns out to be impossible.
It is a 10-15k/year product at best. How does an independent maker get that profitable at <$50k, despite all the costs of setting up a sales and service network?
On one hand I agree. It makes me sad but I'm skeptical they are going to make it.
On the other hand, electric cars seem to be relatively "easy" to build. Sure, Fisker went bankrupt, but Rivian seems to do sort of fine. Xiaomi even managed to build a car, and I actually saw one of them by chance charging next to me today.
Seems to me like a lot more newcomers succeed in getting cars built, than was and is the case with ICE cars.
most profit in autos is in personalization and financing, which in principle you can do at any scale, with whatever fixed costs. I believe these guys are building on top of a Subaru with vendor motors.
that said, the problem with these utilitarian vehicles is that they appeal to people who buy cars once every 20 years, whereas most of the industry is serving the very large, very abundant population of Americans buying 2 cars every 2 years
At least the Fiat Multipla was a great car. It is filled to the brim with small features which improve the driving experience, and it is a miracle that it can fit six(!) people. It has a massive amount of storage space and great visibility, what's not to like?
Besides the way it looks, of course. But if you're inside a Multipla, at least you don't have to look at its exterior?
The width is why the design was so clever from an interior perspective - seated six comfortably with three abreast front/rear in a car shorter than a three door Ford Fiesta!
Interesting to see how much the perception of trucks varies globally. For many, it’s about versatility and utility beyond just daily commuting. The off-road and hauling capabilities often get overlooked in city-centric debates.
Towing range is an issue with all EVs and the battery on this one isn't that big, but if you're regularly doing long distance towing I'm not sure why you'd start with a city truck
Let's see the production model pull 6600 pounds on an 80% charge. Which by the way I see no stats on this on the site. But I'd much rather see production demos before I trusted those even. Even Cybertruck struggles to tow full weight at full charge further than 90 miles.
How much you want to bet you'd be calling a real truck to tow your ass out of that situation? There's a reason electric trucks haven't taken off for real work use cases.
The cybertruck is built pretty poorly. I think we can use truck stats from reputable automakers.
> There's a reason electric trucks haven't taken off for real work use cases.
When were electric trucks realistically available on the market for a reasonable price?
I use a truck regularly (forestry industry), there's huge desire for them, they just haven't been around until very recently. You can't buy a secondhand ol beatup electric truck yet, so I don't expect them to be taking off yet.
Man, I'd love something like this. I was happy with my small, early 2000s pickup, but everything in the used market when it died were obnoxious show-off vehicles that quite literally don't even fit in most of the parking spaces in my city. This has that cute kei truck look... well... Maybe an inbred kei truck. But it seems just the right size for utility (and my much-missed tailgate naps).
But $42k is just so much money to me. I've never spent more than ~$15k (financed) on a vehicle and I feel like I'm fairly well off...
I sure wish more of these electric trucks came with paint-free body panels. Say what you will about the Cybertruck, but the idea of a truck that doesn't have paint is very attractive to me. Seems like this one is moving away from plastic to steel, and I haven't seen what the Slate so I imagine it's probably painted steel as well. Plastic, stainless, whatever...I just don't want a paint job to worry about.
Is there some reason they have to make these have 300 or 500hp? Or is there nothing to be gained in terms of cost and weight from having, say, 90hp (like my completely functional Mighty Max had).
This can fun a fun and practical vehicle,
and it has a lot nifty solutions,
and should serve sub(urban) life well.
but if you really need a pickup truck,
this cannot compare to a Tacoma
That said I dont think anyone buying a Tacoma
will be tempted by this vehicle, and I dont think
the buyers of the MT1 will be comparison checking
the Tacoma either.
Separate markets the way I see it,
as do they
""EV pickup for urban living and weekend adventuring""
> We're tired of oversized, impractical trucks designed for show over substance.
I wonder if Telo is attempting to define a new category. Substance in a truck, in my lived opinion, is about utility. Towing capacity, ruggedness, ability to go (very) off road. An electric power train shows promise, but is limited by infra.
If that’s not the target, then maybe it’s a different target, such as San Francisco residents where space is limited and a slight nod to utility is adequate.
Further down the peninsula, and specifically in the Santa Cruz mountains, this is less interesting. I can’t imagine this for outdoor (e.g. mountain biking) or project oriented (e.g. landscaping) people.
So back to the top: if they’re marketing substance over show, maybe they’re really marketing to people who desire show over substance.
Edit: let me also throw in my drive down to the bottom tip of Baja a few months ago. The roads were rough in places, and I definitely went off road to reach some interesting places. It reminded me of some rough terrain and roads in Wyoming and Oklahoma - truck states. Without big wheels and tough suspension - I wouldn’t take a Telo.
A tremendous portion of the truck market are people who live in urban to suburban areas and need to move things. For that audience, the ability to fit a 4x8' plywood sheet easily puts this ahead of a surprising number of conventional trucks on utility. The 2k lbs payload on the 2WD drive model is more than a Tacoma and some configurations of the F150, for example, popular models that also don't fit a 4x8 sheet without strapping it down over the cab or another awkward technique. It also lists a towing cap of 6,600 which is competitive with many production pickups.
There's a divide in needs between off-roading and moving things around, and this seems oriented in the moving things around direction. I can easily see it working for a landscaper in a suburban environment, for example, where the driving miles per day are really not that high and 6,600 is plenty for a typical landscaper's trailer.
From everything I've seen, true off-roading applications are a pretty small portion of the overall truck market, and one that many popular trucks right now are also poorly optimized for (popular 2WD configurations, middling clearances, etc).
I just put down a deposit. I make things from plywood sometimes, and even in my wife's R1S it's a pain. When we don't take the R1S, all 5 of us have to fit in my car (Honda Clarity). I coach robotics teams and sometimes need to haul a lot of stuff. Sometimes we do some light offroading in the R1S.
Looks like this will do all the things I need OK. I would like to drive something small and easy to park, that I could offroad a bit, carry my family a bit, haul stuff a bit.
And I've always liked the weird aesthetic of kei trucks and things like the Jeep Forward Control.
> I wonder if Telo is attempting to define a new category.
It's a Kei truck. That's not a new thing. Online discourses categorizing Telo as one leads to people pointing out Kei are equipped with weaker engines for legal reasons, that doesn't matter. US finally started making its own Kei truck.
I would say "kei" does pretty specifically refer to vehicles adhering to those Japanese regulations. I think "minitruck" or "compact truck" would be a better, more general name.
What would be the limitation that prevents you from mountain biking? It seems to have a similar sized bed to a Tacoma?
I’m unsure why people think they need such big vehicles for outdoors sports. We drove thousands of miles around Europe with 4 kayaks on the roof of a Ford Fiesta. Or you can easily fit three mountain bikes on a rear bike rack.
I also used to throw my mountain bike on the back of my sports car! It was, in retrospect, ridiculous.
I’ve also seen a motorcyclist having a bike mounted on a hitch!
Optimization for tiny isn’t a factor in the big outdoors. Indeed, I see more people in Sprinter vans than Teslas by mountain biking hot spots. So it’s not about “could you”, it’s about comfort and practicality of anything / everything else you may want to do beyond just lugging a bike to a trail. Such as: the optionality to go truly off road - in the vehicle not on the bike.
I need to tow a 5000lb boat 300 miles without charging and I need to fit 6 passengers. It needs to be $30K or less.
I realize Europeans have a much different understanding of distance and cargo needs; I do. But, 300 miles and 6 passengers is a pretty common requirement here in the US.
I often find that I want to take a break after a couple hours of driving, and even when I drove a gas vehicle, those breaks would be 30-40 minutes long unless it was an exceptionally long day of driving. With a little planning I’ve found that I can do 90% of the trips in my EV that I used to do in my gas car. I probably can’t replicate the couple 1000-mile-in-one-day trips I did in my previous vehicle, but those experiences also made me not want to.
FWIW, in the last two years alone I have driven my EV from MA to Nova Scotia and back, MA to Iowa and back, MA to MD and back, and all over the eastern seaboard (trips to the Adirondacks, WV, etc). Lately I have not even had to plan anymore. It was surprising to discover that I could plug my car (a Bolt) into a GM charger in Indiana this summer and not even need to fiddle with an app. Things have improved dramatically for road trips in the last two years, and I have probably one of the slowest charging cars out there. Really, the only thing stopping me from buying an EV pickup is that I don’t want to pay that much for a vehicle with such an absurdly small bed. My Bolt can pull a small trailer just fine.
Because he can tow 300 miles easily with a ICE vehicle, and he can fill up anywhere in 5 minutes or less. Once you can charge cars in 5 minutes or less, I doubt he’d have made that a requirement.
I started looking at camping trailers recently to tow with my Rivian. I quickly went off the idea when I realized that each time I’d need to charge en-route I’d have to find somewhere to park the camper, unhitch, go charge, then do it all in reverse. That’s going to add at least 20 mins to each charging session. None of this is necessary if I were filling with gas. For typical places I go camping here in CO that could be two or three times per journey direction.
My in-laws tow a heavy, non-aero homemade camping trailer on their Rivian in Colorado. Two things make this work: they don't haul it long distance like you do, and they drive uphill to campsites, and then on the way home they're just charging the whole way back. I realize that there are no free lunches in energy conservation, but this diminishes range anxiety for them I think. Or I misinterpreted our convo and it's just a funny quirk of getting around the mountains.
That’s good to know actually. The distance I travel is certainly not necessary, there is closer camping, but I just tend to prefer areas that are all the way across the mountains from me. Do you know what sort of range they get while towing?
Yeah I asked when we went camping together and I remember them saying that it's a bit better than half the normal miles/kWh. The site we went to was about 22 miles and 3,600 feet of climbing from their driveway, so they were not at all worried about range. If you really want to make sure you make it home, load up your camper with rocks at the campsite so you are charging more on your way home, then dump them when you reach the lowest point on your drive home.
The camper is a cabin with cedar shingles on top of a 5'x10' Harbor Freight trailer. Heavy and not at all aero haha.
I was responding to someone worried about the practicality of carrying mountain bikes to the Santa Cruz mountains 50 miles from San Francisco.
I don't think it's possible to buy a new 6 passenger vehicle rated for towing 5000lb in the US for under $30K.
Europe allows towing with much smaller vehicles. There you can do 4400lb in a Golf and 4850lb in Passat though you might still struggle for 6 passengers for $30k new.
No pickup will do that. Even crew cab pickups normally max out at 5 people (4 passengers), because there is no bench seat up front anymore. Even a Ford Maverick is $30k or so, and that won’t tow a 5000lb boat. Max listed towing is 4klb.
"I commute 400 miles each way to work, every day, towing my 5000 pound boat, fully equipped outdoor kitchen trailer/classroom, my home-schooled family of 6, 6 dogs, a portable sawmill, solar-powered game freezer + ammunition, and an extra trailer because I might have to go to home depot."
I have power, yes; however, I can't even run the toaster oven and A/C, for example, at the same time. There's likely no way I could charge an EV w/o having everything trip the breaker. And there's no way to go beyond what we have unless the electric company upgrades our service.
More advanced EVSEs are capable of adjusting the power delivered based on the power available. It does require a sensor on the supply cables to determine how much power is being used, but it's technically capable without a service upgrade. Also, electric companies will frequently upgrade an old 50/100 amp service to 200 amp for low or no cost (because they figure you'll pay off the cost of doing so through more power usage). The panel side of the service upgrade will cost you, but then you'll be able use the toaster oven at the same time as the A/C.
> I need to tow a 5000lb boat 300 miles without charging
That's a 4-5 hour trip and you don't want to stop to charge for thirty minutes? One bathroom break or stop for food and you've already spent probably half of those 30m stopped anyway.
> fit 6 passengers
This truck does? It has a third row.
But I'm curious what truck you think will comfortably fit six passengers for under $30k. If the second row fits three people and the front row fits two passengers (and frankly, having a person ride in the middle of the front row is ridiculous), you only seat five passengers. Even if you count the driver as a passenger, at best you've got one uncomfortable occupant.
- Ram 1500 starts at 40k
- F150 starts at 38k
- Silverado 1500 starts at 37k
- Ford Superduty starts above 40k
- Sierra 1500 starts at 38k
And most of these are just bench seats in the front, not a third row.
I'm American and this sounds really off. AFAIK pickups in the US typically have space for five passengers, not six. And good luck finding new pickups that can tow 5000 lbs under 30k; as a category, pickups have experienced quite a lot of price inflation, as I understand it.
I'm failing to see how this could have as much or more utility than a Tacoma. I don't see any mention of towing or payload. Not to mention, the clearance will be limiting for anyone who wants to venture off road at all.
Towing is possible but limited-- this is a weak point for all electric vehicles-- but good enough to haul a trailer to the dump or a boat a small distance.
But the bed is better in some ways than the Tacoma.
Big question is whether they can reach production and really deliver for this pricing, etc. They have ~11k preorders and could develop a lot more.
Slate is ugly and not nearly as functional. Predicting who is doomed at this point is silly. But there will be a small electric truck soon, which is nice.
As of OpenSauce last month, they had 3 that were roadworthy. I think the company is 15 people big so it would be odd if they had a fleet with mfgr/prototype plates.
They were cagey on their manufacturing strategy but I got the sense that it'll be mostly contract manufacturing. I think slate is trying to keep as much in-house as possible and that means saying "no" to some design decisions that would require a step-up in terms of manufacturing capabilities. E.G.: Composite panels are a hell of a lot cheaper to make than stamped metal panels so slate isn't going to contract the metal stamping out.
I’d hardly say telo isn’t a viable option compared to slate.
Anyway what really matters is if any of these companies can get a vehicle to market, and at what price point. I’m not about to buy an imaginary car, and neither are you.
Fwiw if they were for sale i would strongly consider buying a telo. It looks perfect for my needs - slate less so, but if they’re all that’s available i’d strongly consider it
I really like the solar roof and bed cover add-ons. They don't have specs but should be roughly 4 square meters combined or so? so about 800w at peak power. Not enough to let you rely on it even if you live in a sunny place, but it could add up to a nice reduction in cost per mile if you use it to commute and park it in the sun.
Honestly feels so far from an actual product I wouldn't expect to see it for another 3 years, in which time there will certainly be better options for $50,000.
This is incredibly sensible design (if they pull it off), it's a reasonable size (unlike a lot of 'Murcian utility vehicles), has some good options (like the dual solar roof) and a useful carry layout.
Is an open front wheel like this street legal? Seems to be it would be a safety issue for pedestrians. Legally weels also are not allowed to stick out past the fender when straight.
Why do these 'new' trucks feel they need to reinvent the wheel? I don't want something I need to 'reconfigure' to either carry people or a 4x8. I don't need seating for 4. I need a small utility truck. Like... a Toyota. A late 70's, early 80's Toyota. No electric windows. No fancy interior. Seating for 2 (my and my dog). No information screen...
As much as I like the novelty of the design, there isn't much of a crumple zone for a head on collision. I could see the wheel placement making this a fun off-road vehicle, though.
>Our standard five-seat crew cab features a 5-foot bed capacity with a configurable mid-partition that either increases the bed size to accommodate 4-by-8-foot plywood sheets with the tailgate up or to allow for additional seating for up to eight passengers.
Eight passengers while driving? Where? I don't see any pictures of that.
They have renders of what a passenger van variant would look like but my understanding is that this is just aspirational and will not be produced unless the 5-seat truck variant is successful.
I saw this on JerryRigEverything and was thinking that this is the perfect city pickup. Compact, yet with a reasonable payload size. It has a good range (which, in my case, is not as important) and the horsepower is good. The dash takes a bit of getting used to, but OK.
It's the second electric vehicle I actually like (Rivian being the first - but it's a full-size).
The reason why we don't generally have vehicles this small any more is because they don't pass crash tests so I'm wondering how this fares in a crash test. I can't see any way this could be sold in Europe unless there's some very clever engineering to make the front end more resilient in a crash.
> I can't see any way this could be sold in Europe
It's 3860 x 1854mm, there are vehicles smaller than that being sold in europe right now (in the A segment, not quadricycles): the fiat 500e is 3632x1683, the suzuki ignis is 3700x1660. The citroen c1 (discontinued 2022) used to be just 3470x1620.
Hell there are B segment cars which aren't much bigger, the R5 e-tech is 3920x1770, the yaris is 3940x1745.
There are smaller vehicles being sold but the distance from the front bumper to the driver's legs is much longer because they don't have a bed taking up space at the back.
The vast majority of tractor trailers in Europe are cab over designs. There’s definitely less room between the bumper and the driver’s legs in those than in any standard pickup truck.
The ForTwo has two seats and no truck bed so it can have enough space for a crash structure in front of the driver. On top of that its NCAP rating expired in 2021 and it is no longer being sold. The next generation of the ForTwo is likely to be longer in order to improve safety (if it ever makes it into production)
why are there no pictures of the backseat? tired of cars with four doors and backseats made exclusively for children. and they say it can fit 8 people???
You can go on YouTuber and find reviews of the car and most people seem to say the backseat is fairly roomy (the one 6'5" reviewer said he fit). I put a reservation down a few months ago and at 6' (1.9 m for the sane people), I'm really banking on that one off-hand comment.
The third row is just planned. They do not have any publicly available views of it, and the currently non-removable back glass of the prototypes inhibit actually installing and using them.
I'm stuck with a cloth interior. I bring a beach towel to drape on the seat after my rides. Mud falls onto the towel which makes it easy to clean out of the vehicle.
Let's hope now that CAFE is dead or at least disarmed, more cars like this will come from the woodwork. I was always jealous that the japanese had so many cool small kei cars like the Subaru Sambar or Suzuki Cappuccino
What’s the range when loaded with things or people? That’s what matters. I find that most EVs have too many impracticalities to be convenient. For a fixed commute, sure. But for versatility, absolutely not.
1. Adding weight to the bed, if it doesn't affect aerodynamics, doesn't affect highway range much. For stop-and-go traffic I assume the range would get worse, but he didn't test it.
2. Adding a big air pusher to an otherwise empty trailer murders the range
3. Adding an aerodynamic car or truck on a trailer is better for your range than the air pusher
I do wish it was a hybrid. Maybe small companies don't have the knowledge built up to make a good hybrid drivetrain but hell, Edison is going for it. They're planning to build logging trucks with a diesel generator under the hood as prime mover for a series plug-in hybrid drivetrain. It looks very practical and their initial tests show it tows great. (Since that's their entire selling point, they'd have to fold if it couldn't haul logs)
I like that it's small and potentially even more functional than whatever idiotic American small-dick-compensating nonsense people buy these days but why does it need to be so ugly?
If you want more people to buy sensible vehicles, make them look nice i.e. not like something NASA would send to Mars.
Sorry. But to me it looks like a truck i can order on alieexpress. Does not show any robustness, strength and is not sexy at all. Nice for your local laundry delivery service at your beach resort. But thats it.
That will only happen if the right-wing propagandists manage to turn these into a wedge issue. But ultimately more EV cars and trucks (as opposed to e-bikes) won’t threaten the car-dependent culture that enables the population-density-driven fear or urban culture driving their narratives to begin with.
The extreme regulation of automobiles in the US is entirely from the left, specifically from people who dislike cars and want everyone on public transit (except for the few special people of course).
Why do you think cars are so hated? Just curious if you could steel-man what you believe their arguments against cars to be, so I know we’re on the same page of understanding.
Just make a gas-powered one that's repairable. This is not complicated. I love my Tesla, but my other vehicle is a Hardbody for a reason. EVs SUCK as trucks.
I'd love an EV truck but not the weird little thing highlighted in this post. I watched an overview video someone linked but turned it off as soon as I saw the guy trying to fit inside the tiny cab.
Also, why is this goofy little truck so powerful and so expensive? Can I please just get a modestly powered EV work truck with capacity for sheet goods, a few tools, and a single passenger other than the driver? Can it not cost $50k?
I want power density and off-grid capability in my truck. I want to be able to go camping and not plan for charging. I also want to be able to repair it without dealing with software. I also want to be able to tow without stopping to charge every 100 miles.
It doesn’t matter how capable, efficient, affordable, powerful, etc. the truck is. That’s not the point.
The point of a truck for 90% of American pickup truck drivers is that it signals to the world around them what team they’re on. This truck is a signal for the wrong team.
This is a good illustration of what's wrong with American not politics, but, I'd say, psyche. Every little (an not so little, like a truck) thing is used to signal allegiance to one of the two irreconcilable warring factions. No union, no values, no common cause, just us vs them, doubtless virtue vs doubtless vice.
It's really, really disheartening to see; not in the parent comment, but generally in life.
I wish an electric truck could alleviate even a small bit of that.
> With Toyota Tacoma capability, Tesla-like range and efficiency, in the footprint of a MINI Cooper, the TELO MT1 is the most compact, practical and technically advanced truck.
Very little information about safety other than marketing speak "Utilizing the latest in advanced safety technology—sensors to predict and classify collisions before they happen, airbags, and structural technology—to make our vehicles safer for everyone on the road."
You think a crumple zone isn’t required by current FMVSS, which they are designing against? That is, in fact, what they referred to with “ structural technology”.
