Future of the tremor and the 7.3l ???

10 years ago an electric semi wasn’t even a believable possibility.

Now we’re debating whether electric semi’s are as good or better than the old smokers.

I’m pretty sure you’ll see more than a tenfold improvement over 20 years.
Oh, it was a definite possibility. There were even test mules in R &D sections when fuel was $4/gallon. The company that can make an economically viable EV Commercial Vehicle first will make bank.

I just don't see Li-Ion or any other chemical battery getting us there. Maybe Hydrogen, but it's easier to just burn the natural gas you use to get it. Molten-salt batteries???

We haven't seen a huge step in battery tech for over 5 years... just further refinements with marginal gains. Tesla's solution is to just throw more cells at it, but notice no one else is willing to eat those costs.
 
One variable not considered here is the very real possibility of an electrical grid failure due to cyber hack or EMP. This threat looms larger every day. If it ever transpired EVs will be useless but it will also make delivery of fossil fuel problematic but still do-able but not at your corner station. At that point I guess we are in Mad Max territory.

Sorry, didn’t mean to get all doomsday.

Here in Northern California the electrical grid goes down several times a year for days at a time.

Gas is the hardest thing to get during those seasons because as soon as the power goes out everyone makes a run on the stations.

Still able to get electricity though so long as the sun stays shining.
 
Its easy for a politician (Newsom or Biden) to throw a Dream out there and see if it fly's, it's another for it to become reality. There is a tremendous amount of variables for this, Auto Industry, Fossil Fuel Industry, rare Earth mines, our only CONUS mine for that shuttered, what 10-15 years ago, deferring to China, now they are years away from restarting. The technology alone, even Musk wonders why Telsas stock price is so high, I think a lot of people are all giddy about EV's and the dream doesn't match the reality.

All of this is on a good day, but in the Economy Environment we are in, it's huge, these are unprecedented times. Consider the inflated housing prices, mortgage forbearance, rent freeze / eviction moratoriums, questionable job market???

There is an Elephant in the room that hasn't sat down yet, just saying.
 
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Oh, it was a definite possibility. There were even test mules in R &D sections when fuel was $4/gallon. The company that can make an economically viable EV Commercial Vehicle first will make bank.

I just don't see Li-Ion or any other chemical battery getting us there. Maybe Hydrogen, but it's easier to just burn the natural gas you use to get it. Molten-salt batteries???

We haven't seen a huge step in battery tech for over 5 years... just further refinements with marginal gains. Tesla's solution is to just throw more cells at it, but notice no one else is willing to eat those costs.

I’m not a battery expert so no idea where the step changes will come from. Graphene?

So far as Tesla’s business model innovations, there are a lot of companies replicating that approach to disrupting the auto industry. The only incumbent I can think of doing the same is Volvo/Polestar.
 
Here in Northern California the electrical grid goes down several times a year for days at a time.

Gas is the hardest thing to get during those seasons because as soon as the power goes out everyone makes a run on the stations.

Still able to get electricity though so long as the sun stays shining.
Not to get too far into hypotheticals, but unless they can recharge their trucking fleet with solar panels on site like you could your house that’s not exactly a fair comparison. They would still be susceptible to issues with power grid.

Another fact about electric semis most don’t want to acknowledge is that the battery weight comes at the direct cost of payload. Unless they can come up with a battery that is more energy dense than diesel they’re always going to be playing catch up on the weight disadvantage. It’s hard to make a business case for a truck with draw backs like range and downtime already. It’s even more difficult when you factor in that you’ve just given up a 1/3 of your payload while your competitors are still running ICE with full payload and none of the other draw backs.

Not saying it can’t happen but battery tech and infrastructure need to come a long way before its realistic.
 
Not to get too far into hypotheticals, but unless they can recharge their trucking fleet with solar panels on site like you could your house that’s not exactly a fair comparison. They would still be susceptible to issues with power grid.

Another fact about electric semis most don’t want to acknowledge is that the battery weight comes at the direct cost of payload. Unless they can come up with a battery that is more energy dense than diesel they’re always going to be playing catch up on the weight disadvantage. It’s hard to make a business case for a truck with draw backs like range and downtime already. It’s even more difficult when you factor in that you’ve just given up a 1/3 of your payload while your competitors are still running ICE with full payload and none of the other draw backs.

Not saying it can’t happen but battery tech and infrastructure need to come a long way before its realistic.

Fair points, but we are talking 10-20 year hypotheticals here. I'd still bet the economic scales tip in favor of electric powertrains on that timescale.
 
