The light truck sales are increasing

General Discussion
41

Yeah those have a lot of room for battery(s) underneath (I assume anyway), so I wounder what the range on one is?? I know a guy that used to drive an ICE big van for Amazon and his route was 60 miles away and spread out in the country… I would guess that the EV vans are more for the city and closer range routes?..
And are they making them with way less power then the Rivian trucks to get longer range??
Would it double the range going from 600HP down to 300HP (or however they rate them) and do they have to be very mindful of the GVWR so they know that if route A is X miles long they can only have x GVWR and with the same spec van that route B can be X miles long due to it weighing much less…

It seems to me that a EV vehicle is much more affected by the total loaded weight (GVWR) then a ICE is, especially when compared to a diesel…??..

Now you have the gears turning in my head, they may be small gears but still gears… lol

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42

They are claimed to have a 150 mile range, but that is probably affected to a certain extent by the A/C, with which all Amazon vehicles are equipped.

I live in a largely rural area, but that 150 mile range is probably practical, given how many Amazon distribution centers have popped up over the past couple of years. There are–I think–three Amazon distribution centers w/in 10 miles of my home.

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43

IIRC Motor MythBusters did an EV test on a small sedan and found out that the AC didn’t effect the range nearly as much as using the heat… And it was around a 100 degree day, none of them like having the heat turned up and the windows closed in the desert heat… :grin:
Don’t know how that transfers to the Amazon EV’s…

I guess it takes less energy to spin an AC compressor then to heat up a stove (EV heater)?? :man_shrugging:

44

My plug-in hybrid’s battery range is now up to 54 miles. (The mfr claims a 37 mile range, and–sure enough–that is what I had for the first couple of months. Then, it began edging upward as–I guess–it adjusted to my driving patterns.)

But, when I engage either the A/C or heat, the “guessometer” immediately goes down to 51 miles. That’s still enough for my normal driving because I used only 36.2 gallons of gas to drive the first 5,100 miles. Obviously, I do most of my driving in EV mode.

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45

Wow! As my dad often commented, not all education comes out of a textbook. Thank you. :slightly_smiling_face:

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46

For some things I do the same; my parents cars of my childhood and later my own cars as an adult.

Many other memories are tied to which kitty cat/s I had at the time.

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47

Textbooks provide basic knowledge that can be applied to real problems. Coursework in college provided a background that helped me understand the problem solving skills I learned during my first couple of years on the job. Working is when I really learned stuff.

Anyone can learn useful things. I was on a tiger team near the end of my years in the steel mill. The hourly guys often had a high school degree but sometimes didn’t. Still, they had a wealth of practical suggestions to improve operations in the mill. Most of their suggestions were better than the ones I thought of. They didn’t know how to test their hypotheses though, and that’s where I came in handy. Together we improved steel wire rod manufacturing enough that we forestalled mill closure. We lasted more than a decade longer the any other integrated carbon steel wire rod mill in the US.

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48

My grandfather use to say, to find the easiest way to get a job done (which I equate to the “Best Way”), you give the job to a lazy worker… In my years in the Air Force, I came to believe that thinking was a bit narrow, I came to believe that the “lazy worker” (in most cases…) was really one who could think outside of the box and see a better way of doing a task… And it did not take a college degree to gain and use common sense…

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49

Good point. In my working days in high tech I interviewed probably close to 200 candidates for scientist/engineer jobs. Of those, maybe 15 actually got a job offer. One of the worries I’d be on the look-out for was candidates who consistently gave text book answers. This got my attention right away, and I’d always ask some follow up questions to see if they’d actually ever thought about the question in any other ways, other than text books. Usually they hadn’t, and I’d say “no”. The problem w/this sort of candidate, if they were to get a design engineering job, they’ll be assigned a project, and when their design doesn’t work and the shipment deadline is approaching, instead of figuring out why, they’ll say “everything I do is designed correctly, so if it doesn’t work it must somebody else’s problem.”

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50

About 1966 when I spent the summer in a truck plant, the guys told me that a $50 an hour consultant (which was a lot of money then), came in to do an efficiency study of the wood shop. They did their work and made some changes. As soon as the were gone, Gordy, the Foreman, put things back they way they were. The place ran pretty smooth so I really never could figure out who was right. I suspect now it was consultants with a bunch of book larnin’ that never had to accually produce anything.

Once in a while I run into the old Plant Manager who is about 85 now, and talk about old times. He’s told me about the problems with owners, etc. that he had. I might ask him about Gordy if I think about it. The PM was an engineer from Chicago with a history of time and motion studies.

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51

Older managers usually have set opinions and won’t take changes lightly. They learned a way of doing things and often believe that theirs is the right way. They might be right, but then there are the times that they are wrong. One of our satellite suppliers had a hybrid chip shop with low yield, and they determined through visits to other hybrid manufacturers in the area that it was a contamination problem. They asked us to recommend changes since we had a lot of contamination control expertise on staff. The foreman refused to recognize any of the help and eventually his employer shut his shop down and bought the parts outside.

52

If you want to see the “my way is the best way,” just turn on a rerun of Gordon Ramsey’s “Kitchen Nightmares…” In this show, Ramsey goes into a struggling restaurants and tries to change the owner’s mind on how to operate a successful restaurant. He comes up with a whole new menu (locally grown vegetables, locally caught fish, etc…), teaches the cooks and chefs how to cook it, and then he modernizes the interior of each restaurant with all new tables, chairs, paint, decorations, lighting, etc…

The Public loves the new restaurants, but the owners often resent all the changes and after Ramsey leaves, they go right back to the way things were before, frozen vegetables, frozen fish sticks, microwaving instead of fresh prepared and cooked… And when Ramsey goes back to do a follow-up episode, the restaurant has closed down…

I understand that modernizing and speeding up production is not the only factors you have to consider because the employees are the ones who have to implement the changes…

In “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” when applied in the Workplace, “Job Satisfaction” is rated above “Money” This means that you can offer an employee more money, but if they are not happy in the job, the money is not going to keep them.

To put in in another context, if a person is imprisoned in a Palace, with all the luxuries that go along with a Palace, it is still a Prison…

When I first started working the '60s, I put up with a lot of “stuff” that the young folk today would not put up with and they would quickly say, “Take this job and shove it…”

tenor

53

He visited a failing restaurant in White House Station, a town near me. He totally re-did the interior, completely revised the menu, and got the old, very ill husband of the proprietress to stop pushing a serving trolley around the dining room.

When it was time for the unveiling, the extremely negative woman who owned the place took one look, and shouted “I hate it”. Within weeks, the old menu was back, and a few months later, the restaurant was shut-down for good.

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54

One of the employees where I worked decided to clean their ancient carburetor using the lab’s ultrasonic cleaning tank. It definitely got the carb nice and clean, spotless in fact. After that, none of the products produced using that tank would pass QA testing … lol …

55

When one wants a truck, but doesn’t want to pay for the bloated full size big rigs of today, and it can be had, fully loaded with AWD and heated seats and off road package, for about the cost of the base model XL f150

56

Could they get the stainless steel vessel out of the box? If nothing else works, put it in a 500C oven and burn up everything on the surface. You can’t do that if the cleaner can’t be disassembled.

57

I expect they just bought a new one. I definitely wasn’t asking any questions. Lots of frowning faces, this was a topic best avoided … lol …

58

Yes, it looks like you were right.
Be afraid, Ford–be very afraid…

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