I'm pretty skeptical of the safety as well. It's also pretty hard to judge where there don't seem to be any actual photographs of the vehicle, only computer renderings.
I would love a small truck like this, but I would honestly buy an old Tacoma or Ranger before even considering buying this on spec.
*edit: digging around I did find some footage on YouTube with actual vehicles. I'm definitely skeptical on the safety now.
Exactly. I love that it's small. I used to have a 4 door full length bed GMC and it felt like driving a boat. Seattle was particularly awful. My current garage is only 210 inches deep (5.334 m) so most trucks will not fit in my current house (very first world problems I know). But yes, smaller, lower cost, and does everything I need a truck for.
I'll be eager to post one! After the cybertruck I won't be preordering any more vehicles. Right now I'm looking to replace our Model 3. I'm waiting for now details on the 2026 R1T Quad, and to see if Mazda actually really makes an electric MX-5. We have two other EVs (cars) so a truck would make sense but we're keeping our options open. An R1T would be cool but putting the 50k difference into a home battery system would be a smarter play, and an electric MX-5 would just be fun as hell.
A friend of mine who works at a tech company doing charging tech is urging me to hold out for a year, so I might delay a decision another year. We'll see.
More capable how? It's more capable if it does more things that you want it to do, but in my case it doesn't add more utility. When you compare it based on range and power, it's still more expensive.
The stereotype is that a big truck implies you're compensating. The only people who think an unimpressive vehicle means you have small bits are the people who think that an impressive vehicle means you have big bits.
So is a Ford Transit van? Who cares. This is a work truck.
> The bed looks too short to be practically useful.
The bed is 5 ft long. From TF website: "Same truck bed length as the Toyota Tacoma. Larger than a Rivian R1T."
> The wheels look comically small.
They look fine? How big should they be?
> The ground clearance doesn't seem to make it useful for more than suburban and urban road environments.
Oh, so they designed it for the environments it was...designed to be used in? And the same environments most macho big boy trucks spend 99% of their life in? What's the problem here?
Honestly, what's your problem? Why is your comment so harshly negative? You can't fathom a target market for this because you don't seem to be in it?
> * The bed looks too short to be practically useful.
Have you looked at the mainstream 'small' truck market lately?
Small in quotes, because actual small trucks disappeared, and we're left with mid sized trucks as the smallest. Used to be you could get a 6-ft bed standard and an optional longer bed on a small truck. Fuel efficiency standards now dictate you can't have that without a larger truck and worse fuel efficency.
I'm not willing to preorder an unproven brand, but I am excited about this. I'm a Toyota RAV4 owner, and I'd like something (much) more fuel efficient, or a fairly affordable EV, but I don't want to lose moderate hauling capacity for equipment, tools, parts for home, etc. I would seriously consider a very small/compact car but I do need to fit a car seat and I do occasionally move things.
I hope this makes it to market because if I was buying a car today, and this was available today, I'd pick this.
EVs are scam of the century. They have diverted so much economic resources into an end product that isn't even reliable let alone having a long life.
Yet to talk about the amount of mining, its carbon footprint and pretty much irreversible or really high cost extraction/restoration of batteries apart.
Longevity and carbon footprint - If that's not your yardstick than other than that the EVs are great. Have more power than any combustion engine can ever have, have more torque, more acceleration and pretty much zero maintenance as far as the "engine" is concerned. No noise, no emissions, no vibrations either.
> an end product that isn't even reliable let alone having a long life
What's unreliable on a modern EV? And what do you mean by "long life", because you now have 10-15 year old EVs that are fine.
Obviously some cars aged poorly, like some Tesla which had poor build quality (not an EV problem, but a company problem) or cars like the Nissan Leaf that didn't have battery cooling for years, but what's exactly unreliable on a modern Polestar or a Hyundai?
If you're referring to what happen to companies like Hertz, then according to them the problem wasn't reliability.
The cars had more accidents, probably because some were not used to the speed or would get an EV just to test the speed. Why buy Tesla in that case then, when their repairs are known to be super expensive and slow? Then you had people who are not used to EVs and charging trying to use EVs and the companies themselves didn't build the charging infrastructure so customers left with a full battery, but that has nothing to do with reliability. Vehicle depreciation? Again, a Tesla problem because they sold them the cars at a high price before dropping prices (the covid years were very weird).
So again, what makes EVs unreliable? It's a simple question.
I think a problem with EVs is that we don't have a depreciation model for the batteries in the same way that we do for the car itself (based on mileage).
In an ideal world you could instantly get your battery replaced with a full one at a recharging station and settle the difference in depreciation.
The EV ownership model only works right now if you charge it yourself and use it to drive around your own town
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I rented EVs multiple times. You don't worry about charging as often as 12 out of 48 hours. If there happens to be a convenient L2 charger you plug in. Otherwise you visit a fast charger.
Superchargers have excellent availability and uptime.
EVs depreciate quickly entirely because of technology advances. In the span of a few years we have seen 800V architectures, LFP batteries becoming commonplace. And semi-solid-state batteries are on the horizon.
> Yet to talk about the amount of mining, its carbon footprint and pretty much irreversible or really high cost extraction/restoration of batteries apart.
Do you also have similar thoughts on all the infrastructure needed for oil, or is that not to be discussed?
I always wonder with the "all the mineral-mining!!!" crowd, do they think the oil infrastructure just arrived overnight? And there was no cost (money and long-term ecological) to it all?
I spoke to them a lot at OpenSauce.
- The body panels were composite but they want to go to stamped metal for production. - It's based off of the subaru ascent; at least most of the frame and suspension is. - NMC chemistry, didn't get an OEM name for the actual cell/pouch though. - Mostly off the shelf Bosch power-train components. Will be interesting to see a tear-down once they're for sale. - No commitment on how "open" the vehicle will be to modifications. They have designed in attachment points for upgrades but it didn't seem to be anywhere as extensive as what Slate is doing. This makes some sense; they have a more "finished" vision where Slate is intentionally taking the "our vision is for you to buy the canvas from us and then make it your own" approach.
On that last point, I don't think Slate has released anything substantial either w/r/t the CAN bus either. As far as I know, their plan is still a BYOD approach for the head-unit so here's hoping that it'll be relatively straight forward to interrogate the busses from an android or linux device. The Telo had a head-unit integrated so who knows how much control you'll have over the vehicle.
I wonder if there's some business model like a mixture of send-cut-send and TSMC where a "FAB" agrees to stamp out 3000 fenders/doors/roofs and ship them to the customer (who then puts together the cars and paints them and such).
This is similar to what lotus did to help bootstrap tesla...
And hey, maybe tesla's going to have some spare capacity lying around so they could be that FAB... ?
I personally really want this truck to succeed. I'd happily trade in my 10 year old model S for this; it'd make dump runs and trips to the garden / home centers a lot easier than in the S...
I do wish they'd go full eccentric and use a citroen inspired oil suspension...
Press tools for car body panels are extraordinarily expensive, which is why low-volume manufacturers generally avoid using pressings wherever possible. It's just inherently very expensive to carve two huge blocks of steel into a smooth curved shape, so you need to sell an awful lot of units to amortise that cost. Tesla's deal with Lotus only worked because they used a fibreglass body - expensive per-unit, but very low tooling costs.
Desktop Metal are developing a sheet forming solution that requires no bespoke tooling, but it's a slow process with fairly poor surface finish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oqeVLILGHY
Right -- this is why I use the analogy of TSMC -- chip fabs are also extremely expensive, for similar reasons.
What are the relative costs of the making die set, the press, and setting up and doing a run of stampings, and the facility and employees to actually house the whole kit?
As of right now, if you need to make a car and you don't have a NUMI or similar retired automotive plant sitting around, it's going to be expensive.
What about the hydroforming process?
I guess smaller car makers from the 60s that did make low volume sheet metal cars didn't need to pass crash tests.
Probably The Telo people should just team up with ineos....
The process of a 3D model -> dies > panels that match the model is iterative. Tesla apparently cheaped out on that optimization paths and they had lots of issues towards rear left corner of cars, somehow on both Model S and X.
ODMs like Magna-Steyr and Valmet also exist. They take your plan, build some, and send to you on a ship from Central Europe.
except the fab pays the tooling cost once per process and the tool and die company charges once per design.
I've actually worked a little on hydroforming, but unless you're thinking of a different kind, it was labor intensive, and prone to crinkling in bad spots. we basically concluded that we used less time and got a better result with an English. which would probably run at least $10k for a car body, if you could find someone willing to work for that low an hourly rate.
Again, I'm confident that this is not a viable business, and certainly in no position to make it a viable business even if it was...
But places that make windshields keep forms around and make runs of windshields even for low volume cars; obviously there's less recurring need for fenders or floor pans... But there may be some way to financially engineer a "do a run we pay X per unit; hopefully that results in doing another run and paying X, and if we can get to 100X the per unit costs go down to some other target.
But I was thinking, and perhaps they should just make these cars out of ground up trabants or saturns. Tesla has demonstrated that some customers don't actually care about perfect finishes or gaps or whatnot; I certainly would be fine with a car made out of trabant, especially if it meant I didn't have to worry about dents...
Isn't that exactly what the automotive component suppliers (Magna, Bosch, Denso, Aisin, etc) do?
I mean, isn't that literally just a supplier?
Car companies tend to make the engines and the sheet metal body parts themselves; the tool and die setup to stamp out the sheet metal is enormously capital intensive and there aren't services to stamp up a bunch of sheet metal for you.
I love the fantastic designs and form factors popping up in mini-EV truck/SUV space. My worry is for the business feasibility for these. Why isn’t Tesla making these? They have the supply chain and expertise to easily pull it off and they’d be such a big hit. People switching to them for light cargo would be a REAL contribution in cutting use of carbon.
I can think of one possibility. At Tesla’s scale, production becomes feasible only if they can produce X million units. This is because setting up production tooling, supply chain channels, and other associated costs is prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the demand for these vehicles will be relatively low until influential YouTubers in the construction, farming, and rural sectors become advocates and start promoting them.
In my opinion, electric vehicles (EVs) are perfectly suited for this task. They are ideal for transporting heavy items between nearby destinations, such as moving Home Depot supplies to a construction site or Costco products to a restaurant or store. A range of even 200 miles is practical for this use-case and keeps the cost low (MT1 is a beast by my standard).
For clarification, I am all for more competition. But I am also selfish and I really want this segment to become wildly successful . In any case, I really and truly hope they can make the business case work and be profitable/sustainable.
I don't think Tesla's judgment should be the litmus test. They have capacity to produce 250K Cybertrucks / year, currently on pace to sell < 20K and it's only going down from here.
To be fair, the main reason for this is that the CEO of Tesla looked at "people who buy electric vehicles", and spent the last four years turning himself into a caricature of a villain to those people.
At the best maybe it was some sort of misguided attempt to encourage the American right to buy EVs?
If so it royally backfired and just decimated his own customer base right at the time real competition was entering the market. The Equinox EV roundly beats the Model Y head to head on range, price, AWD, etc. The Ioniq 5 is more expensive but is lovely.
The CT sales are <10% of their capacity, per your wording. Do you think Model Y sales are down 90%?
No doubt Elon is destroying the profitability of his company by being a public asshole, but the Cybertruck is a fundamentally flawed vehicle (almost) nobody asked for, which is why it's a flop. By comparison, (refreshed) 3 and Y sales are not off by nearly as much, and some of that is just because they're just refreshes of existing vehicles people have been buying for many years, and there's a lot more competition in the EV market, and overall EV sales are slowing.
Not really sure what you're referring to by "per your wording", but Tesla sales were down YoY both Q1 and Q2 of 2025.
Q1 was handwaved away back in April as "oh people are waiting for the new models" but then Q2 was down as well.
Sorry, must have been another thread, not your wording.
Someone pointed out CT production is <10% of their planned capacity. So the CT is underperforming by 90%, but I'm sure 3/Y sales are _not_ down by 90%. Meaning the CT is an outsize failure, even if you take into account Elon tanking Tesla sales in general, and overall slowing or at least plateauing EV sales.
> Equinox EV roundly beats the Model Y head to head
The Y is the best vehicle I’ve ever owned. To me, it took over what the Prius used to be - the best overall vehicle for most people.
You don’t even mention FSD here, I assume strategically. That, to me, is the most important feature. Does Equinox or Ioniq even have FSD?
The Y does not have FSD either.
I can't reply to the other person because their comment got dead'd, but the Y and the Equinox have similar levels of self-driving available anyway. GM's Super Cruise is comparable to what Tesla calls FSD.
I don't think the Ioniq has anything comparable.
My car drives me around town unassisted. Whatever you want to call that - does the equinox or ioniq do that?
The Y and the Equinox have similar levels of self-driving available. GM's Super Cruise is comparable to what Tesla calls FSD.
I don't think the Ioniq has anything comparable.
You are responding to a message about the cybertruck specifically, so I assume you are implying musk's behaviour is to blame for the poor sales of the CT?
The cybertruck fell flat long before Musk's true identity was revealed (maga/nazi affiliations).
Even if tesla was headed up by the most beloved CEO ever, I reckon the CT would still have sold poorly. It's just objectively a very bad, poorly designed and even worse built vehicle. And surprisingly, I feel like it's design aged very very quickly. It does not look next-gen or futuristic to me at all anymore.
There's a lot of reasons the cybertruck is a failure, but I think a lot of it does come down to Musk; not just the cancelled orders because of his politics, but because purportedly he inserted himself into the engineering and development at a far stronger level for this vehicle than the other Tesla vehicles, and a lot of the issues stem from fulfilling his design demands.
At the time the CT was announced there were no other EV pickups remotely close to buyable. If he had stepped back, and let the people who designed the X, Y, and 3 do their thing, it would have been released in 2020, and even with its unique shape would have sold great, and probably would not have developed the reputation for poor quality that the current one has.
> Elon Musk … nazi affiliations
Do you have a source for this?
I kind of think it's cool that reality is configured such that Cybertruck exists, but only in a very meta way. Lazy-think me: It feels dumb and is probably just bad focus from a company focus standpoint.
Sadly, trucks like these are like the automotive "small smartphone". At first it appears there is a large vocal market, especially if you read the comment section. Alas, nobody will buy it, just like nobody actually buys small smartphones.
A truck needs to have an 8 foot bed so you can haul plywood and lumber. I see this one does allow it by a “mid gate” and folding the rear seats but that’s still a bit cumbersome. And I prefer to have a metal wall between me and the 2x4s in case of an accident.
40k with 300hp and 350 mile range? This sounds pretty awesome imo.
Insane price. We need something closer to a $15k S10 or Ranger compact pickup. Simple and utilitarian.
agree, but how much would an S10 go for today if they had just kept making them? probably $25k+.
40k will not get you a 350 mile range. There is no way they get to market at that price for that capability.
40k gets 240 mile range.
The pricepoints are still vaporware.
Agreed, we'll have to see if they're even remotely close to their claims.
Kei trucks and the maverick seem to disagree.
These cars are not mainstream and are typically used to circumvent vehicle classification regulations.
"Used to circumvent" translation: the laws are stupidly restrictive so they're normally (pointlessly) illegal. And the reason they're not mainstream is because they're illegal.
Kei truck and the Maverick aren't even in the same universe of size comparison.
A kei truck will give a VW Golf a run for it's money size wise!
the maverick is a few inches shorter than the ranger. it’s huge.
Sadly true: and I’m one of those who walks their talk wrt. small phones. I don’t need a ute, though, so I drive a cupra born instead
Certainly not at $41k
Here in Ireland al lot of local "last mile" services (postman, deliveries, council services, repair crews etc) are switching to electric vans. It's such a no-brainer and a great application of evs.
I'm actually wondering why pickups are so popular elsewhere. A van makes so much more sense for a travelling tradie IMO - we need more electric vans!
Outside of farmers and heavy machinery workers, trucks are only a status/culture symbol these days. In my town, 1 out of 10 vehicles is a truck... a very clean and shiny truck that has never carried anything.
Partly driven by EU laws, most EU countries have or are introducing (ultra) low emission zones, barring non-electric now or soon from cities. Companies can see the writing on the wall and are making their 10-15 year vehicle investments accordingly.
> Additionally, the demand for these vehicles will be relatively low until influential YouTubers in the construction, farming, and rural sectors become advocates and start promoting them.
This is a surprising claim to me. Can you point to any other vehicles (even something from John Deere or a competitor) whose demand significantly rose in a way directly attributable to influential youtubers in those niches, and which influencers in particular you think would be particularly influential?
A John Deere is not a fashion statement. A car, or a daily commute truck, very much is, for many. (Sneakers, jeans, or t-shirts could be completely pragmatic, brand-oblivious items, too.)
A John Deere is absolutely a fashion statement, lol. You gotta meet more farmers, because the fights I see break out over Case IH, John Deere, New Holland, and Cat are unreal.
Oh, you would be so surprised. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8agst9o_0
"I love the fantastic designs and form factors popping up in mini-EV truck/SUV space ..."
Exterior designs.
The interior has no design - design and UI were given over to a touchscreen. Go look at the interior renderings to see for yourself ...
>My worry is for the business feasibility for these
hopefully the success of the ford maverick can allay some of this concern - i don't think anybody was really expecting it to be as successful as it has been, but it seems like there's actually pretty decent demand for a smaller truck.
> Why isn’t Tesla making these?
Like with most cars they have made it is because Tesla has no taste.
> Why isn’t Tesla making these? They have the supply chain and expertise to easily pull it off and they’d be such a big hit. People switching to them for light cargo would be a REAL contribution in cutting use of carbon.
I get your point but I also think you are being dismissive of their ongoing contributions to cutting carbon use.
But Tesla already did one of these. It's called Cybertruck.
The CT is a truck and it is electric, but it has some limitations, one being the range is not that great. And it has some weaknesses.
It also looks like shit and carries huge social baggage. ;)
And its fucking expensive
> huge social baggage. ;)
Or a great social filter. Consider the type of people that would judge you over a cybertruck.
> Consider the type of people that would judge you over a cybertruck.
I think we call those "most people".
I don't think most people care unless you're in a super liberal area.
Not about the politics of owning one, but they're just ugly as hell no matter where you live. MAGA conservatives that care about aesthetics do exist (e.g., my mother-in-law).
They have to solve a real problem for people hauling cargo, they don’t really do that as they currently exist. They get significantly worse range when hauling than a normal gas or diesel truck, their only benefit is making feel better about their carbon footprint.
I was legit considering getting an F150 lighting for a little while but when I saw how much your range decreases when towing something it became obvious that it’s not really practical. It’s just objectively worse at hauling than a gas car.
Hopefully we see more battery tech breakthroughs that make electric trucks viable work vehicles.
It is worse at hauling. I can get between 150 to 200 miles while towing my 4000 lb RV with my lightning. What’s nice though is I can get a full charge at my campsite for the night so I never really pay for transportation. Turns out 200 miles per day is good enough for cross country RVing.
For everyday driving, I pay about $8.50 for a “full tank” of charge that gets me around 300 miles. That’s about $100 worth of gas in an equivalent gas truck.
That’s being said I think the ideal truck would have about 2x-3x the current battery capacity of the extended range lightning.
The new huge GM EV & SUV trucks do have way more battery - and weight. The GM Silverado EV Work Truck is EPA 492 miles, tested at 530 by edmonds. So take the common rule of thumb, divide range by half or maybe a little more and you get about 250 miles of towing range. https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/topic/us/en/2025/....
In a couple of recent youtube videos, "Aging Wheels" thoroughly tested a variety of trailers towed behind a variety of vehicles and then also added weight to the trailer to see the efficiency impact of towing a trailer with a lot more weight. They found a 4.3% efficiency drop by adding weight to max out the towing, compared to towing without the extra weight. Weight isn't what matters on towing impact, it's the wind resistance of the trailer that matters much more.
They did a long series of comparison drives (in the about 30 mins video) with different trailers and then loaded them with extra weight to see the impact. It was smaller than you expect. The video with all the tests is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA.
I heard about this on the batteries included podcast where they interview the author of the video above, and kind of give high level summary with some details, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJv-xAqcTI.
That first video was very well done, answers so many questions all at once. I’m going to put effort into making my setup much more aerodynamic. That’s a potential 30-50 miles more per charge there!
It’s pretty complicated. The issue with hauling is that it craters your aerodynamics and explodes your rolling resistance, so you need massive battery capacity. Or to slow down, but most people don’t want to do that.
Aging wheels has a recent video on the subject: https://youtu.be/UmKf8smvGsA
They are cheaper to run almost everywhere (depending on the cost of electricity versus gas of course). No breakthrough in battery technology needed for that.
They don't run everywhere though. They run until the fuel runs out. At least with liquid fuels that just needs a short stop to refuel, and stations are everywhere. a recharge takes longer and places to do it are not as common. If you are towing there are places you can't get.
I immediately searched the site for interior pictures and had my pessimism confirmed ... it's a design-free interior with no physical controls.
At least they kept the stalks on the steering column ...
They partnered with Yves Behar for the exterior and interior design, so the current version leans more on the design over function side of things. The interior is getting a whole revamp for the actual units that'll go to customers. One of the things I confirmed is they're going with physical buttons below the screen. The door cards will be slimmed down, and they won't use cork like it currently does.