I could be way off but I'm thinking the more electric cars hit the streets the better for us in a way. At some point, demand for gas will drop because of all the electric cars on the road. Gas companies could try charging more to make up for it but that would just accelerate the transition to electric. I think gas prices will come down just to keep customers driving their gas cars and trucks longer. They may ban selling new gas vehicles but existing ones should be good to drive for years to come in most states. Cheaper gas would slow the transition and make our big block Fords a desirable purchase.
 
What performance? Range? Acceleration? PAyload? I belive what Elon claims as soon as I believe Epstein killed himself.

Fleet owners only care about capability, cost, maintenance, and uptime. EV semi trucks get their butts whipped in three out of four of those, and the cost part makes it a non-starter. Barring a tenfold improvement in both energy density and charge time, EV trucks will be exclusively for LTL and regional haul duties where the government forces acceptance or offers huge incentives for them. Your St. Louis to Denver run will still run on dino fuel for the next 20 years.
haha fair enough. Was reading an article the other day that his semi had like 550 mile range and could rip up and down mountain passes with massive torque #s that diesels can't touch.

But yeah, cost and uptime are way against the EV semi. Capability kind of remains to be seen, and maintenance probably realistically favors the EV. EVs are much simpler machines. No def, no costly emissions shit, no fluids, all the motors are independent of each other so even if a motor went bad it would be a quick swap. Electric motors aren't even espensive either. The bulk of the cost is the batteries.

It will def be interesting to see how the batteries hold up to long haul trucking miles. I know my lithium battery in my cell phone loses like half it's charge capacity in like 2 years so if that's an issue in EVs, just another reason I don't want one, but a non-starter for trucking industry given the mileage and number of charge cycles they'd have to do.
 
haha fair enough. Was reading an article the other day that his semi had like 550 mile range and could rip up and down mountain passes with massive torque #s that diesels can't touch.

But yeah, cost and uptime are way against the EV semi. Capability kind of remains to be seen, and maintenance probably realistically favors the EV. EVs are much simpler machines. No def, no costly emissions shit, no fluids, all the motors are independent of each other so even if a motor went bad it would be a quick swap. Electric motors aren't even espensive either. The bulk of the cost is the batteries.

It will def be interesting to see how the batteries hold up to long haul trucking miles. I know my lithium battery in my cell phone loses like half it's charge capacity in like 2 years so if that's an issue in EVs, just another reason I don't want one, but a non-starter for trucking industry given the mileage and number of charge cycles they'd have to do.
Yes, these are all among the known issues. This is why tesla suggests only charging to 80% except for long trips, and also suggest discharging only to 20%. Which means if you want longevity, you nearly double the battery capacity for the same range. And that's not even considering the power loss in the cold (which tesla also ignores, but trucking certainly does not).

The deeper you get into the dynamics of this problem, the worse it looks for chemical batteries.
 
best thing you can do is try and counter the BS that humans can and have changed the climate. That’s what’s driving the move towards electric vehicles and the death of ICE.
 
Gasoline engines will be around for many years to come. But for certain countries, and certain markets the electric powered vehicles will be adopted much sooner, like California as long as they have some power infrastructure in place. Some European countries will be ahead of others, and most like China which is investing heavily in new Nuclear power plants and can basically tell their people what they will drive.

It will certainly come a time when electric outsells the gasoline counterparts, but even then it will take 10 plus years before electric is the predominant vehicle in the market. Lets say 2035 electric starts outselling gas, then 2045 maybe there are as many electric vehicles as gasoline. That would still be a large amount of gasoline vehicles on the road for many years to come. As far a V8 engines go, it sounds like Ford is already working on a smaller version of the 7.3 that most likely will end up in the Mustang and probably F150 to replace the 5.0 engine. Something that is much simpler, and maybe has cylinder deactivation on it.

My crystal ball may be pretty cloudy, but I see a pretty good uptick of electric vehicles hitting over the next 5 years, and then it really levels out after that unless some new technology comes along that allows them to charge much faster, and also is some readily available material to build the batteries out of.
 
i would love to get a 14 raptor & put the 7.3l in it to make some road warrior type of sh-t???(y)??
 
best thing you can do is try and counter the BS that humans can and have changed the climate. That’s what’s driving the move towards electric vehicles and the death of ICE.
Set a reminder for yourself to come back and read this comment in 15 years.
 
Set a reminder for yourself to come back and read this comment in 15 years.
Is this kind of like how we somehow warmed the planet enough from the 80’s when everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs about the impending ice age? Honest question.
 
