There are a ton of people that want an affordable ICE powered truck, for a variety of valid and invalid reasons. The market is there, but they're going to need to be smart about how they do this if they want to capture that market.

There are many great EV cars. But when you have a trailer or caravan we still talk about a heavily reduced range (and often they aren't allowed to pull at all, or weight limits get a problem, at least in Europe)

I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t an ev. Very aggressive price point for a new IC vehicle.

> I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).

Yeah it’s interesting to see how they do. The big and award winning electric truck from Ford is already discontinued. If we’re talking about US pickups how many other ones are battery powered? If anything, I would be more worried about Slate given what happened to Ford Lightning.

There is a market for it. Cheap. Good range on a tank. 4WD. I've got a 2016 Tacoma TRD Offroad. It's only got about 115k miles (bought it new). I'm not planning on replacing it - toyota hybrid numbers for their trucks suck and an in kind replacement would cost me almost 2x what I originally paid (yes new tech, blahblah). $35k in 2015, $70+k now. Gas isn't going away and rural areas (I've lived in a few) often don't have charging options.

Slate already has that covered.

I say this as someone who will be buying an EV as his next vehicle:

EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:

- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?

- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.

- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.

- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.

EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.

My pickup truck burned 9 miles per gallon when I towed a 35 foot RV. Consider the energy flux and you'll quickly see how hopeless it would be to tow with a battery powered truck.