It's interesting to note that Béhar has founder credit for Telo Trucks, he's not a one-shot contractor. I guess his designs studio is involved with the new version as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telo_Trucks
At least it has a steering wheel. Wait until that disappears to be replaced by a joystick or worse still a USB port, bring your own mouse.
Also what's up with the knit dashboard?
Still as ugly as last time it appeared on HN, it has none of the charm of a Kei truck. I wish any company would just take the old Ford Ranger designs (2011 and earlier) and make a truck on that. Or better yet, Ford themselves could redo the electric version of the Ranger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV) from 25 years ago with modern tech but the same look.
Without a doubt one of the best American pickups of all time. I cannot fathom how a company fumbled what was essentially a perfect product.
I believe small trucks were unintentionally killed by CAFE. The regulation gives companies fuel efficiency targets. Prior to 2011, there were separate targets for categories like "passenger" and "light truck", but since 2011 it's been based on a formula of wheel footprint. Manufacturers realized that instead of trying to make current models more fuel efficient they could make bigger trucks instead. It was definitely one of the greatest failures of regulation and unfortunate that Congress never fixed it in 14 years. CAFE was essentially gutted in the recent budget bill.
That regulation certainly didn't help. Though more fingers can be pointed around, I think, for what has contributed in important amounts. What also has to be explained is that the modern giant F-150 is just a massively popular vehicle vs. all other vehicles, even if I and other small truck enjoyers don't have much interest in one. I think the optionality of them helps them sell quite a bit. As one incentive, regulations on car seat requirements often come up in various government complaints, but the F-150s with a dual cab can fit 3 in the back (and under the seats and the truck bed handles whatever else like strollers and so on), so the vehicle can make sense as a family vehicle for a younger and not too poor family. Interest rates on loans being lower until recently also helped not so rich people stomach the financing, though sales have been getting back to 2019 levels so I'm not sure how much that matters. Any other aspirations like towing a trailer/camper, or taking it onto dirt roads, or doing occasional "truck stuff", make it all the more attractive even if the options aren't exercised or can be individually satisfied better by other choices.
I wish our country was functionally governed again.
Unintended consequences. Perhaps it have been better to tax fuel directly?
That's the natural thing you think of, but then you have the problem that a fuel tax is a regressive tax on the poorest - who are usually also driving less efficient vehicles because they're cheaper, so they're hit twice as hard. But, if you tax vehicles by size, then you run into the issue that a lot of working-class people need large trucks to do their work. It's a hard problem and I've been thinking about it for a while.
Thinking government can help is wrong to begin with. It can't, it can only get in the way. Perhaps electric vehicles and definitely smaller vehicles could've been more prevalent today without the CAFE rules. Other environmental rules prevent (or make prohibitively expensive, same thing) the mines in which rare earth metals for batteries for EVs are produced.
At least the federal EV mandates are gone now (my state's still exists though, sadly). That would've only driven up costs, meaning more people either would NOT drive EVs at all, or would be even more in debt then they are now.
Congress probably isn't functional enough to pull it off, but they could pass a regressive fuel tax and then make up for it with adjustments to income tax. E.g. adjust progressive tax brackets or the EITC.
> 152 in Length 73 in Width 66 in Height
This is 3860 x 1854 x 1676mm, or 14% x 25% x -16% bigger than Japanese Kei car specifications(3400 x 1480 x 2000mm max.) Closest match in features among Kei cars would be Daihatsu Hijet Deck Van, except that one is 465mm / 18" shorter that this having an awkwardly short 880mm / 35" long bed.
well, one thing you'll learn from their marketing is that Mini Coopers are kind of big
41k ?!
The entire point of the Slate truck is to try to come in under 20K or around it, and without the EV subsidies that's probably not going to happen.
There's a reason limited production vehicles are almost always sports cars. Huge economies of scale are needed to target the budget market that you're not going to get as an unknown brand.
Slate is going to start closer to 28K now that the tax credit is gone (remember it’s not going into production until next year).
That said, $41K is still a big jump in comparison and it makes the Telo much closer to the price of a Model Y starting around $45K.
When I scrolled quickly through the landing page looking for the price, I noticed it wasn't there and figured it would be expensive. I didn't think it would be this much though...
There. It’s be something really expensive about EV’s. I keep hearing about batteries getting cheaper but these prices are insane.
It's twice the capabilities of the Slate though.
This is a breath of fresh air. Modern pick up trucks post-2017 are giant vehicles with high danger to pedestrians. They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
Good overviews of the truck https://youtu.be/aEq-vTLimrQ?si=fS-UhjndoWuxwBip
https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs?si=nEysWQHzafRpxfRp
> They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets
When I was off-roading and traveling a lot of dirt trails with my truck I would also wash it, wax it, and keep it in pristine condition when I got back home.
What did you expect? That we’d leave the mud on it forever, never wash it, and all of the side panels would be bashed in? If you’d climb under the truck (as I do for oil changes) you could see a lot of scrapes and dings from rocks, but I avoid damaging the side and front because that’s very expensive to repair.
Anyway, most of the trucks sold today aren’t sold in the off-road trim. They’re sold with features like lower clearance air dams up front for better fuel economy, on-road tires for better road noise and fuel economy, and commonly in 2WD trims. A new F150 can get 25mpg on the freeway even without the hybrid option.
I work remote so my truck isn’t used for commutes. I frequently haul things in the bed. I off road with friends.
Yet that doesn’t stop some people from making snide remarks about driving a truck. Some people love being angry at truck drivers and imagining they’re all just making irrational choices. They won’t be happy until we’re driving to Home Depot or UHaul every other weekend to rent a truck or trailer instead of parking one in our driveways.
It doesn’t stop them from calling me up and asking for help moving furniture when they need it, though. :)
You seem very intent (here, and in the loneliness thread) on projecting your own experiences as the baseline on which things should be evaluated.
It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed. Millions of school pickups happening on massive trucks - and SUVs - are not ceasing to happen because you loaded your own with a pile of grass. People buy them because they’re “safer”, comfortable and look good. This is coming from research data for years now, and not only in the USA.
It can be hard to relate to changes happening at societal scale that don’t affect your own microcosm, but how else can we be aware of it, and act on, if not through data, averages and trends?
Let's be honest. I only rarely use most of the features of my vehicles.
What's worse? A not in use bed, or a not in use back seat?
I have a truck, because I find it more convenient to have a truck bed anytime I need it, than to have to arrange to borrow or rent one. The bed doesn't get used often, but it's also a reasonable vehicle for driving solo or with one passenger; two in a pinch. Much better visibility than any other vehicle I have, too. Unfortunately, the single cab, 6-ft bed small truck market disappeared, and I got this one used with too big of an engine, so the mileage is poor... when I had a 4-cylinder small truck, mileage was better, but I don't drive that much anymore anyway.
But, I have lots of space, so I can keep a car for transporting a car pool in comfort, a PHEV with good mileage for longer trips that don't need anything special, a small truck for doing small truck things, and an old van with removed back seats that's fun to work on and can carry things that shouldn't get wet when it's raining. The van visibility towards the front is even better than the truck, because it's cabover, but visibility to the back isn't as good... None of those modern pillars that make it hard to see out the sides though.
> What's worse? A not in use bed, or a not in use back seat?
It's more "what's worse? A huge truck with worse visibility, alone, or a car that has better visibility, safety features, and less likely to kill someone in an accident, driven alone".
Obviously if the bed or the back set were the only swap, none of it matters.
And like... yeah there's the calculus of how often you use it etc.
> A not in use bed, or a not in use back seat?
A not in use back seat takes up far less space in a sane car than a pick-up truck with a bed.
> Much better visibility than any other vehicle I have, too.
At the expense of others. And good luck seeing a small child in front of it if you're driving in a moderately pedestrianized area.
My s-10 is 190 inches long by wikipedia. A same year Honda Accord is 189.5–191.1 in long. The accord is marginally wider.
Driving alone in my s-10 takes the same space as driving alone in an Accord if I had one. And it's easier to see around or through the S-10, so everyone gets more visibility.
The S-10 hood height and length is more than an Accord, so there may be some additional risk there, sure.
Either way, a cabover design like the linked vehicle should appeal. Better visibility to the front, and less wasted space.
You know, for someone who clearly is a bit triggered (reasonably) by dealing with whatever stereotypes and judgements people make about trucks and truck owners, their post is quite positive and respectful. Your reply to it is not. It seems like your argument is “the data indicates a statistical likelihood that someone judging, assuming, or stereotyping will still be accurate.” The factual inaccuracy of prejudice is not the problem with prejudice, the prejudice is
I fail to see how prejudice against waste is a problem.
Prejudice is a bad thing- for things that people can't change, like their race or age. Prejudice against people making bad or wasteful decisions is a good thing.
No, prejudice is bad, full stop. By definition it means to judge someone for something before you actually know for sure that they have/do the thing that bothers you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, that’s not the problem or the point. The point is you can’t, or shouldn’t, view or treat someone as though they have some quality you dislike when you don’t actually know about this individual and only know that a high percentage of them do. You can’t judge an individual this way! If you hate waste (as do I) and you feel trucks contribute to that and that a majority of truck owners don’t make use of their trucks, then great! Speak about it exactly like that. But you can’t simply take any truck driver and say “that individual is wasteful” without knowing.
You can’t do that any more than you can assume my friends and I are criminals and drug dealers because at some point we decided to use Telegram as our primary messaging app, or like ICE can assume anyone standing near a pro-Mexico protest is an illegal immigrant, you cannot attribute a quality to an individual without having actual knowledge of it.
> You can’t judge an individual this way
But nobody is here to judge individuals. It’s the other way around - the discussion is around behavioral trends and data, they were the ones bringing in personal anecdotes to counter it. The point is to look at the behavior of of the general population and its impact, not trying to prove that anyone in particular conforms (or not) to the overall trend.
The point is you can't reliably tell if someone's choice of vehicle is wasteful unless you get to know them a bit. Snap-judging someone's entire lifestyle in the second it takes to recognize a make and model isn't constructive.
You can't know it's waste until you know their actual use of it.
Like another comment says, prejudice is bad -- full stop.
I fail to see the prejudice?
The OP said, I quote:
> This is a breath of fresh air. Modern pick up trucks post-2017 are giant vehicles with high danger to pedestrians. They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
That's not a prejudice that's literally how they are marketed and used to a large extend.
The second poster said, he is not using it that way, sure fine nobody said that _everybody_ is using a pick up truck this way, however as the reply to the other post said, there is ample research that the majority of pickup trucks are never used offroad and hardly ever have anything in their bed. Why did the responder feel triggered? And let's not ignore the fact that people driving pickups on the road does have a cost for everyone else, they reduce safety for everyone not in a pick up as well as pedastrians and cyclist, they have poorer milage so are contributing unnecessarily to climate change...
Now as to the point of all prejudice is bad. That's a pretty strong statement. Are you not judging people by their actions? If someone walks around with a swastika (sorry for godwins law, but you made an absolute statement) on his sleeve, is it prejudice to judge him?
If prejudice is bad full stop, even to entirely freely chosen actions, then it's wrong to criticize people for writing prejudiced comments - after all, you're being prejudiced against prejudiced comments, and being prejudiced is wrong.
(Please note that criticising nested paradoxes of tolerance expires after one use per conversation.)
In the UK there was also a loophole that allowed them to be treated as a business expense when bought by sole traders. Many a hairdresser bought a pickup over the years.
That was changed so adding rear seats meant you could no longer class it as a company vehicle (the setup that was most common).
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.
Just want to point out that big pickups are really about the hauling capacity, it's not like their beds are much bigger than a modern Ford Ranger. An F250 can safely pull 10 tons, and a dually F450 can pull 20t. Usually you aren't towing...but when you need to haul nontrivial loads you need a big truck.
What's a reasonable scenario where average citizen need to haul 10, let alone 20 tons, on such regular basis that they need to own that capability themselves? Just rent or hire help. I would imagine that to also require special driving license, even if the car technically can handle it? We are not talking about professional use here, for that, use as big of a truck as you want.
They need it to take their 20 tons of artisanal tomatoes and sourdough bread to farmers market. For backhoe and other heavy equipment that they rent on a daily basis. They help their friends and family move, with the 6 x 12 utility trailer add on, which can be daisy chained. They have large families with boats, jetskis and canoes that need to be towed for fun activities. Haul lumber and tons of stuff from homedepot for the DIY remodeling projects, once again helping friends and families. Volunteering on nextdoor to helpout Ukrainian and palestinian refugees, helping charities with food, clothes, tires, furniture donations and donations of upto 20 tons of gold bars. Helping friends and family buy/sell and resell antique furniture, audio equipment and plasma TVs, lots of trips to and from self storage. A big pickup truck also helps build a big house with a massive garage with its own DIY repair shop. Also, lots of friends with other pickup trucks that get stalled need towing help. Beer, lots of beer for weekend sports watching. Hunt hogs and bring meat home. Most importantly, it helps get away from wife to help a friend/family, which is the killer app.
That’s what some peoples’ lives look like in Instagram. Good one.
Let’s cut to the chase here and flip this around. You tell people how often they need to be using the bed or towing things before you would accept their decision to buy versus rent as reasonable?
I go through periods where I tow weekly for months. Then I also have periods where I may tow nothing for 6-12 months. I rented for a bit and it was a huge pain in the ass for many reasons not to mention fairly expensive, can be so expensive to make paying the high price on a truck worth it.
If, as I suspect, you have never had the need to tow. Or do not live a lifestyle by trade/hobby that occasionally necessitates it, just say you can’t relate to the problems and inconveniences that renting poses and quit pretending nobody has thought of this before.
Your case sounds more justifiable, but there is definitely a threshold of use below which buying extra utility doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I believe that a large number of Americans in particular sit under this threshold.
I feel that even with my current vehicle, which is an AWD electric compact SUV — it’s a great, highly capable car but in practice I’ve found that I’m practically never coming close to approaching the ceiling of its capabilities, which makes it feel wasted on me. I could get by just fine with something like a Bolt or e-Golf or a fossil fuel counterpart like a Fit and so once my lease is up I’ll probably be “downgrading”.
You cannot rent a truck with a bed. Try it - nearly all rental 'trucks' have storng use restrictions such that you can't use them as a truck. even home depot trucks are for taking your purchases home and can't be used for other truck work. Even if you can use it, they often check the condition so if what you haul will scratch the bed you are out of luck.
if you manage to navigate that and find a truck that will work - the cost is so high that you are money ahead owning your own truck after rediculasly few rentals.
I regularly rent a Mitsubishi 20' flatbed with 1T lift gate for around $75 a day incl fuel. they don't bother doing the walk around since its 80% dents anyways.
I wish I could find a place like that. I don't need a nice truck but that is all I've found.
And towing anything is also forbidden. Yes there are commercial rentals but they are priced substantially more than the trucks at Home Depot or other consumer rental places.
When I was renting more often, I found Enterprise had pick-up trucks and you can tell them you will be towing during the RSVP (I think it may be a small extra fee, but mostly they want to make sure they get you a truck with a towing hitch). I still use this option if I need more than my half ton can handle (thankfully not very often). I wouldn't use the bed for anything as they are always nice new trucks and any wear would be extremely obvious and I'm not sure if they will charge me. I will rent a trailer from Uhaul instead, another layer to the inconvenience.
> Usually you aren't towing...but when you need to haul nontrivial loads you need a big truck.
That you can probably rent.
"I may need to haul a non-trivial load once 10 years from now" is hardly a justification for buying one
you probably cannot re&t such a truck. Home depot and all rental cars places have a no towing clause in the contract. Uhaul only tows the own trailer by concract.
the few rent for towing places are rare, and charge high fees such that it is cheaper to own your own truck.
Searching "rent a truck to tow":
- Enterprise https://www.enterprisetrucks.com/truckrental/en_US/towing.ht...
- U-Haul https://www.uhaul.com/Truck-Rentals/Pickup-Truck/
I'm sure there are plenty more + services for towing.
Most enterprise locations are no towing. Most uhaul trucks are the same despite that webpage. When hou find otn that can tow the costs are so high that it is almost always cheaper to own a truck you drive empty 95% of the time. You have to run your own numbers but everytime I run them for me I can't justify a car and renting a truck when I need one. (I mostly ride my bike)
That might be a side effect of everyone owning a pickup, so demand is low.
In the Netherlands you can easily rent a transport van or truck for €30+/day. Owning your own would never be cheaper, especially as road tax is based on vehicle weight.
> You seem very intent (here, and in the loneliness thread) on projecting your own experiences as the baseline on which things should be evaluated.
I was pointing out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You cannot conclude that a truck never goes off-road by observing them on city streets. That was your claim, and I explained why it didn’t make sense. I also explained why trucks are not primarily sold as off-road vehicles anyway.
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed
If you read the “studies” that make these claims they use two tricks:
First, they specifically exclude a truck defined as a work truck.
Second, they redefine “using the bed” to some arbitrary threshold, like hauling a large load of loose dirt or hauling something over so many hundred pounds.
If you actually believe that truck owners aren’t putting anything in the truck bed, you’re out of touch.
But why does this one point trigger you so much? If I showed you a similar study that the majority of people with back seats rarely had more than 2 people in their cars, would you become similarly enraged at the people buying 5-seat cars instead of a compact 2-seater?
If I showed you a study that the majority of people rarely use more than 200 horsepower would you start getting triggered by all of the 300, 400, or even 500 horsepower cars so wastefully driving around?
There’s something about pickup trucks, specifically, that makes a vocal minority irrationally angry and triggered. It’s a funny meme to watch because so many comments in this thread are absolutely sure that they understand the situation but they don’t understand basic facts about how you can’t tell if someone goes off-road by judging the condition of their paint, or that using a truck for work purposes doesn’t render it visibly damaged in a way that they can see. They just see trucks, get triggered, mix it with misleading “studies”, and come to believe odd conclusions like “truck drivers don’t use their beds”
Why are you triggered by the vocal irrational minority? You seem quite defensive for someone who is confident and comfortable in the the truck they own and how they use it and maintain it.
Not them, but I find that people who take out political frustration against non-political things quite annoying.
For example, when Tesla was blue-coded, way more comments here were highly forgiving, if not outright glazing. They became red-coded, and suddenly you’d see tons of highly technical reasons they sucked. You can gut yourself into coming up with many reasons this isn’t true, but it’s definitely true.
Trucks have gotten this since the beginning.
It’s not that it’s triggering, it’s just more annoying to have to waste a lot of time reading things that are clearly therapy for the poster more than any sort of interesting opinion.
It's getting harder to find good online discussions devoid of bias and emotions. With user moderation, control goes to those with the most time to waste online, meaning the least happy, productive and social.
And it's a self reinforcing downward loop as those deteriorating online spaces then completely drive away everyone with anything better to do
There is no discussion involving humans that is devoid of biases. It's in our nature. Important is trying to get aware of them...
Right. Not quite what I'm saying.
Take away the user moderation and you still have bias but you lose the feedback loop. You level the playing field between folks who live in their basements and folks with more balanced lives.
> There’s something about pickup trucks, specifically, that makes a vocal minority irrationally angry and triggered
Because of the cultural coding of pickup trucks, versus say sports cars that might get just as bad mpg.
> I was pointing out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
This discussion is pretty much done, but I just wanted to note that I’m not the original poster you were replying to.
> You cannot conclude that a truck never goes off-road by observing them on city streets. That was your claim, and I explained why it didn’t make sense.
No, the claim is that the majority of them are not going off road, not any particular vehicle (yours included).
I enjoy cars, and driving a large pickup is fun. I also happen to think they are not appropriate vehicles for the majority of people, should not be a default option, take up way too much space, and make city roads significantly less safe. This is not an emotional response, just an opinion. If your use of a pickup makes sense I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
And yes, I also agree that 200hp+ ICE cars are wasteful, and even if they are an EV, most people should not be driving something that powerful as it also has an impact on road safety. Similar thing: you enjoy cars, drive well, and own an SRT? Great, have fun! Should the average driver have one? Hell no.
People using their trucks for truck stuff know most others don’t. They don’t have to make shit up
> It is a known fact that the vast majority of truck owners rarely ever use the truck bed.
I'm not here to defend brodozers, but you cannot possibly prove this statement. That a _pickup truck_ isn't hauling the majority of the time it is on the road is not some new thing. But of course there are more pickup trucks on the road than ever, so if you argument is aggregate time of all pickup trucks not doing truck things is the highest its ever been is certainly true, but you'd probably have to go back to before the 80s for that number to actually be meaningfully different per truck.
Not sure what you mean by "prove this statement" but answering questions like this is exactly why organizations do consumer research. To wit [1]:
> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
The hauling figure is useless without specifying what they mean.
Usually these “studies” redefine hauling to mean something specific like hauling loose dirt or something extremely heavy.
If you can read a quote claiming 2/3 of truck owners don’t “put something in the bed” more than once a year then and not realize that something is wrong with these statistics then you’re missing something.
The question is not whether they "put something in the bed" — it's whether they use the bed in such a way that the trunk or back seat of a smaller vehicle would be unsuitable.
