The average American drives less than 30 miles per day, according to AAA. The range in the Lightening will be fine for the vast majority of users (and, related, the vast majority of folks who buy a pickup truck don't actually need them for their 4x4/truck features -- I'm not judging people's needs, and am a firm believer in "buy what you like", but I think these data points speak to the viability of the Lightening's range). Even if someone drives 7 times more than their "average" neighbours they will fit in the 230 mile claimed range. To the point of folks like
@ThundahBeagle, not everyone is in this demographic -- the 'average' is not the 'every' -- but for a lot of end-users the electric truck won't be that different than a gas one, as their daily mileage is lower than even the extremely conservative numbers of just over 100 miles range, and the truck can be plugged in and topped up at home overnight.
As far as charging times, there are two factors I think about. The first factor is that charging times are practically pretty good today - far better than many give them credit for, as this is an area where there's been significant real-world growth in the last 5-ish years. I've shared before, but a
Tesla managed to do nearly 3,000 kms in 24 hours on the Autobahn a few years ago. Without a doubt they are slower to refuel than gas equivalents, but even in a gas vehicle I can't see anyone practically needing to do 2700 kms in a day -- human beings aren't really wired to do that, regardless of whether they are in an ICE or an EV, so in a 24-hour period, EVs have the same practical range as gas vehicles (i.e. the vehicle will go further, including fuel stops, in a day than most humans likely would want to do in that same time period).
The second factor I think about is in terms of re-thinking how we do stuff. Without a doubt, an EV will take longer to charge than a car does to gas up, but how can we re-think that use of time? It's not as if you have to plug in your car and sit there with your hand on the charging cable for an hour, the way you often must do at gas stations for 5-10 minutes, so how else can that time be used? In terms of travelling, when I think of the "flow" of our trips, we typically camp somewhere overnight and hit the road in the morning. By lunchtime, we typically need to get gas but we tend to 'stack' our stops -- this is what I mean by "how else can that time be used". So we fill up on gas, spin the dogs out, grab something to eat, use the restrooms, etc. which in total takes us between 30 minutes and an hour depending on how relaxed we are being. That's plenty of time for an EV to sit and passively charge while we are doing our other tasks. I think a similar "rethink how we do stuff" approach can work for commercial users of EVs. Folks using EVs professionally would for sure need to figure out how they use their time to make it worthwhile but it's not a deal breaker. For a time, I was working from the cab of my truck; a gas stop is a "lost" 10 - 20 minutes, but I can totally see myself parking for an hour to charge and pull out my laptop to do invoicing/e-mails as that full hour actually gives me some time to focus. That is work that needs to be done at some point in the day - might as well do it while my truck is fuelling up, and kill two birds with one stone.
The biggest issue is that not everywhere has the infrastructure of the Autobahn, and there's no easy way to haul 5 gallons of electricity for remote touring -- but as EVs grow in popularity (which looks to be the trend), the infrastructure will follow to support while at the same time, the performance of said infrastructure will continue to improve dramatically.
www.autoblog.com
