Tim Esterdahl of the popular “Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk” website and podcast obviously has mixed feelings about electric vehicles, as he demonstrated once again in two recent videos about a 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning he got on loan for a week.
After the first video about charging the truck, Esterdahl received so many questions and comments, he said, that he wanted to put together a second video to address some of them.
To start off, he admitted that he wasn’t exactly charging the vehicle the way Ford would suggest.
“If you recall from last night’s video,” he said, “I have the worst possible situation: I’m plugging [into] 110. And this charger allows up to 30 amps of power to go through it at 110 volts.”
Esterdahl had shown that arrangement in the previous video, and had apparently gotten a lot of complaints from people saying that wasn’t the way to get it done.
“You’re right, you need to charge on 220,” he responded. “Because this takes forever.”
However, he said, there would be times in any EV owner’s life when he’d be forced to charge at the suboptimal voltage. Everyone has 110v outlets (the standard outlet in American homes); not everyone has a 220v outlet where an EV could plug into it.
“There’s no superchargers around here; there’s no level 2 — the level 2’s at the Ford dealership. I don’t go sit at the Ford dealership for an hour to charge, then go see my friend.”
“The infrastructure’s not there yet,” he said.
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Which, of course, is one of the major obstacles to adopting electric vehicles at the rate the Biden administration and leftists in general would prefer.
Shockingly, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been apparently unable to dissuade the president from moving too quickly in this direction. You’d think that the two-term mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana would carry more credibility than that.
I’m kidding, of course. Mayor Pete is all-in on electric vehicles.
Esterdahl did the math and figured out he’d charged for 16 hours with his suboptimal arrangement, and gained 36 miles. Using the national average cost for electricity, he calculated that he’d spent $2.56 for that charge. He figured that it would have cost him $5.25 in gas to drive the same distance, or a little more than twice what it cost him to charge the EV.
Charging with a 220v outlet would have taken less time and less money to get more range, he pointed out — or it would have been free if he had charged using solar power.
There are also faster charging options that Ford recommends. Esterdahl said those options would take an EV from 15 percent to 80 percent charge in less than an hour.
Which is still a lot longer than we typically plan to spend filling up at a gas station, but it beats the four days Ford estimates it would take to charge the F150 Lightning on a 110v connection.
“This idea that you have to have a full tank, or charge, every morning — I don’t know if I believe in that,” he said, after saying that he works from home and doesn’t actually put all that many miles on his truck. “I don’t always need all this range.”
“But everybody’s different,” he admitted. “But if you treat this battery like you would a gas tank, I drive around with a half tank all the time. and, granted, there’s not that many chargers around here, but back in the, you know, when Ford came out with the Model T, there was like two gas stations.”
You can watch the entire video here:
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“I could make arguments this technology’s not quite ready yet; I can make arguments that it is kind of ready if you can manage it; and I can make arguments that it’s gonna come, no matter what’s going to happen, companies are investing billions of dollars globally in this technology, so it’s coming.”
And while the savings on fuel are evident — at least in some parts of the country — Esterdahl admitted that consumers would spend a lot more to purchase an EV rather than the gas version of a similar vehicle.
“Like I said,” he concluded, “it’s a lot of debate.”
Debate we should probably be having before the federal government forces electric vehicles onto the general public.