The Telo appeals to me. I've resisted getting a truck because I like a smaller vehicle and don't want to have undue impact and because I've listened to arguments like this before.
But I was offroad last weekend. I move sheets of plywood a couple of times per year and either need to beg my wife to help or sit around waiting at Home Depot for the truck to be available. I have stuff to move for robotics comps that I'm always barely able to get there by cramming it in my car + begging a couple of parents to help out. Dealing with the bike rack is hard. Ordering things like Ikea furniture for delivery is expensive, latent, and not exactly low impact iself.
Yah, 90% of the time I need a car, but 10% of the time I need a little more and there's enough friction around making it work that I would pull the trigger on something like this.
On the other hand I don't think I could say "frequently" to any of those questions.
Two thoughts here:
1. An ideal society would be structured such that you wouldn't need to buy a truck you use as a car 90% of the time. But that society doesn't exist here, and you shouldn't feel guilty about living by incentives you didn't create. Maybe you do need a truck!
2. But we're not talking about people who compromise to make 10% of their trips more convenient; we're talking about people who never use their truck for truck things. A car would be better choice for them 100% of the time, yet they still drive a truck.
One of my points was re: #2:
I am not sure how I would answer on that survey. It really depends on fine details of how the questions were worded.
For sure towing would be "rarely". But "personal hauling"? I am not sure.
There’s a quote from some consulting firm that goes around claiming 2/3 of truck drivers don’t “put something in the bed” more than once a year.
It’s a laughable claim for anyone who thinks about it for more than a second.
The way they usually get to these numbers is by redefining what “hauling a load” means to be something extremely heavy or for loose fill materials. So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
The company in question has been doing their survey for two decades. It’s a private data set, but has been reported on by multiple serious news outlets which will have their own data scientists looking over the data, e.g. Axios: https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
You can also verify the data is coming from real drivers, by searching for “New Vehicle Experience Study” and seeing all the posts from users who receive the survey and think it’s some kind of scam.
> So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
Even if that’s the case, the truck owners doing this probably don’t need a full size truck. A 90s-era small truck or maybe even a kei truck would suffice, and yet more often than not the trucks in question are the likes of F-150s.
Agreed, unfortunately small trucks are increasingly harder and harder to find. A 90s truck also won’t have the amenities that a modern truck has.
I think if they are just hauling mountain bikes, they could get a small hitch installed and purchase a high-quality bike rack. A roof rack can carry 2x4s very well.
Or do what I do and drive an MPV, which are bloody excellent for getting my TT bike in with its excessively angled aero bars!
That's what hauling means to me, though.
A rack mount on a normal European-sized car is perfectly sufficient for a couple bicycles, I have one, and a trailer for my enduro motorcycle, or a fridge, or anything else I occasionally transport. Anything bigger and I'll rent an actual truck.
> So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
If that's all you're doing, anything more than a Maverick is overkill. Bike racks and wood delivery are a thing. Shit you can fit a mountain bike in the back of a sedan. I see people doing this at trailheads all the time.
Those suburban moms don't need a Yukon to take their two kids to soccer practice either.
> So if someone routinely hauls a couple mountain bikes in the bed of their truck or gets a few 2x4s from the lumber yard it wouldn’t count.
I don't know how long a 2x4 is, so I don't know about those. But in the summer holiday period (so now) you see a lot of these running around: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thule_(11834033554... Even on surprisingly small cars.
I dislike the whole "justify why you like X" thing. People can always find the flimsiest of reasons why they want to prohibit things they don't like and then demand others justify why they should get to keep what they have. Just simply liking something never seems enough for those fighters against joy.
I really don't like pick up trucks. I also think most of their practical uses can be achieved with other vehicles. But that shouldn't concern me. If the owner of the car gets joy out of it, then that should be enough. I don't have to like what others like, and they don't have to like what I like.
>If the owner of the car gets joy out of it, then that should be enough.
For most things, yes, absolutely! However, considering the dangers of huge trucks it is very valid to have concerns about them. An exaggerated analogy: if the owner of a gun gets joy out of free firing it into the air that should be enough.
Respectfully, if you don’t know how long a 2x4 is, I think it would be very reasonable to look this up, as it will make you much better equipped to make this argument.
I generally agree with what you are saying, and frequently haul 2x4s without my truck - but the solution to that is a long flatbed trailer, not a Thule hitch attachment.
The Thule hitch attachment was responding to GP saying they throw their bikes in the bed of their truck.
it does depend a lot on what you buy it for, but obviously 8' is a good benchmark.
But honestly... at 8' I'm not sure why you're bothering with anything (unless you're getting a lot of them), i usually just threw 8 footers in my Honda Fit and closed the hatch.
Ironically most pickup truck beds are shorter than 8' and most likely a 8' piece of lumber would have to lay diagonally sticking out over one of the edges.
Still good for occasional piece of furniture, lots of lumber, or plywood.
The shortest bed f150 you can buy is 5.5ft, with a 2ft tailgate, trivially hauling 8ft with just a few inches overhang with the tailgate down, and easily doing 10ft lumber.
Again, I think pickup trucks are idiotically oversized and dangerous to pedestrians, but arguing against them by repeating things that anyone that uses a pickup knows is nonsense is not helping win over any detractors.
To be clear, I am not arguing against pickup trucks. The reason I bring up the bed length is a personal pet peeve thing. I have some amount of OCD going on, and I will be damned if I will ever approve of a truck that can't fit a piece of lumber in its bed without leaving the tailgate open that can fit into a Ford Fiesta with the trunk closed.
I am fully aware of why and how people use pickup trucks and I have no beef with that on cultural grounds. But if I were to get one it would be a long bed truck and I would sacrifice the cab space if needed.
Exactly, because my car can do that. You can put your shopping in the flatbed but you wouldn’t claim you were “using” the flatbed or “hauling” a pint of milk and a load of bread…
I meant, you could, but I’d laugh in your face.
> That we’d leave the mud on it forever, never wash it, and all of the side panels would be bashed in?
That's exactly how we always did it growing up.
> A new F150 can get 25mpg on the freeway even without the hybrid option.
As a non-American it's super weird that this is considered a good thing. That'd be considered utterly atrocious in most parts of the developed world.
I completely get that a truck is absolutely the best tool for the job for many people. But it's pretty obvious the OP was pointing out the people who own a truck and use it to get from home to their desk job.
As an American, I think 25 is absolutely abysmal.
It's not good in 2025. The fuel economy of a modern sedan (eg. a Toyota Camry) is around 50. It's just this one poster who is defending trucks saying it's good.
The average fuel economy for cars on the road right now is around 25mpg.
You can also get a 40-50mpg brand new sedan here if you want, but they serve different purposes.
You can also get a hybrid F150 that gets better mileage.
You can also get a fully electric F150 that doesn’t use any gas at all.
I was trying to make a point to counter the silly assumptions throughout this thread, such as the person who keeps claiming trucks are “incompetent” at being normal vehicles.
> You can also get a 40-50mpg brand new sedan here if you want, but they serve different purposes.
They don't. Your average truck is hauling a person from home to work to grocery store to home 10% of the time. 80% of the time it's parked. 90% of the remaining 10% is also covered be a sedan
As a non-American, I operate in l/100 km, and have no idea what 25 mpg is...
Assuming I used the correct gallon (US!=UK), I think it's 9.4l/100km
25 isn't good? That's what my tiny sedan used to get and I sold it not even 5 years ago.
No, not even close to good.
I'm having to convert to US gallons to Imperial here but...
My old ICE car was getting approx 50mpg (which is approx 41mpg for you) and was considered poor for its age. My new one (hybrid) is 60mpg (approx 50mpg for you).
For a fairly modern car (e.g under 10 years old) in the UK you'd expect at least 40–50 MPG (UK) / 33–42 MPG (US), and even that would be considered on the lower end. Most modern cars are either electric or hybrid here these days so you'd expect 60–100 MPG (UK) / 50–83 MPG (US).
Few modern gas cars will get over 50 US MPG in city usage. 35 MPG is probably a better estimate for the hybrid fleet which is still much, much better than gas cars of a decade ago.
My 2011 golf gets 40mpg real world mileage. Tiny engine, but I don’t need to impress anyone with my car
That's exceptional fuel economy for that car, typical looks like 25-35 MPG. If you are more skilled than average (I'm guessing so), don't have too many short trips, and live somewhere relatively flat no doubt it's doable. Edit: while I was looking I checked out the Prius and RAV4 and it turns out median reported MPG is around 49 and 39 so maybe my intuition is tainted by living in a hillier than average area.
I do live in the Netherlands, and drive conservatively and it is also manual and the smallest engine, all of which might help
A Toyota RAV4 (the best calling ICE car in the world) is about half that. They do a hybrid model that’s lower still.
The Toyota Corolla (second best selling) is then lower again.
US cultural perceptions on fuel efficiency are bonkers.
Genuinely terrible, a 15 year old Civic handily gets 35mpg highway, a 2025 non-hybrid gets 47+.
A 2025 non-hybrid gets 47+? I don’t think so. That’s pretty close to the EPA rating for the hybrid model.
15 year old, so c. 2010.
I can easily belive it, though the closest Civic mpg report I found was for a 2012-14 model:
- https://www.auto-data.net/en/honda-civic-ix-hatchback-2.2-i-...I had use of a Renault Megane for a bit, it was getting something a bit better than that: https://www.auto-data.net/en/renault-megane-iii-phase-ii-201...
American cars just aren't at all efficient by anyone else's standards.
25 is terrible highway mileage. When I (USA) had a pickup truck as my daily commuter for a few years 5-10 years back, I got ~22 mpg on "city" roads, and >30 mpg on highways. And that's not considered good.
My sports sedan gives 25 mpg, and my parent's Toyota hybrid SUV gives 58 mpg.
My 2019 subaru forester only gets 27 mpg.
This is a deeply emotional response to someone making the completely obvious point that the vast majority of trucks are grocery haulers. That's not opinion - it's statistics.
Nobody wants to tell you you can’t buy a truck, but the rest of us shouldn’t bear the negative externalities of every person who wants to buy a truck - especially when the facts show most of those people would be served (practically if not emotionally) just as well by a smaller vehicle.
Why should we subsidize truck (and SUV) ownership? They ruin roads, are vastly more dangerous, require wider lanes, have worse visibility of pedestrians, pollute more, are louder, and take up more space than other options. Yet we don’t make SUV owners pay for any of that. We subsidize their gas, their road repairs and expansions, their car insurance, their storage space, their car payments, not to mention ignore the injuries, deaths and discomforts they cause.
My 2011 VW Golf gets 40mpg… so I’m not very impressed by an F150 that 99.9% of the time performs the same job (carrying one person and no cargo) getting 25. (Even if this isn’t your experience, the facts show that for most people it is)
You should be free to make your own decisions! I support you in that. I can believe that your lifestyle justifies owning a truck, even though that doesn’t generalize to most SUV owners. I just don’t want to pay for other people’s lifestyle decisions. It’s like we have socialism for truck owners, but market capitalism for people who need healthcare
My truck is used purely and solely for truck shit - getting in and out from where we live, which is absolutely impassible with anything other than a high 4x4 with mudder tyres, and hauling everything from trees to gravel to water to batteries - there’s almost always something substantial in the bed.
It gets washed maybe twice a year, as it ends up filthy within 20 minutes anyway - and the panels all have scratches and dents from forging through brush.
For car shit, I have an (electric) car which I park on the main road.
The idea of waxing my truck is up there with the idea of waxing my legs.
25mpg is still insanely, obscenely profligate when a reasonable vehicle (say a Renault Clio) gets somewhere between 50 and 70. That will make some people angry and it’s hard to see that as entirely irrational.
I completely agree and I personally consider it ethically wrong to buy an ICE at this point in time. There’s still a premium to pay for an EV, but the excuses are rapidly evaporating. What this tells me is that for all the lip service people give about the environment, fundamentally most people don’t really give a shit.
In the U.K. I see many pickups owned by hairdressers (judging by the livery) in suburban areas. Something tells me they’re not transporting generators around with them…
People addicted to online forums love to comment and upvote posts which trash talk trucks. People who own and enjoy trucks are busy leading fun and productive lives and can't be bothered to waste their time with online arguments.
Because they are subsidized by the rest of us. That’s all we want to stop.
The primary purpose of a pickup truck is gender affirming care for men in an increasing confusing world.
Yea, it's not like men have a natural preference for tools, liking to repair things, cool toys to carry on the back, or think "why get a mini-cooper when I can get an F-150 to carry my hunting gear, tow the boat". It obviously all culture-imposed gender preferences.
> it's not like men have a natural preference for tools
A proven preference they're born with and unrelated to the culture they grow up in? Please do link to that study!
You don't need to study if grass is green or water is wet, but you're welcome to study why.
If you don't question the basics, you will miss they grass is not always green, depending on environment https://www.australianplantsonline.com.au/imperata-rubra-jap... https://www.oztrees.com.au/product/austrostipa-scabra/ So yes, sometimes you need to study that before assuming that what you usually see is natural rather than shaped.
Vehicular elephantiasis is largely the result of perverse incentives from emission regulation. Make something big enough and it fits into different more lax categories. The way we do emission and mileage standards might do more harm than good unless you’re an oil company.
Maybe, but it's clearly worked it's way into fashions as well. The F-150 lightning doesn't have to worry about emissions categories, but it's just as elephantine as the rest, including a child-killing vision-obstructing front hood and grille whose only purpose is to enclose a frunk.
I like that’s the lightning is giant. I don’t particularly like small, low to the ground vehicles.
Your comfort shouldn’t outweigh the safety of pedestrians. There is a reason those cars do not pass regulations in Europe.
I’ve driven plenty in Europe. Those small cramped roads can’t handle big vehicles and parking anywhere is non existent or highly inconvenient. I bet that’s the main reason European cars tend to skew smaller.
But why is that? Is there any chance it's at least partly to protect yourself from everyone else in giant cars?
I have a Subaru Forester. When I drive a sedan everyone shines their headlamps into my face. I parked my Forester behind a sedan and drove back and forth. My lights were not in their cabin.
So other people drive in a way that is not compatible with my driving because I don’t want headlamps in my cabin. Occasionally there’s a lifted truck behind me and it brightens my cabin.
In those moments I fantasize about placing retroreflectors all over my rear seat headrests but then I pull over and let them past and the moment passes.
Besides, a HN truism is “Yield to gross tonnage”. I liked that. It makes sense that HN users who believe that if you’re big others should get out of the way also get large cars.
“The cemeteries are full of people with right of way” so smaller vehicles should get out of the way of larger vehicles or risk death. It’s a good lesson. Can’t say it’s false.
I guess there should be rules about the height of headlights. It seems like exactly the sort of safety and compatibility problem that standards exist to solve.
US mainstream belief is that standards can be enforced at factory but no laws should be enforced on individuals. I act in that ecosystem. Not worsening it, but not sacrificing myself to it.
It is obviously true.
What is also obviously true is that road damage scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass, and that therefore vehicle taxation should increase at a similar power, so that the drivers of the 3-tonne trucknutted Canyoneros stop freeloading on the community.
… and that’s why I bought a Marauder MPV to go get groceries.
Nothing less than a decommissioned Abrams tank will do for taking little Billy to school!
Also the arms race of collision survivablity. I have no interest in driving a big truck, but with all the other big trucks out there I’m seriously tempted just for my own safety…
The big trucks are not evaluated for safety to the same standard as other vehicles. They aren't rigged with exploding gas tanks anymore, but the feeling of safety is mostly psychological.
That’s not the safety risk. The safety risk is not being in a big truck and getting hit by one. It’s not so much to do with the vehicle’s safety features as to (1) mass; and (2) height of the cabin.
That’s part of the issue. The safety ratings of a pickup truck do not incorporate the risk of the front end causing fatalities in collisions.
The feeling of safety is part of that - drivers think they have better visibility due to seating position. They are also more likely to roll and spin out than other vehicles.
Causing fatalities to the other drivers and pedestrians. This is, unfortunately, a selfish incentive that works against the common good.
Agreed. It’s gross. Unfortunately we live in an era where common good is a quaint concept.
The only logical next step is the mini-tank
I've been looking at the GTK Boxer since it was first announced. The modularity means you can bring the kids to school then swap the rear module for one more suited to transporting raw materials, you just need a garage equipped with a 15t crane to do the swap at home in just a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn_WblYc4xk
Just wait until 2050 when we all have our own killdozers [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
The killdozers will all be self driving with no passengers and we will be the target. This will surely come to pass long before 2050.
How did I never hear of this? That was an epic read, thank you.
It isn’t an arms race, as being in those bigger vehicles only feels more safe; it isn’t actually any safer.
It is much safer to be in a big truck hitting an another big truck, than in a small sedan hitting a big truck. Physics of momentum beats out safety features. Actual studies do show this: it is safer for the occupant of the truck in a two-vehicle collision.
More trucks on the road make the chance of fatalities overall higher. You often find articles saying that fatalities go up when you introduce a truck, and that is true. But that's because trucks are more likely to kill pedestrians or drivers of smaller cars, NOT because of risk to the truck driver. []
It would be better if there were fewer trucks on the road. But if everyone else is buying a truck, it becomes your selfish incentive to do so as well, for the safety of your* family. It is a tragedy of the commons situation.
[*] The exception is single-vehicle accidents, e.g. rollovers. Those are riskier and more likely for the driver of a truck, but also less of a concern in suburban driving.
I think that’s part of it, but also about 30% of men apparently have a nearly-unlimited budget for buying the biggest truck.
Maybe we’ll see that change if the recent CAFE changes stick. I think the big bill passed recently set CAFE fines to zero.
those are the trucks that people who buy trucks like. This truck is designed to appeal to people who don't buy trucks.
It's also because of CAFE standards.
Those effectively don't exist anymore. The fine multiplier was reduced to zero, so there's no penalty for violating the standards, retroactive back to 2022.
> I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
It’s about having one vehicle that can do it all. Maybe you’re noticing when there’s one human but you don’t really know how else that person is using the vehicle at other times. Trucks can haul people, things, do road trips, etc. pretty well.
You Don't Need a Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume - https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz... - March 15th, 2019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42638394 - January 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21631704 - November 2019
Ray Delahanty | CityNerd: Rural Cosplay is, Unfortunately, A Thing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18
(Americans buy trucks out of emotion and cosplay, not realized utility and rational TCO, based on the evidence and data)
I'm shopping for a truck atm because I need one. I am pretty routinely overloading the towing capacity of my Land Cruiser, and a decent flatbed pickup would obviate the need to hook up the trailer most of the time. Being able to tow/haul 3-4cord of firewood logs in one go would be super convenient, I'll use that capability at least once per year.
And if you're thinking "why not just rent?" I'll ask when was the last time you saw an equipment trailer rental with a winch capable of hauling logs up onto it?
Paradoxically, at least in the context of this thread, my motivation to own a truck is safety and efficiency. A 12 valve Cummins pulling the GCVWR of a 1994-1998.5 3/4 ton Dodge will get right around 10mpg and do it safely.
I admit there are many of you out there, and have no problem with folks who need a truck for truck use cases. That's what trucks are for. I take issue with those buying them for non rational use cases (status, etc), "Pavement Princess" vehicle duty cycles.
> Americans buy trucks out of emotion and cosplay
This is a hilarious take for anyone who has spent any time living outside of a big city.
Yes, there are some people who buy trucks because they want one but don’t actually use the truck features.
Generalizing to “Americans are cosplaying” is just trolling.
Study Claims That Most Pickup Truck Owners Don’t Actually Use Them For Truck Stuff - September 2023
https://www.powernationtv.com/post/most-pickup-truck-owners-...
https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
You’re spamming this same study throughout the thread without realizing that is uses a different and much stricter definition of “hauling” than the average person.
This demonstrating the average person is an idiot who never needed a truck because their “hauling” can be done with a sedan or even a compact car.
Which is rather the point.
Could it be possible that while you can cram something in the backseat of a car, a truck bed might result in less damage to vehicle interiors and the object being moved?
It's a tool not a baby. Are you buying vehicles several times the price and encumberance because you can't fold down the rear seats and lay down some tarp?
And more damage to the roads, society, the cities, and the neighborhood children you can’t see
From that own study it shows more than half are using it at least “occasionally” for “hauling”.
I’d like to see the study on what percentage of people use all 4 seats in their car so you can dunk on people who buy 4 seaters next.
You make it sound like it would be unreasonable to dunk on people wasting our society resources. Why not hit on people driving 4 seat cars when they drive alone most of the time? If it affects me it should be normal that I voice an opinion. Those cars use public space, roads, bridges that are affected more the heavier your car is. That also drives up the motor power needed which in turn increases public air pollution.
Electric cars weigh far more than a gas Toyota Corolla. You don’t want to go down that path
Why do I not want to go down that path? Of course I do. It's a trade-off.
> This is a hilarious take for anyone who has spent any time living outside of a big city.
People outside of big city need big trucks about as often as people in the city.
Source: lived in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina.
Living outside of big city doesn't mean you're immediately a farmer who needs to haul tons of forage or lumber. The absolute vast majority of people don't.
