alt Hacker NewsI pretty much concur with your take. I'm interested in this because I sometimes need a truck, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on an oversized gigantic vehicle I don't really need to have a truck the sometimes I need it. For me, that is mostly to go to the home store and back w/ materials, which is something I expect to do more regularly near the tail end of this summer onward as I ramp up my carpentry hobby. That 200 mile range is fine for me, because the closest home store is just 2.1 miles away from my house.
The flip side of that is over the holiday weekend I drove more than 250 miles to go visit my folks for Father's Day, which is just a couple of hours driving each direction. That's not even a long drive, that's a fairly normal weekend mini-roadtrip. It's not unusual for me to sometimes drive to the office in the next city over for meetings, and that's 116 miles from my house, where I work from home hence having significantly shorter typical driving experiences than most Americans. That next city over is a place where quite a lot of folks work and commute daily. 200 miles is definitely on the short side of acceptable range in the US.
Maybe it's just a Texas thing, but driving a hundred miles or more in a single direction is a typical behavior for many people under a variety of circumstances when you expect to return on the same day. This state also has the largest market for truck sales in the US.
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FWIW I just rent a truck from the home center when I need to do that two or three times a year. Small hassle but a lot easier than owning a whole vehicle.
To be fair texas also has a fairly decent amount of charging stations at this point as well. I road trip my E-Transit from South Louisiana to Austin/Dallas all the time. Does it suck? Yeah kinda, but stopping every 1.5 hours to charge isn't so bad once you get used to it. I hate road tripping in ICE cars now that can go 500 miles on a tank of gas and no one wants to stop to pee and stretch every few hours.