Set a reminder for yourself to come back and read this comment in 15 years.
I set a reminder of how they said by now the dams feeding our biggest and third biggest city would be dry and never fill again. Then laughed when the flood proof bridge they just built was 2 metres under water because that same dam spilled for 2 weeks and the Brisbane CBD flooded twice. None of their catastrophic predictions of how the world would be by now have come true. There is still sea ice in the Antarctic, the Arctic hasn’t melted away, the Pacific Islands and the Maldives are thriving and if anything are increasing in size. The predictions of world wipe crop failures due to heat and lack of rain are met by the realities of record grain harvest. The demise of the GBR, predicted for over 50 years is nowhere near coming true.

I don’t know about you, but when people make dire predictions after dire predictions and none of the come true, I no longer listen to them. Unfortunately, too many people still do and that’s why we have electric cars which where I live are good only for city commuting, or you have lots of money and time. Even then, if everyone tries to go this way there is no way the infrastructure will be in place by 2050, let alone 2035 the way governments take forever to do things
 
The world will be very different in 5 years. Like unrecognizable! May well be that way in 1 yr.....
It's changing so fast. It's not even remotely the same country it was when I was a kid. Granted as a kid I might not have been as aware of the global "goings-on" as I am now but it seemed like a fairly happy and liberty minded country. Now everyone's fucking miserable, media and politics are beyond toxic, the woke mob and cancel culture zealots have sucked joy out of nearly every facet of life while the envrionazis despite being demonstrably wrong about everything for the last 40 years are winning.

I have a 5 year old and 2 year old and I really worry about what kind of shit country they're going to be left with.
 
It's changing so fast. It's not even remotely the same country it was when I was a kid. Granted as a kid I might not have been as aware of the global "goings-on" as I am now but it seemed like a fairly happy and liberty minded country. Now everyone's fucking miserable, media and politics are beyond toxic, the woke mob and cancel culture zealots have sucked joy out of nearly every facet of life while the envrionazis despite being demonstrably wrong about everything for the last 40 years are winning.

I have a 5 year old and 2 year old and I really worry about what kind of shit country they're going to be left with.
It’s not as bad here as that yet, but we’re going in the same direction as well. Just this week the media hyperventilated about lack of diversity in a kids cartoon featuring a blue dog. If you disagree with that lot, you’re considered evil. If you don’t accept the global warming con job, you’re a denier and climate criminal. No doubt even worse if you drive a super duty
 
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Gasoline engines will be around for many years to come. But for certain countries, and certain markets the electric powered vehicles will be adopted much sooner, like California as long as they have some power infrastructure in place. Some European countries will be ahead of others, and most like China which is investing heavily in new Nuclear power plants and can basically tell their people what they will drive.

It will certainly come a time when electric outsells the gasoline counterparts, but even then it will take 10 plus years before electric is the predominant vehicle in the market. Lets say 2035 electric starts outselling gas, then 2045 maybe there are as many electric vehicles as gasoline. That would still be a large amount of gasoline vehicles on the road for many years to come. As far a V8 engines go, it sounds like Ford is already working on a smaller version of the 7.3 that most likely will end up in the Mustang and probably F150 to replace the 5.0 engine. Something that is much simpler, and maybe has cylinder deactivation on it.

My crystal ball may be pretty cloudy, but I see a pretty good uptick of electric vehicles hitting over the next 5 years, and then it really levels out after that unless some new technology comes along that allows them to charge much faster, and also is some readily available material to build the batteries out of.

Yes. Electric options will hit a market saturation point fairly quickly. Unless you live in a major urban center, and never leave said urban center, they're useless. Tesla allows some flexibility there with their superchargers, but you're still quite limited on how far off of a major interstate you can go.

I think of the trips I take camping out in BFE Rockies 30 miles off of a paved road, and my 700-1000 miles trips towing a sled trailer, and I kinda laugh at the thought of being forced into electric by the government class. It certainly has a use case, but the folks pushing it live very insular, naive lives and are seemingly unaware of the mass of humanity who doesn't live exactly like they do.

I'm not a luddite; I don't NEED the ICE. I just need an electric that allows me to drive as far as I'd like with minimal interruption. And right now the limiting factor are batteries. There's very little to suggest any breakthroughs are forthcoming in that regard. Physics will still exist even if the irrational amongst us are not able to accept it.
 
It’s not as bad here as that get, but we’re going in the same direction as well. Just this week the media hyperventilated about lack of diversity in a kids cartoon featuring a blue dog. If you disagree with that lot, you’re considered evil. If you don’t accept the global warming con job, you’re a denier and climate criminal. No doubt even worse if you drive a super duty

Luckily our government hasn't tried to ban all guns yet. Though if they try we won't roll over and comply, they'll get a horrific firefight.

Our 2nd Amendment is our last line of defense against all this liberal/commie tyranny but they've been chipping away at it bit by bit.

If I had the know how, I'd be building a thousand AR-15s from 80% lowers, slathering them in cosmoline and burying them offsite somethere.
 
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