I live in a big city and two children under 10 have been killed by large pickup trucks within a half mile of my home in the last five years. Two that I know of anyway, because I'm acquainted with the families. One had been modified with a "bull bar" making it more dangerous to pedestrians.
And 80% of americans live in urban areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullbar
>based on the evidence and data >Evidence and data show that cake taste better than bread, why are they starving? Let them eat cake
I really wonder what kind of world people live in who write such articles and what kind of world people live in who seriously read them. It's hard to believe that they live among us, there must be some separate island in the ocean or something like that where they can write their articles in complete isolation from the rest of the world.
Ehh, vehicle affordability rapidly accelerating away as the middle class evaporates solves the problem if people can’t make financially rational choices themselves. As of this comment, the average price of a new full-size pickup truck is around $64,000, while the average price of a new mid-size pickup truck is about $42,690. This is before tariff impacts are baked in. Doesn’t include operating costs (fuel, insurance, maintenance), putting monthly payments around $1k/month (at least). Let them drive studio apartments around I suppose, if they can get financed and not repo’d in the near term.
Would you cry for me if I wanted a Lambo but couldn’t afford it? You would not. This is different? Everyone is entitled to wildly conspicuous consumption? I argue no.
>affordability rapidly accelerating away as the middle class evaporates solves the problem
But that complete bs. Vehicle affordability is not in any danger, average price of a new pickus trucks depends on the amount of money the population has. Even if the middle class completely disappears, people will just drive cheaper pickups.
>Would you cry for me if I wanted a Lambo but couldn’t afford it?
But they could. And that the reason why "the average price of a new full-size pickup truck is around $64,000"
> But they could. And that the reason why "the average price of a new full-size pickup truck is around $64,000"
Car Repos Hit Levels Unseen Since 2008 Financial Crisis - https://www.pymnts.com/transportation/2025/car-repos-hit-lev... - March 27th, 2025
Late Car Payments Hit Highest Rate in More Than 30 Years - https://www.pymnts.com/loans/2025/late-car-payments-hit-high... - March 6th, 2025
St Louis Fed FRED: Average Amount Financed for New Car Loans at Finance Companies - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DTCTLVENANM
I’ll see if I have access to the Cox Automotive pickup truck specific repo stats as soon as I’m not mobile. Based on the auto loan delinquency and repo rates, the evidence is fairly robust that people cannot afford these price levels. They get off the lot with the vehicle, certainly, that’s super easy due to easy credit, but then the clock starts ticking on when the car gets repo’d.
(~100M Americans are sub 700 FICO subprime, 33-40% of consumers depending on credit reporting agency providing the data)
> Americans buy trucks out of emotion and cosplay,
You don't need anything besides tent and food!
Every person buys almost everything for emotion.
Sure, but large trucks come with a ton of very negative externalities.
The original comment is just about how "irrational" it is.
And truck owners pay more - for the vehicle, for tires, for registration, for gas, etc which are all taxed by the public to reflect their greater usage of public roads.
You would need to argue that trucks have a disproportionate impac. For example, if I commute 2 hours to work in an Accord, is that a greater negative externality than owning a Truck a commuting 15 minutes?
I suspect the answer is no - a truck is some small multiple of a smaller vehicle.
What I see in this thread is that the narrow demographic here is merely expressing a preference - they don't like trucks, and they wish that could be imposed on others. Ultimately, you need to convince your fellow men in an election.
Small multiplier, I think not.
Pickup trucks weigh about 1.5x as much as a sedan (comparing Camry to F150). Due to the fourth power law, they should be taxed about 5 times higher than a sedan simply for road maintainence. I don’t have the numbers, but I doubt that is so. Toll roads typically charge per axle, and as below, gas tax is probably only about 2x. Ironically, EVs should pay more tax for maintenance since they are usually quite a bit heavier—though the OP truck is still ~600 lb lighter than an F150.
Fuel economy is about half in a pickup vs. a sedan, so they pollute that much more. Gas tax obviously scales here, but do the other taxes? Does gas tax go towards remedying the pollution impact at all? I don’t know.
Then there’s the safety impact on pedestrians and other vehicles. I don’t have numbers here, sorry.
Also, if you consider the externalities of cars in general, there's the additional issue of designing our communities around them rather than around the people who live there.
This quote is kinda a meme by now but here's SimCity lead designer Stone Librande on how the team had to make parking lots unrealistically small for the game to be enjoyable [1]:
> When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
[1] https://archive.ph/z7hZG#selection-753.65-753.506
If you spend any time looking at parking lots on satellite maps you quickly realize parking lots are nearly always at least twice as large as the building they are for.
> Due to the fourth power law, they should be taxed about 5 times higher than a sedan simply for road maintainence.
In this model wouldn’t 18 wheelers dominate and it doesn’t matter what personal vehicles do?
Indeed a max-load trailer truck is equivalent to 10,000 cars in road wear. However the benefit of them (since they transport goods for many) is somewhat outweighed. Regardless, that doesn’t obviate taxing personal vehicles at all, nor heavier vehicles more than lighter ones. Some quick searching shows there are about 60x more personal vehicles than trailer trucks in the U.S.
Right, carbon emissions, excess deaths incurred on others, etc.
This is one of the dumbest takes I’ve seen on trucks. It attacks a straw man.
If you buy something for one of its features and don’t use the others, it doesn’t have anything to do with cosplay.
This is like saying people who buy electric cars should just buy race car driver costumes instead. Unbridled ignorance.
Most race cars aren't electric though? That analogy makes no sense.
If you buy a product that comes with a ton of negative externalities and then don't use the single feature that distinguishes it from other products, people will rightly judge you.
> Most race cars aren't electric though? That analogy makes no sense.
No, they aren't. I attend a significant amount of track events as a driver and I will see maybe 1 electic car every few events. Besides the lack of charging infrastrucutre at most race tracks, the one positive of instant torque/power is significantly outweighed by their overall mass and significant heat generation.
The latter tends to result in a Tesla S being unable to last more than 20 minutes at Laguna Seca or Sonoma before the battery pack overheats and reduces power output requiring the car to exit the track.
Electric cars have great acceleration. According to this thread that’s just pointless cosplay.
The comparison breaks down since, in race car terms, the great acceleration isn’t enough to offset the negatives that make electric cars poor race cars. So in a sense it is pointless cosplay. Even the acceleration might be working against itself since the great acceleration comes at the cost of the battery pack expending more energy, contributing to heat build up.
This isn’t to say the heat problem couldn’t be managed, but one of the biggest issues with race cars generally is heat management so starting from a platform with a unique and significant heat problem isn’t ideal. Then the weight and overall longevity of the battery pack comes into play.
To tout the acceleration without discussing the drawbacks involved in delivering it or the practicalities of leveraging it suggests that it’s such a great feature that the drawbacks either don’t exist or don’t matter.
They also produce no tailpipe emissions and tend to have a lower carbon footprint, more storage space, a quieter cabin, no "hump" for the driveshaft, etc. There are lots of reasons you might choose an electric car other than the acceleration.
On the other hand, a truck's single distinguishing feature is the bed.
> Unbridled ignorance.
Ironically, I don't think ignorance means what you think it means. It simply means not knowing something; it's not, for example, an attitude in itself.
It means exactly what I think. This dunk on truck drivers based on seeing them in the city is ignorance. Trucks are multimodal. Seeing them in one mode does not mean they aren’t used for another.
A lot of modern “trucks” are pretty crappy for actually hauling anything. A few months ago I had the pleasure of loading some furniture into an Escalade. The outside is huge, but the inside is remarkably small. The height of the interior floor is also ridiculous, so it’s extra difficult to lift anything into the vehicle. I don’t think most full size pickups are a lot better.
Also, check out the underside of most of these monster vehicles. The approach, breakover, and departure angles may be awesome, but that’s only because the definitions assume uniform height transverse to the driving direction. If you drive these things over any substantial bump that the wheels don’t go over, the differential will bottom out. Oops. This means that, for many practical purposes, the height of the vehicle and the absurd suspensions don’t buy nearly as much capability as they might appear to.
I wouldn’t consider an Escalade a truck, just a luxury SUV. A Hilux/Tacoma, Tundra or F150 are trucks. And they pretty capable of doing all the things. My Tundra might be one of the best cars I ever owned.
Rule #1 of driving offroad is that tires contact the ground, not other parts of the truck. If you see a bump, drive over it; don't straddle it.
What fraction of modern light trucks do you suppose are ever driven in a technically competent manner off-road, even once, by their original owner?
I bet a larger fraction, albeit still small, are driven around construction sites with crud on the ground, with a driver who pays approximately no attention to what they’re driving over. In which case a monster suspension with a dangly differential is probably less appropriate than a low vehicle without any dangly bits in the middle.
(I’m obviously excluding trucks that are used a loading docks. If you are planning to load and unload at a loading dock, you want your truck to load and unload at loading dock height.)
This. I have had a 2016 F-150 since late 2017 - I'd never owned a truck before. I can go get mulch, take an entire bed-load of stuff to the dump (couches, mattresses, etc). When we go on vacation within driving distance (usually up to 500ish miles for us, we can bring more or less anything we want without concern for space. We took my wife's SUV 2 weeks ago on a 700 mile trip (her mid-sized SUV is much newer) and we had to pack very carefully compared to when we take the truck. Our son plays ice hockey, his hockey equipment stinks (yes it gets aired out...he's still a stinky teenager), but it's never an issue because with the truck, it's not in the passenger compartment. We live in the south but drove to Pittsburgh through 2 snowstorm there and back...lots of SUVs stranded on the road...my 4x4 F-150 made it through without any trouble. When my father in law passed last year, we moved all of his things out of his apartment with my truck. I let my neighbors borrow it when they need to move something large. The only thing that sucks about it is parking in store parking lots. That and buying a newer (not brand new) costs 2x what I paid for my 2016 in 2017. I've toyed with getting rid of it for something smaller, but it's just too versatile for me to give up.
> Maybe you’re noticing when there’s one human but you don’t really know how else that person is using the vehicle at other times.
95% of big trucks I see on the road have one person in them and beyond my anecdotal experience we know statistically that most vehicle trips involve 1 person. It's not super hard to extrapolate from there.
I'm not even particularly "anti" truck, though I do think the increase in size and weight has gotten totally ridiculous.
Except that one vehicle is completely incompetent for its primary use 99% of the time :)
In a sane society "knowing someone with a truck" is all you really need. In a highly individualistic society "having a truck just in case" is the dominant precept
Fully agreed. Although to add, I literally never met someone with a truck, and in fact never owned a car myself either, but rented a car and also ranted a van plenty of times during a move, even with a driver.
Same reason I don't own an airplane, I just rent one with a driver if I go on holiday trips.
Big caveat: I've always lived in a (capital) city of my country and I have no kids yet.
But by and large I think renting for the 3 day a year use-case makes more sense than owning 365 days of the year, even if you have no friends to rely on.
If you tow anything, renting is not an option. Rental contracts almost always prohibit towing or restrict it to only 1st party trailers.
This. I learned as much when I was clobbered by a distracted teen and my SUV ended up in the shop. I use it a lot for moving people, things and towing (like daily). Nobody would rent me a SUV and allow me to tow with it, only commercial truck rentals at ridiculous rates.
And for the truck driver haters three things:
- Are you speaking from experience or projection? Stereotyping doesn’t work. After owning a large SUV for 25 years I can say with conviction that the price is worth the utility to me. No question. - I would LOVE to also own a small electric scooter for small trips. The cost and poor quality have put me off for years but it’s inevitable I’ll end up with one soon. - Our next sedan will be electric as well, and probably weigh more than the SUV.
Truck owners aren’t idiots or evil.
Eh perhaps if you rent a recreational vehicle from a company that caters these cars 90% to tourists . I've rented plenty of cars for towing, even with the trailer, from the same company. There are lots of companies that specialize in renting out vehicles for moving, construction etc. There is a market for everything.
Those companies likely exist, but they don’t exist in my area.
The only thing that I can rent to tow with is a box truck. Needless to say, those aren’t really fit your whole family in type of vehicles.
I'm curious what the population size is of the place you live (order of magnitude). I fully appreciate not every place in the world has such companies with rental offerings.
If you own a boat, jetski or horse trailer etc, and live in a small metropolitan area with few rental offerings, those I think owning a car makes sense. And if it's a large enough boat (so not a jetski, which a regular car can tow), a medium/big SUV or truck is the most sensible choice.
Meanwhile only about 10% of the US population lives in a metropolitan area of less than 100k people. About 65% lives in an area with >1m people for example, where I'd be quite surprised you can't find regular rentals to tow things, my city has plenty and it's <1m people.
And only about 10% of households own boats, and only a fraction of those are stored on-land, and a fraction of those are larger boats that require a sizeable car (SUV/truck).
Meanwhile 80% of cars are either trucks, vans or SUVs.
So statistically the vast majority of people that own SUVs/trucks, do not own a boat or something equivalent that needs an SUV/truck to tow, or who live in a place where there are rentals that allow you to tow whatever you want if the car is rated for it.
And even then you get to the point where the question is still whether you need to own one, or know someone with one.
So I think the point stands: most truck/SUV owners don't own because of their use-case, but because of other reasons (mostly personal style / branding / feeling). Yes of course non-ownership of an SUV/Truck is not an option for 100% of SUV/Truck owners given their use-cases. But the vast majority of SUV/Truck owners statistically don't own something that needs an SUV/Truck to tow, or live in a place where you can find rental alternatives.
I've done this research in 4 different large metropolitan areas, including Chicago.
There are a handful a major problems:
1. They don't guarantee a specific make, model, or configuration. They guarantee a hitch receiver, but they don't guarantee minimum payload capacity, brake controllers, tow mirrors, axle ratio (important for towing), or engine configuration (also critical for towing). This alone is pretty much a breaker. Again, a truck isn't any use if it cannot legally tow your configuration.
1b. Rental trucks are almost always lowest trim levels. They're not going to have a tonneau cover, advanced safety features, or creature comforts of the truck you own/lease.
1c. They do not guarantee fuel capacities or offer extended range tanks. This can be a major problem when you're towing in the middle of nowhere or in mountainous areas.
2. They do not guarantee they will have inventory available when you need it. Everyone wants to go camping and move during major holiday weekends, so it's neigh impossible to actually rent one during peak times. This argument holds against any sort of "just rent from a niche provider". Renting doesn't work if somebody else is renting the vehicle you need during the time you need it.
3. It's wildly inconvenient to actually rent a truck. For example, Enterprise does offer truck rentals - but they come from truck-centric rental locations, geared towards business and commercial use. They basically only operate during standard business hours. That means getting a rental truck requires taking time off.
Some companies offer fleet rentals that basically solve all of the issues above - except these are really more like leasing programs. You can get a month-to-month rental, but prices are pretty absurd. Not to mention, you still have a truck sitting in your driveway for the part of the month you're not traveling.
All good points, thank you for expanding.
In most places in the 1st world you can rent a truck if you need one *
For other times, use a car.
* a truck is just a car that misses a roof over the back part of it
> * a truck is just a car that misses a roof over the back part of it
Respectfully, a truck is not just a car missing the back part of it. It often has a lot more power, is lifted, has off-road springs, larger wheels, low and high speed gear box, roll cage for the front cabin, raised air intake - the list goes on.
Most people, though, do just need a car with a removable back.
In any case, the "truck" from the article doesn't seem to have all that.
I own a truck.*
*It’s stored at Home Depot and whenever I need it, I just pay them $19 for the hour or so that I use it.
I did this for a while. You’re leaving out some ancillary details: time driving to and from home depot to pick up and drop off the truck, needing a truck and no rentals available, picking up a rental truck and there’s some issue with it, something happens out of your control that requires more time with the truck but you can’t extend the rental… all things i’ve encountered.
At some point the number of times i needed to use it picked up (hah) which multiplied these inconveniences enough that it became worth it to just pick up (hah) a used truck.
I use it exclusively for hauling work, but that usually entails at least one trip without a load, which may lead people to incorrectly judging me for driving it unnecessarily.
>In a sane society "knowing someone with a truck" is all you really need.
Yes, yes, we all know. "You'll own nothing and be happy". Fewer and fewer people believe you.
You don’t know that. You’re making assumptions. But even if that were true, so what? Maybe it is important to that person’s quality of life to have the truck for weekend adventures or chores.
If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs. Most people buy trucks as a lifestyle choice, not as a practical one.
That’s not to say there aren’t real uses for trucks, or people who use them for their designed purpose.
That’s also not to say people should be required to purchase only vehicles that meet their basic transportation requirements. People drive sports cars even without ever going out to a track.
Trucks (and full-size SUVs) specifically push some pretty crappy externalities onto other road users, so it’s not exactly crazy to be annoyed with people who buy and drive big trucks a personality trait.
> If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs.
You can tell how few people in this thread have any idea how light off roading or hauling works.
Driving your truck down a dirt road or putting something in the back of it doesn’t destroy the paint job. You can have a work truck and keep it nice.
Sorry, but I have driven off-road and you inevitably get dings, nicks, and scratches from gravel, tree branches, and random detritus.
I know people that use their trucks for hauling for work and they are never pristine. They don’t look destroyed. They look used.
I'm sitting here smh. Everyone in my (rural) neighborhood owns a pickup truck. Except for the one dude who towed a skid steer with an Escalade. Those trucks are often towing trailers, hauling messy crap, etc. and don't look any different than any other truck on the road.
Hell, I just unhooked a horse trailer less than an hour ago and the year-old truck that was hauling it looks like it just drove off the showroom floor.
It is wild to me how heavily downvoted this comment is.
I bought by Ford Ranger off my in-laws who literally own a farm, and it got more damage from being parked under a tree with nasty sap for too long then it's 7 years handling hauling and field work (the lesson being, I really should've been washing it more frequently then I was... And then it would really clean and so obviously isn't used real work or something).
> If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs.
I generally beat the crap out of my truck and the exterior looks just fine.
It's really not hard to avoid damaging your exterior. In fact, you have to have a total accident or be completely negligent to cause actual damage. Stuff goes in the bed of the truck. The bed had a bunch of nicks and dings in it, but you're not going to be seeing that while casting judgement.
Heck, go take a look at the work trucks. Find something like a welding truck, an electrician, or a plumber. These are all trucks that people literally use every single day for work, tossing stuff in and out of the bed. They just don't look that beat up. That's because it's just not that hard to avoid completely destroying your vehicle.
>If this were the case, you’d see more trucks with wear and tear on them and fewer with five years in and pristine paint jobs. Most people buy trucks as a lifestyle choice, not as a practical one.
No you wouldn’t. Off-roading, hauling things, and towing trailers does not require destroying the finish or exterior of the truck in any way.
Yep. Trucks that actually get used as trucks look like it with dings, scratches, and scuffs because they’re tools, not toys.
Ironically they’re also often old small models that owners have been keeping running forever because they’re cheap to fix, practical, and easy to park unlike their embiggened modern counterparts.
> Trucks that actually get used as trucks look like it with dings, scratches, and scuffs because they’re tools, not toys.
Not really. Lots of people use trucks and keep them in pristine condition too. Beds have liners now to keep them looking new. And you aren’t getting random dings on the outside unless you drive into things.
The amount of effort required to keep them pristine scales with the quantity and intensity of the work performed, no? The most serious truck drivers probably aren’t going to have time to buff out every little mark when it’s going to get covered in them again on the job tomorrow.
People who drive a truck for work aren't going to crash it into things all the time, what are you even talking about? Do you regularly crash your car into things while driving it? Like on a daily basis?
Like..you get that mud and dust just wash off, and the reason to wash them off is that once dried they can mess up the paint over a long period which then gives you a rust problem you really don't want?
The people I know who drive trucks are doing things where constant small bits of damage are inevitable. Think kicked up gravel, tree branches scraping against the body, unintentionally bumping up against the truck with equipment, etc. Damage is frequent enough that it’s one of the reasons they find buying a new truck difficult to justify and would rather buy something that’s got some visible wear and tear on it already.
I do know that because I see the same trucks driving around my neighborhood with Jerry cans and recovery boards 7 days of the week!
Best case you’re looking at 28.5% weekend utilization which isn’t that bad, much better than the 1% I joked with, but how many people do you know taking an offroad adventure every single weekend?
So what? Yeah I don’t really care. It’s mostly hilarious watching them try to park.
Does it have to be an off road adventure specifically? I feel like most people will want to get two vehicles in their family that can do many things, since that’s what they have room for, rather than more. A truck could be used for off road stuff but it could also be used for taking kids and gear to their games, or for a weekend camping trip, or just for commuting. It can do whatever you need without needing to rent a different vehicle or borrow from a friend or whatever. That’s peace of mind and flexibility. I don’t even own one but I do appreciate that aspect.
Why do you need a truck for that? A cross over can do all that.
> Trucks can haul people, things, do road trips, etc. pretty well.
Yes, as can most vehicles?
Not to the same ability. Sedans and mid size SUVs have far less space, and also less ground height. If you’re traveling on gravel roads or camping, most sedans and smaller SUVs aren’t ideal. If you have kids, space fills up quickly even for small trips. If you’re moving something larger (like drywall or a TV) it may not fit at all in a smaller vehicle. Even most full size SUVs also have less space than a full size truck (even one that isn’t one of the larger models).
