alt Hacker NewsAs someone towing every weekend with a Lightning, I get closer to 150mi.
ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing. People just don't seem to be able to factor it in.
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Are they really that inefficient? My 94 Roadmaster sedan gets 14ish mpg towing 7000lbs at 60mph, which works out to a bit over 300 miles on a tank. I figured your average gas truck would do at least that well, and they have larger tanks.
meanwhile, my impression is the whole poor towing narrative (while true) is a big part of what killed the ev truck when how many people use trucks in the way they could otherwise use a four-door sedan.
"ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing."
Not so sure about that one, boss. I can fully-load up a Ford Ranger to its 7500lb rated towing capacity and lose ~10% in fuel economy/range while you just dropped something like 30% (from the base power package range of ~240 miles, platinum package at 300 miles you're losing half if you only get 150 miles out.)
The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it.
Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.