The argument Telo makes is that you can have high utility in a smaller vehicle designed well. I was my own GC for a site-built home and sub contracted out many parts of it. I did it while owning a 2 door Mini SE. Only twice did I need to rent truck from my local Home Depot to haul some unwieldy and heavy debris. Most stores will deliver what you need (lumber, large pipes, insulation, etc) because consumer trucks are rarely large enough. I would not have been able to load any significant amount of lumber into an F250. That leaves large vehicles for recreation or family space. I hope car manufacturers rethink vehicle packaging now that EV motors and batteries allow for different confirmations like putting the motor in the wheel hub.
And, the sub contractors - the ones doing the work (immigrants) - they had a wide variety of vehicles. I took note that some had Camrys, Prius, old Golfs, small picks ups like Rangers, and some older mid size trucks that were visually heavily used. Else, they used commercial trucks or vans. When did I see the prestigious full cab F150s or Silverado RTs? When I originally interviewed GCs which is when I noticed they drove their clean and new trucks.
They did a good job maximizing wheelbase given the small size, which is very important for safe and comfortable towing. I look forward to their launch and some real-world reviews and drive tests.
The vast majority of dirt roads are fine. I put hundreds of miles on my 1996 Honda Civic hatchback in the Cascades with no problems many years ago.
If the road existed in the 1990s, it's quite likely accessible by a mid-size SUV. Similarly, if families of 4 could go camping with cars from 1950-2000, you can today as well. In fact, you can get more compact tents, etc. today.
Trucks and huge SUVs come in handy if you want to bring lots of modern toys like gigantic prestige coolers and 4x4s.
I have multiple times driven a Mustang Mach E (a heavy, very low ride height EV) out to a friend’s property an hour off of anything resembling a road, down multiple dirt switchbacks into the bottom of the Yuba River canyon.
Vehicles these days are shockingly capable.
You can do all those things with a vehicle half the size. Modern F-150s are industrial vehicles. They weight 5000 pounds. They and their large SUV cousins are a menace to pedestrians, normal-sized vehicles, and the road itself.
The other day, I was just remarking how my minivan makes a better pickup than most pickups for most tasks. For years I've wanted to get another truck (had an old Dakota that I had to sell when kid #3 was on the way). Practicality reigns, though, and I'm extremely satisfied with the usability of the van.
Getting a cheap minivan with an ugly, worn out interior that’s been through the rigors of family and ripping the seats out seems like it’d be a great cost saving hack for a number of businesses that people often buy trucks or small commercial vans for.
The people I know with pick-ups don't use the bed half the time "in case it rains today" and have to tow a covered trailer to haul anything that wouldn't like to get wet.
Let’s not play this game.
The main objection is the buffoonish size. Look at trucks in the 1990s and compare the size.
There is absolutely an element of clownish machismo involved.
> Look at trucks in the 1990s and compare the size.
If you actually compare similiar configurations, you'll find basically no difference in size.
Compared to a 90's F-150, a modern f-150 is
* 1" wider
* Either 0' longer or 1' longer depending on the exact configuration
* 1" taller
* Nearly 1k lbs less heavy (lots of weight optimization in the past ~35 years)
I agree generally, but blame the makers I guess. One important thing to remember is bed length. Trying to haul plywood or 2x4s with a 5 ft bed is a joke, and not easy with even a 6 ft bed.
The old, small rangers used to have a 7 ft bed option! I believe the longest you can get today is 6. So if you want a longer bed, you're kinda forced into the full size fold.
I don't know how well they'd actually sell, but it'd be neat if they at least offered something maybe a hair bigger than maverick sized with a 7 ft bed.
Where I'm from, people often own a car for their commute to work, and rent a van when they're moving. Their regular car is way less of a hassle for other people than the van is, but that's okay, cause the van is just for a few days.
I now own a truck. I’m actually regretting not getting a bigger/heavier duty one. The biggest limitation is payload capacity. Payload is anything that puts weight on the vehicle - occupants, dogs, gear, food, supplies, bed covers/caps, etc. You must legally be under payload capacity or you can risk fines or liability in an accident. A lot of people are willing to push these limits, but cops pay a lot more attention to people towing/hauling.
If you want to actually tow with your truck, you need to allot a good portion of your payload to trailer weight (and hitches) that rests on the truck (tongue weight). This can range from 200lbs to 1k+ lbs, but is typically in the 500 to 600lb range for something like a boat or travel trailer. It can easily go higher if you load the trailer up with stuff.
A typical light duty truck might have 1500 lbs of payload capacity. Four people and their belongings can easily add up to 800lbs. Add pets, bikes, travel gear, food, etc and your suddenly well over 1k lbs of payload. You literally have no capacity to tow anything but the smallest of trailers.
So what do you do, well you get a bigger truck. You don’t need it all of the time, but it just doesn’t make sense to own a vehicle that cannot legally handle a family road trip.
Before people say “rent”. That comes with its own major set of issues. The biggest being little to no ability to tow with a rental vehicle. Most rentals flat out prohibit towing (even if technically capable and equipped). Those that do allow towing, generally limit it to 1st party trailers (U-Haul truck can only tow u-haul trailer).
The typical number of times an American non work truck is used to haul a load each year is zero. Same for using it's bed capacity.
I don't think this generalization is quite fair. I'm sure this is true for some folks and their social circles, but for those of us who engineer and know our way around a Home Depot, the capacity is a game changer. I used to have to rent or borrow trucks for my projects.
Not to mention Christmas trees, moving, helping friends out, etc.
Depending on the survey 63-to-75% of truck owners use it for towing once a year or less (i.e in reality never). So yes, the majority do not use it for towing.
To be fair I'd misremembered the load carrying figure and the load figure for 1 time a year or less is 32-35%
https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history?trk=feed-de...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
Yes this has actually been studied. Though I don't have a link on hand I remember the numbers being quite stark
> The typical number of times an American non work truck is used to haul a load each year is zero.
If you specifically exclude work trucks and define “haul a load” as filling up the bed with loose dirt or gravel or something then I could believe this.
I haven’t put a cubic yard of anything in my truck bed this year but hauling a cubic yard of anything is a rare occurrence for someone who isn’t doing landscaping.
But you have to really stretch the definitions if you believe that people never put anything in the bed to haul.
If you’re not hauling a cubic foot then why need a truck?
Hm, sounds like you don't really need a truck... The world is racing to +4C and you're over here defending 25mpg gender affirming care mobiles - you're on the wrong side of this one buddy.
I wonder what this is like for driver safety though - not a lot of crumple zone in that nose!
Not as much crumple zone as you might think in a "traditional" truck if most of the space is full of a solid metal block
You're both right!
I noticed the lack of a "crumple zone" the instant I saw the image.
...and a moment later, I also realized it's usually a solid engine block that sits there. I shudder to think of what actually happens when that zone "crumples".
Back to the Telo MT1, it's great that they redesigned it from the ground up, around it being an EV -- it's like the Phelps Tractor having reins, and then somebody asking "why does it need to have reins if there's no horse?"
Don't shudder, learn about it.
The engine is designed to move based on the design of the frame rails and mounts -- it is pushed under the passenger compartment, absorbing and deflecting more energy.
I'm sure the Telo is designed to modern standards and would perform similarly. I'd be more worried about expensive damage to the vehicle in less personally dangerous collisions.
This would be my concern. A fender bender hits the wheels on this thing and suddenly you're doing major surgery to repair it.
Decades of research, innovation, crash tests and rule changes have been put into improving safety in head on collisions. It’s not like you’re the first who wonders what will happen with engine block. It’s designed to go down.
Although I don’t know about American trucks. I think they are meant to wreak havoc on every single person involved.
My neighbour designs the crumble zone on Volvo's heavy duty trucks. They at least spend a shit ton of effort (continuous, multi-decade) on making anything hit by the truck having as little effect as possible (at least).
Quite a challenge with heavy duty trucks shipping tens of tons of stuff, but anyway.
> ...and a moment later, I also realized it's usually a solid engine block that sits there. I shudder to think of what actually happens when that zone "crumples".
I believe the engine drops down and the rest crumples inward, at least in theory.
There's a nice Jay Leno video on this truck with the founders as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw250Va1JFo
The risk to pedestrians is pretty much a non-factor in this. It’s going to come down to business / agriculture adoption where I see the largest market opportunity. Think service technicians such as HVAC, plumbers, construction. If these can make financial sense in terms of ROI and cost of ownership then Telo can make it. Currently the base price of $41,500 is a bit on the higher end, though of course will save dramatically on fuel and maintenance over industry standard vans and light trucks.
It fully misses the main reason people buy trucks in the US -- to signal where they stand on the political spectrum.
>They are often touted as off road capable with high utility, and I see them in pristine condition on city streets hauling a totality of one human.
If you off-road with a truck and keep it clean afterwards, this is exactly what it looks like on the street.
You could have written this exact comment on the Slate Truck announcement post.
> This is a breath of fresh air.
But for $41,000? To me that's an automatic nope... I can import a used Kei truck that works just fine from Japan for less than $10,000.
This is the originally unintended side effect of regulation that applies to cars.
Americans generally don’t want tiny vehicles. The option that leaves them is trucks and, increasingly, SUVs.
I want a tiny car. The problem is that road design is unsafe so people buy bigger cars so they are safer when they get into an accident. I've seen the aftermath of a Chrysler Fiat getting into a collision with an SUV and lets just say the Fiat driver had much worse day than the SUV driver.
It's a failure of law and regulation that those things are even allowed. Their existence is a direct attack on the freedom of third parties.
You only need a Pentium 3 machine to read and write on Hacker News.
I don't think you thought this one through... if anything you're making the opposite point you're (I believe) trying to make.
I'm writing this on a macbook air that sizes up to <2.5% of the weight and volume of a desktop computer you're describing (screen, case and peripherals). It's also idling at about 2-3 watt, which is also <10% of the computer you're describing. It also produces much less sound, it's entirely quiet.
So size, weight and power usage and noise are way down.
The idea that I'd use a pentium 3 instead is ridiculous for these very reasons (heavier, bigger, noisier, using more energy), even in private use, and especially in public use.
It's also the reason why bigger, heavier, noisier and more energy-consuming cars, are also ridiculous to many people, particularly those not driving them and having to face them in the public sphere.
Having a CPU sitting idle doesn’t cause massive externalities.
I don't get it, is the joke, 'stating the obvious'?
Why is it wrong to have a powerful vehicle if you don't always use it for tasks demanding that power, but it's okay to have a surplus of power for low-demanding computing tasks?
Same reason I don't want to have dinner in a restaurant next to someone trying to cut their steak with a chainsaw: at best they are being incredibly obnoxious, at worst they are going to maim me. Just because it is better for your once-a-month weekend lumberjack trip with the boys doesn't mean it is an appropriate one-size-fits-all cutting tool for day-to-day use.
Contrast that with someone having a needlessly powerful computer. How does that impact the rest of the world? Not at all, it only impacts the owner's wallet. Someone's needlessly-powerful computer has never killed a child, or taken up four spots in public. Heck, it'll even downclock when idle, so there isn't even any extra power use to be worried about!
Because accomplishing the same task with a more powerful (i.e. larger) vehicle is a) more polluting, and b) more dangerous for other road users; two things that are not true for a surplus of computing power.
Are you sure your house is the minimum you need? It's looking a little bit nicer and more spacious than others.
Nope, it's not! It's more than the bare minimum I need, and also larger than an appropriate moderate size (let's not shift the goalposts here) because - unlike a vehicle - operating a larger-than-appropriate home is _barely_ more polluting, and no less dangerous, so my indulgence has negligible negative externalities.
Thanks for playing! Wanna try again?
---
For anyone else reading this, the issue that monkeyelite's comment had was the false equation of "it is good to prosocially take others' safety and comfort into account when making choices about personal behaviour and consumption" with "one can never use or consume any more than the bare minimum". This is a classic approach that the American right uses when criticizing any prosocial policy - the immature that the only choices are selfish indulgence and bare austerity. It's possible to be comfortable and even lavish while being a considerate member of society. Using/consuming/polluting less is always good _in isolation_, but can and should be measured against the benefit that it accrues to you _and_ the externalities imposed on society.
The obvious counter-argument there is "I don't care about other people, I want my big truck, and I don't care (or, I actively like) that it endangers other people". Which, well - if that's your viewpoint, you're welcome to hold it, and others are welcome to judge you for it.
Because by and large the apps and programs you are running on your computer requires lots of resources just to open and allow you to do your low-demanding tasks.
You can do it with a raspberry pi.
Did that for a couple of years. RPi4 as my daily driver (including image creation and video editing).
https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=blog&link=1&post=4
I find no problems with them being giant. I drive a F150 Lightning and since it all electric I love that it’s big.
The things you listed are _why_ people buy them. If they wanted something smaller, they would go with a Toyota Tacoma or a Nissan Titan.
People by and large don’t really know what they want, they purchase based on vibes and manipulation. If people in general really wanted these trucks they’d be more popular outside of America. The truck has been a boiled frog, slowly growing in size and people haven’t realised it. Also Americans in general have a bit of a cultural issue with ego, individualism and all that, which doesn’t help.
Even Tacomas are larger than they used to be. One day not too long ago when I was running errands I came across an early 2000s Tacoma (before they got bumped up to midsize trucks) and was almost dumbfounded, because it’d been so long since I’d seen a truck that size. It’s a great size, but nobody makes them like that any more.
I’d like a small truck for DIY house projects in a suburb, but even the “small” Ford Maverick is nearly a foot longer than a 2000 Tacoma and the 2025 Tacoma is about two feet longer, both of which would be awkward to park and maneuver on the tight streets around here. Their increased height is dangeorus with all the kids running around, too. So, well, I don’t have a truck.
The Telo and maybe Slate are the first two modern trucks that I could realistically consider. Hoping for an R3T that’s sized similarly to Rivian’s upcoming R3 (which is comparable in size to a VW Golf) but that’s probably not going to happen.
Why not import a Kei truck from Japan?
Can’t legally register them in my state for now, would need to register it in a neighboring state, which is a lot of trouble for a 25+ year old vehicle.
Titan is full-sized. You mean the Nissan Frontier.
Still those have basically caught up with full-sized vehicles from ~15 years ago..
One thing I'm really happy about with the rise of EVs is that they seem to be unlocking a fresh wave of innovation. This is in part because at a fundamental level, they are much simpler and easier to manufacture and more flexible in terms of design, so they are far more accessible for the startup ecosystem to break into. I'm really looking forward to what else we see emerging in the next few years once all the basic EV technology is commoditised.
I am glad to see EV companies doing something different, aesthetically. In this particular case I do not like it -- at all -- but I much prefer a high-variance aesthetic distribution to the genetic every-car-looks-the-same world we have now, sans a tiny few exceptions.
The side compartment under the bed / in front of the rear wheel is pretty cool too.
This made me think about the bagnole, which seems to target the same kind of market: https://kilow.com/en/pages/la-bagnole
83 mile range vs 250+, max speed of 50MPH vs 100+, 20HP vs up to 400HP, only seats 2 and a tiny bed. I don't think this is remotely the same market.
6kWh (or 12 in option) is quite a lot less than 106kWh tough.
This is cool I guess but I don’t get why some of these electric car companies have to design cars that look like toys. Rivian and this. It looks like a golf cart with a flatbed. I think an electric kei truck would have a huge market in the US but the design needs some work to be taken seriously.
There’s something to be said for being distinctive, but you can do that while not looking silly (Lucid is a good example). And simply being a small electric truck is enough differentiation anyway
They had a ton of design constraints, and looking like a toy wasn't one of them. This is what their solution to those constraints (such as more range via a low coefficient of drag) looks like. Very few people are capable of evaluating a vehicle without their biases influencing them, such as what a masculine truck needs to look like.
Not trying to offend anyone as this is a matter of taste, but I can't help finding the American "masculine truck" ugly and cringeworthy.
Maybe it is me being the from European Alps and having close contact with people who actually have to drive vehicles in challenging terain (for forest work and hunting). And those cars are typically the polar opposite of the pseudo-masculine big truck: You want them small, because where you go there are trees and rocks that won't move out of the way just because your car looks masculine. You want them light because you are moving across badly maintained forest roads, etc. You want them ugly because you will be scraping more things than you like. And unless you have need for moving bulk loads like water containers for alpine cows regularly a closed back is much more practical, at least in this climate (if you need to move such a thing, get a trailer).
Over here these trucks are relatively rare, and likely smaller than their American variants, and mostly driven by a certain type of man as what appears to be a fashion choice.
Maybe it is a cultural or generational thing, but to me a car is a tool and I don't connect a lot of my identity to it. That doesn't mean I don't like a specific car or don't like to be able to mainrain one myself etc. It is just that I like functional efficient machines and a big tank weighing many tons that you drive in mostly alone is the opposite of that.
Of course they are a cultural status symbol.
That said, mountainous forest work is obviously a more prominent use case in the alps than it is in the US.
US trucks that are owned by individuals are not primarily seen as tools. 70% of US truck owners have only one vehicle, so their primary purpose is to be used as a luxury barge and family hauler. Not much different than the huge cars that Americans preferred to drive in the 1950s and 1970s. There has always been a thread of huge cruiser style vehicles in American auto culture and this continues today.
When it comes to work, towing capacity and generic American suburbia workloads tend to dominate (large houses with big projects, longer drives, etc).
Not saying that these tanks are a "practical choice", but they are perhaps better viewed through the lens of luxury barges.
Hunting is a good point, but from what I've gleaned it's a subculture that sort of stands alone and has a huge "gear" component. I think that it's somewhat common to have small specialized vehicles for that use case, like ATV style vehicles of various sorts. Ex: last time I was in North Carolina I saw someone with this dune buggy thing suited for that... and it was being hauled around behind a massive truck, naturally. Off-roading and hunting culture also overlaps a bit, and there is a legitimate off-road culture that is quite separate from the Big Truck culture. These people will often have two vehicles, so the Big Truck would be used for the aforementioned luxury cruising and status, while as you said, a more suitable vehicle is used for the actual rough terrain.
They do have a fairly unique status power in much of the US. If a small business owner drives up in a sports car, they may get jokes, but for some reason driving up in a new GMC 2500HD is sort of seen as a mark of a "working man's success" instead of being flashy and showing off. It's something you can drive up and meet clients without about how you are going to look. That said, I'm speaking from experience in southern and midwest culture, but that's where the majority of the US population lives. When I was in New York you would see these monster trucks much less often, and as you said the driver was often much more ostentatious I'm trying to flagrantly stand out rather than subtly rise above without getting called out as one does in the midwest.
Thanks for shining a light on this for me, helps me follow the line of thought, especially your part about how it is seen as a sign of success to own a specific new car etc.
Most urbanite Gen Z students I teach don't have (need) driving license and don't plan to get one. Owning a car is somewhat a useless luxury in most European bigger cities, since you're much faster and more comfortable with bicycles and public transport anyways. The occasional family trip or bigger transport can be done with a rental or car sharing, if public transport doesn't cut it. This results in the car being seen much less as a status symbol, except for certain migrantic or economically strained subcultures. But you won't be able to impress your say average Berlin Techno-girl with a flashy car, in fact it would likely achieve the opposite effect.
Where I live hunting isn't really that much of a sport, more a mix between a regular job, a hobby and tradition. So while there is expensive gear (hand-engraved traditional guns that sell for the price of a luxury car), most people just use whatever. From what I have seen in the US hunting (like literally everytbing else) is much more gear-focused over there.
> Very few people are capable of evaluating a vehicle without their biases influencing them, such as what a masculine truck needs to look like.
Right, thats why looks would have been a good additional constraint.
That would get us back to the “bigger is better” hole though.
To 99% of consumers in the US, kei trucks look like toys, so I'm not sure that's the best example.
Honestly, if you look at the truck market, it's dominated by masculine designs like the F-150. Arguably this has created a gap in the market for designs that are more compact and approachable. It may never be the majority, but TELO looks perfectly suited to address that niche.
Kei trucks are small but they look like a workhorse in a similar way to a classic Hilux giving them a respectability that I think this design lacks.
I agree there should be more approachable designs, just seems like this went way too far in the direction of toy-like
I find it amusing that people are discussing the masculine design language and how men driving trucks are overcompensating (OK, not so much in this particular thread), but for as long as I can remember, it's been women that have always told me that they prefer bigger vehicles.
I just want my 2000 Toyota Tacoma but with a small EV(0-60 in 10s is fine, 150hp is fine, 200mi range is fine).
The Slate truck is probably pretty close to what you’re looking for?
Late 90s/early aughts Tacomas are GOAT vehicles.
I had a stick shift one in high school. Absolutely loved it.
I dream of a low-milage early 2000s Taco with aftermarket Carplay
I daily a 2002 TRD 6spd with carplay. Currently 125k, I’m taking it with me to the grave..
Oh man I would scoop that up in a heartbeat.
I'll take "looks like a toy" over "looks like a death machine", thanks.
I think it looks great? It evokes a Kei truck to me, but with more modern styling.
I suppose there's no accounting for taste.
Personally I find the increasingly large bulbous noses tacked on to the front of US trucks ridiculous. The fact that these "codpieces" are empty on EVs is such a wild metaphor that it seems like an intentional parody.
I'll grant that the Telo may have gone a little too far in the other direction given that they have issues with the aerodynamic drag of the front wheelwells, but it still looks slightly more sensible than a normal truck.
This looks like a kei truck, who by definition looks like a toy.
Seriously though, it has the same shape and look of any kei I've seen. Like others, I wish for a 90s era Ford Ranger or Tacoma, but between safety requirements and capability demand from people that's probably not practical.
What's wrong with toys? Toys are fun!
The kei truck itself has a ridiculous toy-like design also though.
It's aesthetically not pleasing in my eyes. They even have a comparison with ford trucks on their page and all i'm thinking is yeah i'd take that ford instantly over that thing.
It looks like a pug:
https://i.imgur.com/omF3Abn.jpeg
The real question is whether it's compatible with standard truck nuts: if not, the Florida market will remain inaccessible.
I was thinking a while back about how you could roll coal in an EV. Maybe a huge Tesla coil throwing lightning everywhere would be analogous? Or a giant Jacob’s ladder?
Seems like the Cybertruck is sort of that.
Maybe a few people get some functionality out of the design.
I was thinking the same thing. You need some way of conveying the power associated with electric cars, not just efficiency
Spark gap ozone generator
... proceeds to throw harmonics from DC to daylight
This is a bad marketing idea to compare a golf cart like this to a Toyota Tacoma. There is practically zero ground clearance and a unibody frame, this will high center in places where I regularly drive my Tacoma. Tacoma wins on ruggedness, lower total cost of ownership thanks to a significantly lower price and having limited depreciation.
Unless these are priced at under $30,000 for the AWD, these will flop commercially.
If the CAFE standards could be fixed, we could get ICE and hybrid trucks that are smaller and more affordable, the EV route is too expensive and the products are strange.
It has ten inches of ground clearance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEcI967gXUg
I know the CAFE standards are bad, but isn't it just a tax if you miss the target? Anyone know how much would it cost a car company per vehicle if they made a modern version of the '80s Ranger or Hilux?
They got "fixed". He penalty was set to zero.
One thing I have learned. If you own a pick up like vehicle You will be helping even people you barely know to move. and your extended friends and family whenever they buy something too big to fit in their car
Doug DeMuro did a review a couple months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYe-QNRkdz8
(Not sure if this is just me, but) I find this truck so aesthetically displeasing?
Somehow, most EVs have curves and "bounciness" (and why such odd headlights??) in all the right places to make it look childish. I find the Tesla sedan extremely aesthetic though, that might be the one exception. The bigger Teslas (especially in color white) remind me of pandas for some reason.
A lot of commenters are in the same boat
I really like the idea of taking advantage of there not being an engine bay in the front, and moving the driver position forward, and eliminating the unused length of the engine bay - but this looks very unsafe for the driver in a crash, with no crumple zone to speak of - not to mention it turns a simple fender bender into a front axle replacement (though with modern cars and their sensors, there's no such thing as a cheap crash anyway)
Looks good and a step in the right direction (speaking as someone who thinks the modern day trucks are getting too big for the danger of those driving alongside them on the roads).
I wonder though if the interior trim can be ordered without this felt-like material. I can easily see that being stained or dirty in a short period of time. I am sure there is.
This is a truck that appeals to car buyers because it's not sacrificing a compact body or efficiency, while providing immense utility and off-roading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEcI967gXUg
People tend to focus on demand, but just getting vehicles like this into production at a profitable cost often turns out to be impossible.
It is a 10-15k/year product at best. How does an independent maker get that profitable at <$50k, despite all the costs of setting up a sales and service network?
On one hand I agree. It makes me sad but I'm skeptical they are going to make it.
On the other hand, electric cars seem to be relatively "easy" to build. Sure, Fisker went bankrupt, but Rivian seems to do sort of fine. Xiaomi even managed to build a car, and I actually saw one of them by chance charging next to me today.
Seems to me like a lot more newcomers succeed in getting cars built, than was and is the case with ICE cars.
most profit in autos is in personalization and financing, which in principle you can do at any scale, with whatever fixed costs. I believe these guys are building on top of a Subaru with vendor motors.
that said, the problem with these utilitarian vehicles is that they appeal to people who buy cars once every 20 years, whereas most of the industry is serving the very large, very abundant population of Americans buying 2 cars every 2 years
Man, this car is ugly. I'm getting strong Fiat Multipla vibes:
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/remembering-fiat-multipla-quite...
At least the Fiat Multipla was a great car. It is filled to the brim with small features which improve the driving experience, and it is a miracle that it can fit six(!) people. It has a massive amount of storage space and great visibility, what's not to like?
Besides the way it looks, of course. But if you're inside a Multipla, at least you don't have to look at its exterior?
Fiat multipla - car so ugly that Michael Schumacher had to do a commercial for it.
They have a very strange presence. They are quite wide. All the proportions are odd. It catches one’s eye. I uggly-puppy like it.
The width is why the design was so clever from an interior perspective - seated six comfortably with three abreast front/rear in a car shorter than a three door Ford Fiesta!
There's a video walkthrough of all its "quirks and features", of which there are plenty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYe-QNRkdz8
Too few physical controls on the dashboard.
Welcome to 2025.
Interesting to see how much the perception of trucks varies globally. For many, it’s about versatility and utility beyond just daily commuting. The off-road and hauling capabilities often get overlooked in city-centric debates.
This isn’t a mini truck, it’s a truck. It’s just that the others are giant trucks.
What's the tow capacity and range when towing? No 4WD either. It's not a truck it's a UTV.
6600 lb towing capacity
Towing range is an issue with all EVs and the battery on this one isn't that big, but if you're regularly doing long distance towing I'm not sure why you'd start with a city truck
It has 4WD
Ah yeah with a 1700 pound payload and no tow capacity. Many UTVs are 4WD too.
6,600lb tow capacity. You can dislike a thing, but like, you should probably at least get the facts straight.
Let's see the production model pull 6600 pounds on an 80% charge. Which by the way I see no stats on this on the site. But I'd much rather see production demos before I trusted those even. Even Cybertruck struggles to tow full weight at full charge further than 90 miles.
How much you want to bet you'd be calling a real truck to tow your ass out of that situation? There's a reason electric trucks haven't taken off for real work use cases.
> Even Cybertruck struggles to
The cybertruck is built pretty poorly. I think we can use truck stats from reputable automakers.
> There's a reason electric trucks haven't taken off for real work use cases.
When were electric trucks realistically available on the market for a reasonable price?
I use a truck regularly (forestry industry), there's huge desire for them, they just haven't been around until very recently. You can't buy a secondhand ol beatup electric truck yet, so I don't expect them to be taking off yet.
Man, I'd love something like this. I was happy with my small, early 2000s pickup, but everything in the used market when it died were obnoxious show-off vehicles that quite literally don't even fit in most of the parking spaces in my city. This has that cute kei truck look... well... Maybe an inbred kei truck. But it seems just the right size for utility (and my much-missed tailgate naps).
But $42k is just so much money to me. I've never spent more than ~$15k (financed) on a vehicle and I feel like I'm fairly well off...
I thought electric cars are simpler and should be cheaper. You can tariff out competition only for so long...
I sure wish more of these electric trucks came with paint-free body panels. Say what you will about the Cybertruck, but the idea of a truck that doesn't have paint is very attractive to me. Seems like this one is moving away from plastic to steel, and I haven't seen what the Slate so I imagine it's probably painted steel as well. Plastic, stainless, whatever...I just don't want a paint job to worry about.
Is there some reason they have to make these have 300 or 500hp? Or is there nothing to be gained in terms of cost and weight from having, say, 90hp (like my completely functional Mighty Max had).
For the most part there is a floor with EVs where if you go small in battery, weight, and motor... You have a golf cart, not nearly enough range.
As you increase each of those, a larger motor will probably be more efficient for propelling a heavier load with a larger battery.
Because of the instant torque plus high speeds of an EV motor, it's not hard at all to have high HP figures.
Telo are too small to succeed and too interesting to fail. I expect them to be bought after they fully launch the vehicle and it shows promise.
For $41k, I can buy 20 chang li explorer trucks off alibaba and have $1000 leftover.
I just fail to see how anyone sane would try and enter this market right now.
Are you in the US? How do you get those into the country? These aren't street legal, right? I would love to know I'm out of date on this belief.
This can fun a fun and practical vehicle, and it has a lot nifty solutions, and should serve sub(urban) life well.
but if you really need a pickup truck, this cannot compare to a Tacoma
That said I dont think anyone buying a Tacoma will be tempted by this vehicle, and I dont think the buyers of the MT1 will be comparison checking the Tacoma either.
Separate markets the way I see it, as do they
""EV pickup for urban living and weekend adventuring""
So why the comparison?
> but if you really need a pickup truck, this cannot compare to a Tacoma
Can you elaborate? This has the same bed size, same crew capacity and greater horsepower than a tacoma.
In my experience (US), the Tacoma is often the first vehicle that comes to people’s minds when they think of a small pickup truck.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the Tacoma is no longer even remotely small.
I really want a modern version of a mid-90s Tacoma.
Slate is coming in at around 175 inches..
It wouldn't cost much less than the big Tacoma, so it would simply not sell (like this won't sell).
> We're tired of oversized, impractical trucks designed for show over substance.
I wonder if Telo is attempting to define a new category. Substance in a truck, in my lived opinion, is about utility. Towing capacity, ruggedness, ability to go (very) off road. An electric power train shows promise, but is limited by infra.
If that’s not the target, then maybe it’s a different target, such as San Francisco residents where space is limited and a slight nod to utility is adequate.
Further down the peninsula, and specifically in the Santa Cruz mountains, this is less interesting. I can’t imagine this for outdoor (e.g. mountain biking) or project oriented (e.g. landscaping) people.
So back to the top: if they’re marketing substance over show, maybe they’re really marketing to people who desire show over substance.
Edit: let me also throw in my drive down to the bottom tip of Baja a few months ago. The roads were rough in places, and I definitely went off road to reach some interesting places. It reminded me of some rough terrain and roads in Wyoming and Oklahoma - truck states. Without big wheels and tough suspension - I wouldn’t take a Telo.
A tremendous portion of the truck market are people who live in urban to suburban areas and need to move things. For that audience, the ability to fit a 4x8' plywood sheet easily puts this ahead of a surprising number of conventional trucks on utility. The 2k lbs payload on the 2WD drive model is more than a Tacoma and some configurations of the F150, for example, popular models that also don't fit a 4x8 sheet without strapping it down over the cab or another awkward technique. It also lists a towing cap of 6,600 which is competitive with many production pickups.
There's a divide in needs between off-roading and moving things around, and this seems oriented in the moving things around direction. I can easily see it working for a landscaper in a suburban environment, for example, where the driving miles per day are really not that high and 6,600 is plenty for a typical landscaper's trailer.
From everything I've seen, true off-roading applications are a pretty small portion of the overall truck market, and one that many popular trucks right now are also poorly optimized for (popular 2WD configurations, middling clearances, etc).
I just put down a deposit. I make things from plywood sometimes, and even in my wife's R1S it's a pain. When we don't take the R1S, all 5 of us have to fit in my car (Honda Clarity). I coach robotics teams and sometimes need to haul a lot of stuff. Sometimes we do some light offroading in the R1S.
Looks like this will do all the things I need OK. I would like to drive something small and easy to park, that I could offroad a bit, carry my family a bit, haul stuff a bit.
And I've always liked the weird aesthetic of kei trucks and things like the Jeep Forward Control.
> I wonder if Telo is attempting to define a new category.
It's a Kei truck. That's not a new thing. Online discourses categorizing Telo as one leads to people pointing out Kei are equipped with weaker engines for legal reasons, that doesn't matter. US finally started making its own Kei truck.
I would say "kei" does pretty specifically refer to vehicles adhering to those Japanese regulations. I think "minitruck" or "compact truck" would be a better, more general name.
What would be the limitation that prevents you from mountain biking? It seems to have a similar sized bed to a Tacoma?
I’m unsure why people think they need such big vehicles for outdoors sports. We drove thousands of miles around Europe with 4 kayaks on the roof of a Ford Fiesta. Or you can easily fit three mountain bikes on a rear bike rack.
I also used to throw my mountain bike on the back of my sports car! It was, in retrospect, ridiculous.
I’ve also seen a motorcyclist having a bike mounted on a hitch!
Optimization for tiny isn’t a factor in the big outdoors. Indeed, I see more people in Sprinter vans than Teslas by mountain biking hot spots. So it’s not about “could you”, it’s about comfort and practicality of anything / everything else you may want to do beyond just lugging a bike to a trail. Such as: the optionality to go truly off road - in the vehicle not on the bike.
Depends on what you're in to, but there's a HUGE amount of land in the US and a lot of lakes and mountains don't have paved roads to them.
(Check out Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, etc.)
I need to tow a 5000lb boat 300 miles without charging and I need to fit 6 passengers. It needs to be $30K or less.
I realize Europeans have a much different understanding of distance and cargo needs; I do. But, 300 miles and 6 passengers is a pretty common requirement here in the US.
Why without charging? Are there time constraints?
I often find that I want to take a break after a couple hours of driving, and even when I drove a gas vehicle, those breaks would be 30-40 minutes long unless it was an exceptionally long day of driving. With a little planning I’ve found that I can do 90% of the trips in my EV that I used to do in my gas car. I probably can’t replicate the couple 1000-mile-in-one-day trips I did in my previous vehicle, but those experiences also made me not want to.
FWIW, in the last two years alone I have driven my EV from MA to Nova Scotia and back, MA to Iowa and back, MA to MD and back, and all over the eastern seaboard (trips to the Adirondacks, WV, etc). Lately I have not even had to plan anymore. It was surprising to discover that I could plug my car (a Bolt) into a GM charger in Indiana this summer and not even need to fiddle with an app. Things have improved dramatically for road trips in the last two years, and I have probably one of the slowest charging cars out there. Really, the only thing stopping me from buying an EV pickup is that I don’t want to pay that much for a vehicle with such an absurdly small bed. My Bolt can pull a small trailer just fine.
Because he can tow 300 miles easily with a ICE vehicle, and he can fill up anywhere in 5 minutes or less. Once you can charge cars in 5 minutes or less, I doubt he’d have made that a requirement.
I started looking at camping trailers recently to tow with my Rivian. I quickly went off the idea when I realized that each time I’d need to charge en-route I’d have to find somewhere to park the camper, unhitch, go charge, then do it all in reverse. That’s going to add at least 20 mins to each charging session. None of this is necessary if I were filling with gas. For typical places I go camping here in CO that could be two or three times per journey direction.
My in-laws tow a heavy, non-aero homemade camping trailer on their Rivian in Colorado. Two things make this work: they don't haul it long distance like you do, and they drive uphill to campsites, and then on the way home they're just charging the whole way back. I realize that there are no free lunches in energy conservation, but this diminishes range anxiety for them I think. Or I misinterpreted our convo and it's just a funny quirk of getting around the mountains.
That’s good to know actually. The distance I travel is certainly not necessary, there is closer camping, but I just tend to prefer areas that are all the way across the mountains from me. Do you know what sort of range they get while towing?
Yeah I asked when we went camping together and I remember them saying that it's a bit better than half the normal miles/kWh. The site we went to was about 22 miles and 3,600 feet of climbing from their driveway, so they were not at all worried about range. If you really want to make sure you make it home, load up your camper with rocks at the campsite so you are charging more on your way home, then dump them when you reach the lowest point on your drive home.
The camper is a cabin with cedar shingles on top of a 5'x10' Harbor Freight trailer. Heavy and not at all aero haha.
Because I travel to places without charging infra.
I hear you. I love to go to very remote places. But I guess I see it more of a personal challenge.
I was responding to someone worried about the practicality of carrying mountain bikes to the Santa Cruz mountains 50 miles from San Francisco.
I don't think it's possible to buy a new 6 passenger vehicle rated for towing 5000lb in the US for under $30K.
Europe allows towing with much smaller vehicles. There you can do 4400lb in a Golf and 4850lb in Passat though you might still struggle for 6 passengers for $30k new.
Well, you were responding to me, after I noted my excursions through Baja, the mountain west and Oklahoma.
Santa Cruz Mountain roads tend to be well paved. Though, large exceptions definitely exist! (E.g. Highland Way)
No pickup will do that. Even crew cab pickups normally max out at 5 people (4 passengers), because there is no bench seat up front anymore. Even a Ford Maverick is $30k or so, and that won’t tow a 5000lb boat. Max listed towing is 4klb.
> I need to tow a 5000lb boat 300 miles without charging and I need to fit 6 passengers. It needs to be $30K or less.
Then you need a used diesel pickup truck. 6 people is a stretch unless at least one of those is an infant or you have people on laps.
OK buy a different fucking vehicle then? Sorry this one isn't for you.
"I commute 400 miles each way to work, every day, towing my 5000 pound boat, fully equipped outdoor kitchen trailer/classroom, my home-schooled family of 6, 6 dogs, a portable sawmill, solar-powered game freezer + ammunition, and an extra trailer because I might have to go to home depot."
1. I don't commute; I work from home.
2. I would use a truck as it was intended to be used--as a truck.
3. I have a lake home 150 miles from my primary home and I don't want to have to drive 4 kids and 2 adults in two separate cars every time.
4. There is no charging infrastructure near my lake home.
Do you have power at the lake house? Then you have charging infrastructure. Also, why are you towing the boat to and from the lake house?
And again, which new production pickup fits 6 people?
I have power, yes; however, I can't even run the toaster oven and A/C, for example, at the same time. There's likely no way I could charge an EV w/o having everything trip the breaker. And there's no way to go beyond what we have unless the electric company upgrades our service.
More advanced EVSEs are capable of adjusting the power delivered based on the power available. It does require a sensor on the supply cables to determine how much power is being used, but it's technically capable without a service upgrade. Also, electric companies will frequently upgrade an old 50/100 amp service to 200 amp for low or no cost (because they figure you'll pay off the cost of doing so through more power usage). The panel side of the service upgrade will cost you, but then you'll be able use the toaster oven at the same time as the A/C.
> I need to tow a 5000lb boat 300 miles without charging
That's a 4-5 hour trip and you don't want to stop to charge for thirty minutes? One bathroom break or stop for food and you've already spent probably half of those 30m stopped anyway.
> fit 6 passengers
This truck does? It has a third row.
But I'm curious what truck you think will comfortably fit six passengers for under $30k. If the second row fits three people and the front row fits two passengers (and frankly, having a person ride in the middle of the front row is ridiculous), you only seat five passengers. Even if you count the driver as a passenger, at best you've got one uncomfortable occupant.
- Ram 1500 starts at 40k
- F150 starts at 38k
- Silverado 1500 starts at 37k
- Ford Superduty starts above 40k
- Sierra 1500 starts at 38k
And most of these are just bench seats in the front, not a third row.
Do the Ranger
It's base MSRP is 33k and it only does five passengers
I'm American and this sounds really off. AFAIK pickups in the US typically have space for five passengers, not six. And good luck finding new pickups that can tow 5000 lbs under 30k; as a category, pickups have experienced quite a lot of price inflation, as I understand it.
Right. What I’m saying is if you’re going to make a compact car with a bed, it better cost less than a pickup.
The CEO pretty clearly says it's meant to be a city truck with small size but just as much utility (or more) than something like a Tacoma.
https://youtu.be/pw250Va1JFo?t=469
I'm failing to see how this could have as much or more utility than a Tacoma. I don't see any mention of towing or payload. Not to mention, the clearance will be limiting for anyone who wants to venture off road at all.
Payload's around 1700-2000 pounds, TBD.
Towing is possible but limited-- this is a weak point for all electric vehicles-- but good enough to haul a trailer to the dump or a boat a small distance.
But the bed is better in some ways than the Tacoma.
Big question is whether they can reach production and really deliver for this pricing, etc. They have ~11k preorders and could develop a lot more.
A $41K ($46K for AWD) “truck” is absurd. This isn’t a viable option for Americans, at all.
I’m not sure what you mean. The 2025 F150 starts at $39k. https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/
And if you want it to be electric, it starts at $55k: https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150-lightning/
Slate is targeting mid-twenties and has over 70+ prototypes vehicles on the road.
Last I checked Telo has... one prototype?
Telo's doomed, anyways.
Slate is ugly and not nearly as functional. Predicting who is doomed at this point is silly. But there will be a small electric truck soon, which is nice.
> Last I checked Telo has... one prototype?
As of OpenSauce last month, they had 3 that were roadworthy. I think the company is 15 people big so it would be odd if they had a fleet with mfgr/prototype plates.
They were cagey on their manufacturing strategy but I got the sense that it'll be mostly contract manufacturing. I think slate is trying to keep as much in-house as possible and that means saying "no" to some design decisions that would require a step-up in terms of manufacturing capabilities. E.G.: Composite panels are a hell of a lot cheaper to make than stamped metal panels so slate isn't going to contract the metal stamping out.
Slate: $27k, 150 mile range
Telo: $41k 350 mile range
Slate: 2 door with bed, or 4 door no bed.
Telo: 4 door with bed.
I’d hardly say telo isn’t a viable option compared to slate.
Anyway what really matters is if any of these companies can get a vehicle to market, and at what price point. I’m not about to buy an imaginary car, and neither are you.
Fwiw if they were for sale i would strongly consider buying a telo. It looks perfect for my needs - slate less so, but if they’re all that’s available i’d strongly consider it
I don’t think slate has a four door option. It’s still two door, but with a rear seat that you can clamber into after pushing the front seat forward.
Oh! Yes that’s true! I thought at first glance the ones with an enclosed back seat had doors but it looks like they don’t.
This isn’t a F150; it’s a mini with a bed. They’re apples to oranges.
Why did you put airquotes around truck? It's got a 60 inch bed and seats 4. What truck quality is it missing?
People are buying Rivians that cost much more.
People who can afford $100K+ for a new one and $65K+ for a used one are not most people.
Many people finance cars well beyond their means…
$41k is not an absurd starting price for a truck. Look at f150 prices, starting at 39k.
Apparently nobody speaks spanish in the team. Telo MT1 can be read as "te lo mete uno" which translates to sombedy puts it into you.
still better than “doesn’t go”
I recently learned that being a issue for them was a myth.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanis...
I really like the solar roof and bed cover add-ons. They don't have specs but should be roughly 4 square meters combined or so? so about 800w at peak power. Not enough to let you rely on it even if you live in a sunny place, but it could add up to a nice reduction in cost per mile if you use it to commute and park it in the sun.
The information you're looking for is $41,520
How many kWh? Charging specs? Solar panel specs?
Honestly feels so far from an actual product I wouldn't expect to see it for another 3 years, in which time there will certainly be better options for $50,000.
This rules. I hope it succeeds. More smaller vehicles designed for urban spaces please!
I’d love to drive something like this. Looking forward to these hitting the market!
This is incredibly sensible design (if they pull it off), it's a reasonable size (unlike a lot of 'Murcian utility vehicles), has some good options (like the dual solar roof) and a useful carry layout.
Is an open front wheel like this street legal? Seems to be it would be a safety issue for pedestrians. Legally weels also are not allowed to stick out past the fender when straight.
The wheels are behind the front bumper by a few inches.
The first image on their website clearly shows the front wheels sticking out past the front bumper as well as not having any covering on the front.
https://imgur.com/V05Mc5a
That's just perspective, as orthographic projection would probably look a little wonky.
You can see them up close in the prototype model here:
https://youtu.be/uzyRb1s2U5c?t=1512
I recommend watching the CTO's story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB-XlCf87hQ
Why do these 'new' trucks feel they need to reinvent the wheel? I don't want something I need to 'reconfigure' to either carry people or a 4x8. I don't need seating for 4. I need a small utility truck. Like... a Toyota. A late 70's, early 80's Toyota. No electric windows. No fancy interior. Seating for 2 (my and my dog). No information screen...
That's what Slate is doing: https://www.slate.auto/en
Also read:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42638394
As much as I like the novelty of the design, there isn't much of a crumple zone for a head on collision. I could see the wheel placement making this a fun off-road vehicle, though.
The crumple zone is 20", same as a normal car. What there isn't is anything else aside from the crumple zone, enabling it to be so short.
Interesting, thanks for clarifying.
Next level ugly. One of the worst designs I've ever seen.
>Our standard five-seat crew cab features a 5-foot bed capacity with a configurable mid-partition that either increases the bed size to accommodate 4-by-8-foot plywood sheets with the tailgate up or to allow for additional seating for up to eight passengers.
Eight passengers while driving? Where? I don't see any pictures of that.
They have renders of what a passenger van variant would look like but my understanding is that this is just aspirational and will not be produced unless the 5-seat truck variant is successful.
This seems dangerous. Where's the crumple zone?
I saw this on JerryRigEverything and was thinking that this is the perfect city pickup. Compact, yet with a reasonable payload size. It has a good range (which, in my case, is not as important) and the horsepower is good. The dash takes a bit of getting used to, but OK.
It's the second electric vehicle I actually like (Rivian being the first - but it's a full-size).
Exciting to see new development, especially in this terminal economy.
What sort of ANCAP rating do they get with such a short front hood?
Why'd they make it look like that? It looks like one of those dog breeds that can't breathe normally.
The reason why we don't generally have vehicles this small any more is because they don't pass crash tests so I'm wondering how this fares in a crash test. I can't see any way this could be sold in Europe unless there's some very clever engineering to make the front end more resilient in a crash.
> I can't see any way this could be sold in Europe
It's 3860 x 1854mm, there are vehicles smaller than that being sold in europe right now (in the A segment, not quadricycles): the fiat 500e is 3632x1683, the suzuki ignis is 3700x1660. The citroen c1 (discontinued 2022) used to be just 3470x1620.
Hell there are B segment cars which aren't much bigger, the R5 e-tech is 3920x1770, the yaris is 3940x1745.
There are smaller vehicles being sold but the distance from the front bumper to the driver's legs is much longer because they don't have a bed taking up space at the back.
The vast majority of tractor trailers in Europe are cab over designs. There’s definitely less room between the bumper and the driver’s legs in those than in any standard pickup truck.
I guess modern crash safety does require decent crumple zones, but I'm not sure in how far Europe is different than North America in this.
If anything, small vehicles aren't a thing in NA, but extremely popular still in Europe, even though SUVification is also happening here.
There's plenty of small cars left, like the Toyota Aygo X. Renault is also working on a new electric Twingo, and the new 5 isn't huge either.
Probably also the open wheels would be an immediate issue in Europe, especially for pedestrians.
I love the look of the front wheels though!
The Smart ForTwo and Smart ForFour sold pretty well in Europe, and they are minuscule: the ForTwo was only 270cm (106in) long and 150cm (61in) wide!
The ForTwo has two seats and no truck bed so it can have enough space for a crash structure in front of the driver. On top of that its NCAP rating expired in 2021 and it is no longer being sold. The next generation of the ForTwo is likely to be longer in order to improve safety (if it ever makes it into production)
Light and medium duty commercial vehicles in Europe seem to be almost entirely cab-forwards designs; how do they pass crash tests?
A fabric interior? That's one I didn't see coming. Seems like it'd be harder to clean.
If it had full physical controls in the interior, this would be my dream vehicle. I'd reserve one today.
The second I saw that touchscreen garbage dashboard I closed the window. I'll never buy a vehicle with that nonsense.
In Australia, BYD Shark 6 is currently conquering the market for the EV utes.
$42k. If you're making a tiny truck, it should have a tiny price.
Most of the cost of building a truck is the same whether it's big or small. Hence why we only get big trucks - that reaction.
You'd pay for a useless hood?
It looks horrible. Why do all these new electric cars look like they've been through a 'you don't want to buy this' session?
When your legs are an integral part of the crumple zone.
why are there no pictures of the backseat? tired of cars with four doors and backseats made exclusively for children. and they say it can fit 8 people???
You can go on YouTuber and find reviews of the car and most people seem to say the backseat is fairly roomy (the one 6'5" reviewer said he fit). I put a reservation down a few months ago and at 6' (1.9 m for the sane people), I'm really banking on that one off-hand comment.
The third row is just planned. They do not have any publicly available views of it, and the currently non-removable back glass of the prototypes inhibit actually installing and using them.
I like the mini idea. I want a small car thing and this might be just the type of thing that is practical for me
Love the footprint, hate the cloth interior. I want to be able to spay it out after my mountain biking trips.
I'm stuck with a cloth interior. I bring a beach towel to drape on the seat after my rides. Mud falls onto the towel which makes it easy to clean out of the vehicle.
Sorry am I being an idiot or is there no rough price for this?
EDIT> Price is $50k 350m range . Nearly London -> Edinburgh
Pre-Order pricing:
> $41,520 | 260 mi | 300 hp
I'm not sure this thing would fare well in a crash test.
I am asking the same. Putting truck bed from rear into front would help with that.
Really hope enough people buy these new so that in a few years time I can get a second hand one. ;-)
Let's hope now that CAFE is dead or at least disarmed, more cars like this will come from the woodwork. I was always jealous that the japanese had so many cool small kei cars like the Subaru Sambar or Suzuki Cappuccino
Neat, but I imagined what an accident with a semi head on would do to me...
I can't customize that ugly front into a cooler design unfortunately.
This will be a giant success.
Wow, that is one ugly vehicle. It looks like it's been in an accident.
Did anyone reserve? If yes what’s your preorder position number?
Telo vs Slate.... Fight!
Bottom of the page:
> Copyright © 2024 TELO Trucks. All rights reserved.
Can you explain the relevance of this?
Looks like a Kei truck
What’s the range when loaded with things or people? That’s what matters. I find that most EVs have too many impracticalities to be convenient. For a fixed commute, sure. But for versatility, absolutely not.
This guy did tests in a different EV truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA
The results were:
1. Adding weight to the bed, if it doesn't affect aerodynamics, doesn't affect highway range much. For stop-and-go traffic I assume the range would get worse, but he didn't test it.
2. Adding a big air pusher to an otherwise empty trailer murders the range
3. Adding an aerodynamic car or truck on a trailer is better for your range than the air pusher
I do wish it was a hybrid. Maybe small companies don't have the knowledge built up to make a good hybrid drivetrain but hell, Edison is going for it. They're planning to build logging trucks with a diesel generator under the hood as prime mover for a series plug-in hybrid drivetrain. It looks very practical and their initial tests show it tows great. (Since that's their entire selling point, they'd have to fold if it couldn't haul logs)
It looks like a pug. I’m not saying that is bad :-)
Nice, how much do I need to cut to get 33s on it?
This is literally an ad.
Is this cheaper to run than the gas equivalent?
way too expensive for its size and capability
This is what Tesla should have built instead of the Cybertruck.
With their distribution and service centers, this would sell like hot cakes.
Why is the design so… awkward?
Super ugly and super pricey.
What a great form factor.
for this size i would want it to be less than 20k !
how are you supposed to put some big tires on this thing
I like that it's small and potentially even more functional than whatever idiotic American small-dick-compensating nonsense people buy these days but why does it need to be so ugly?
If you want more people to buy sensible vehicles, make them look nice i.e. not like something NASA would send to Mars.
Telo MT1 - "your knees are the crumble zone"
Is it much worse than having an engine there?
Sorry. But to me it looks like a truck i can order on alieexpress. Does not show any robustness, strength and is not sexy at all. Nice for your local laundry delivery service at your beach resort. But thats it.
When EU?
why it is so ugly?
Too small, this won't sell.
Can't wait to see what mental gymnastics are done to make this illegal or heavily taxed in some US States.
That will only happen if the right-wing propagandists manage to turn these into a wedge issue. But ultimately more EV cars and trucks (as opposed to e-bikes) won’t threaten the car-dependent culture that enables the population-density-driven fear or urban culture driving their narratives to begin with.
The extreme regulation of automobiles in the US is entirely from the left, specifically from people who dislike cars and want everyone on public transit (except for the few special people of course).
Why do you think cars are so hated? Just curious if you could steel-man what you believe their arguments against cars to be, so I know we’re on the same page of understanding.
This is what Ford e-transit could’ve been. Another missed opportunity by Ford.
Another Canoo bankrupt future and lose my 150 bucks?
Just make a gas-powered one that's repairable. This is not complicated. I love my Tesla, but my other vehicle is a Hardbody for a reason. EVs SUCK as trucks.
I'd love an EV truck but not the weird little thing highlighted in this post. I watched an overview video someone linked but turned it off as soon as I saw the guy trying to fit inside the tiny cab.
Also, why is this goofy little truck so powerful and so expensive? Can I please just get a modestly powered EV work truck with capacity for sheet goods, a few tools, and a single passenger other than the driver? Can it not cost $50k?
>EVs SUCK as trucks.
What makes you say that?
I want power density and off-grid capability in my truck. I want to be able to go camping and not plan for charging. I also want to be able to repair it without dealing with software. I also want to be able to tow without stopping to charge every 100 miles.
Battery energy density and the huge amounts of energy required to tow or haul heavy, un-aerodynamic loads.
My wife caught a glimpse of this over my shoulder, "What an ugly truck." she said immediately. Pretty much sums it up.
It doesn’t matter how capable, efficient, affordable, powerful, etc. the truck is. That’s not the point.
The point of a truck for 90% of American pickup truck drivers is that it signals to the world around them what team they’re on. This truck is a signal for the wrong team.
This is a good illustration of what's wrong with American not politics, but, I'd say, psyche. Every little (an not so little, like a truck) thing is used to signal allegiance to one of the two irreconcilable warring factions. No union, no values, no common cause, just us vs them, doubtless virtue vs doubtless vice.
It's really, really disheartening to see; not in the parent comment, but generally in life.
I wish an electric truck could alleviate even a small bit of that.
> With Toyota Tacoma capability, Tesla-like range and efficiency, in the footprint of a MINI Cooper, the TELO MT1 is the most compact, practical and technically advanced truck.
I'm cautious anytime a brand compares themselves.
Very little information about safety other than marketing speak "Utilizing the latest in advanced safety technology—sensors to predict and classify collisions before they happen, airbags, and structural technology—to make our vehicles safer for everyone on the road."
Have they never heard of a crumple zone?
You think a crumple zone isn’t required by current FMVSS, which they are designing against? That is, in fact, what they referred to with “ structural technology”.
I'm pretty skeptical of the safety as well. It's also pretty hard to judge where there don't seem to be any actual photographs of the vehicle, only computer renderings.
I would love a small truck like this, but I would honestly buy an old Tacoma or Ranger before even considering buying this on spec.
*edit: digging around I did find some footage on YouTube with actual vehicles. I'm definitely skeptical on the safety now.
'22 rangers are in a sweet spot right now.
Who is the target market here?
* Purely subjective opinion: It's ugly as hell. The front of vehicles isn't just for engines, it's also for aerodynamics.
* It's crazy expensive.
* The bed looks too short to be practically useful.
* The wheels look comically small.
* The ground clearance doesn't seem to make it useful for more than suburban and urban road environments.
I'm the target market.
- I think it looks fine
- I don't need a full sized bed for anything I'd be transporting
- Tricked out it's a little over half the cost of an R1T Dual and $10K less than a comparable F150 Lightning upgraded to the long range battery
- The wheels are small because it's a small truck. Big wheels would look ridiculous.
- This isn't a truck for off roading or unmaintained dirt roads.
What would I use this truck for?
- towing a motorcycle trailer
- Picking up stuff from Costco that won't fit in my trunk
- Buying and transporting dirt, gravel, and stone for my yard
- Going up to my cabin with my partner and two friends and having enough room to seat everyone and have room for all the luggage
Exactly. I love that it's small. I used to have a 4 door full length bed GMC and it felt like driving a boat. Seattle was particularly awful. My current garage is only 210 inches deep (5.334 m) so most trucks will not fit in my current house (very first world problems I know). But yes, smaller, lower cost, and does everything I need a truck for.
I'm excited to hear your review after purchase.
I'll be eager to post one! After the cybertruck I won't be preordering any more vehicles. Right now I'm looking to replace our Model 3. I'm waiting for now details on the 2026 R1T Quad, and to see if Mazda actually really makes an electric MX-5. We have two other EVs (cars) so a truck would make sense but we're keeping our options open. An R1T would be cool but putting the 50k difference into a home battery system would be a smarter play, and an electric MX-5 would just be fun as hell.
A friend of mine who works at a tech company doing charging tech is urging me to hold out for a year, so I might delay a decision another year. We'll see.
Isn’t a ford lightning much bigger and more capable?
More capable how? It's more capable if it does more things that you want it to do, but in my case it doesn't add more utility. When you compare it based on range and power, it's still more expensive.
Maybe it's more capable because driving small truck could make people think your genitalia is small?
Not my personal opinion... but wonder how much of a factor this is :)
The stereotype is that a big truck implies you're compensating. The only people who think an unimpressive vehicle means you have small bits are the people who think that an impressive vehicle means you have big bits.
> It's ugly as hell.
So is a Ford Transit van? Who cares. This is a work truck.
> The bed looks too short to be practically useful.
The bed is 5 ft long. From TF website: "Same truck bed length as the Toyota Tacoma. Larger than a Rivian R1T."
> The wheels look comically small.
They look fine? How big should they be?
> The ground clearance doesn't seem to make it useful for more than suburban and urban road environments.
Oh, so they designed it for the environments it was...designed to be used in? And the same environments most macho big boy trucks spend 99% of their life in? What's the problem here?
Honestly, what's your problem? Why is your comment so harshly negative? You can't fathom a target market for this because you don't seem to be in it?
> * The bed looks too short to be practically useful.
Have you looked at the mainstream 'small' truck market lately?
Small in quotes, because actual small trucks disappeared, and we're left with mid sized trucks as the smallest. Used to be you could get a 6-ft bed standard and an optional longer bed on a small truck. Fuel efficiency standards now dictate you can't have that without a larger truck and worse fuel efficency.
I'm not willing to preorder an unproven brand, but I am excited about this. I'm a Toyota RAV4 owner, and I'd like something (much) more fuel efficient, or a fairly affordable EV, but I don't want to lose moderate hauling capacity for equipment, tools, parts for home, etc. I would seriously consider a very small/compact car but I do need to fit a car seat and I do occasionally move things.
I hope this makes it to market because if I was buying a car today, and this was available today, I'd pick this.
EVs are scam of the century. They have diverted so much economic resources into an end product that isn't even reliable let alone having a long life.
Yet to talk about the amount of mining, its carbon footprint and pretty much irreversible or really high cost extraction/restoration of batteries apart.
Longevity and carbon footprint - If that's not your yardstick than other than that the EVs are great. Have more power than any combustion engine can ever have, have more torque, more acceleration and pretty much zero maintenance as far as the "engine" is concerned. No noise, no emissions, no vibrations either.
> an end product that isn't even reliable let alone having a long life
What's unreliable on a modern EV? And what do you mean by "long life", because you now have 10-15 year old EVs that are fine.
Obviously some cars aged poorly, like some Tesla which had poor build quality (not an EV problem, but a company problem) or cars like the Nissan Leaf that didn't have battery cooling for years, but what's exactly unreliable on a modern Polestar or a Hyundai?
You don't need to ask me, check what happened with car rental companies and EVs.
It's all pretty evident.
If you're referring to what happen to companies like Hertz, then according to them the problem wasn't reliability.
The cars had more accidents, probably because some were not used to the speed or would get an EV just to test the speed. Why buy Tesla in that case then, when their repairs are known to be super expensive and slow? Then you had people who are not used to EVs and charging trying to use EVs and the companies themselves didn't build the charging infrastructure so customers left with a full battery, but that has nothing to do with reliability. Vehicle depreciation? Again, a Tesla problem because they sold them the cars at a high price before dropping prices (the covid years were very weird).
So again, what makes EVs unreliable? It's a simple question.
You can't charge them within five minutes like you would load up a traditional car.
Battery starts to lose range. Even more so in extreme temperatures.
Battery replacement is super expensive. In that amount you can get your engine rebuilt multiple times over.
You're mixing different problems and clearly have no experience driving or owning EVs.
> You can't charge them within five minutes like you would load up a traditional car.
Nothing to do with reliability.
> Battery starts to lose range. Even more so in extreme temperatures.
Yes, you lose ~20% of range if it's snowing or very cold. Is this a reliability issue?
> Battery replacement is super expensive. In that amount you can get your engine rebuilt multiple times over.
It is very expensive, but batteries are not failing. Again, we now have 10-15 year old cars on the road without battery problems.
I think a problem with EVs is that we don't have a depreciation model for the batteries in the same way that we do for the car itself (based on mileage).
In an ideal world you could instantly get your battery replaced with a full one at a recharging station and settle the difference in depreciation.
The EV ownership model only works right now if you charge it yourself and use it to drive around your own town
Car rental companies hated EVs because of the large depreciation. That's a sign that the technology is progressing quickly.
Nah - renters didn't want them. Nobody wants a care for 48 hours on rent out of which at least 12 hours it has to worry about charging it.
Superchargers aren't always available or in working condition even if are nearby.
And EVs don't deprecate faster because technology is advancing by leap and bounds. It has other factors.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I rented EVs multiple times. You don't worry about charging as often as 12 out of 48 hours. If there happens to be a convenient L2 charger you plug in. Otherwise you visit a fast charger.
Superchargers have excellent availability and uptime.
EVs depreciate quickly entirely because of technology advances. In the span of a few years we have seen 800V architectures, LFP batteries becoming commonplace. And semi-solid-state batteries are on the horizon.
> Yet to talk about the amount of mining, its carbon footprint and pretty much irreversible or really high cost extraction/restoration of batteries apart.
Do you also have similar thoughts on all the infrastructure needed for oil, or is that not to be discussed?
I always wonder with the "all the mineral-mining!!!" crowd, do they think the oil infrastructure just arrived overnight? And there was no cost (money and long-term ecological) to it all?
EVs are simpler than ICE cars. No transmission, more efficient regenerative braking.
The only thing the batteries need is lithium, which isn't the most uncommon element. And there will be other battery chemistries in the future.