EV Truckin’
Ever since coming out here to the hilltop, there have been several inevitabilities. One of them is that sooner or later I would get myself a truck. I’ve had my Tesla X for seven years and am a committed EV user for many reasons. I clearly like being able to avoid the pump, but I also enjoy the driving experience of an EV since the acceleration in particular is so brisk. However, I have also determined that I do not like the range anxiety associated with distance traveling with an EV, so I have only used the Tesla for local driving. That resulted in accumulating less than 30,000 miles on the odometer in those seven years. I am now averaging about 5,000 miles per year, but that is all local errand-like traveling. And much of that errand running is to the nursery and garden center. I have never been shy about loading up the back of the Tesla with bags of mulch and whatnot, but there are clearly some limitations to what I can carry in it and it has occurred to me more than once that I really do need a pickup truck. If anything, what was an observational obsession, given the vast number of pickup trucks in the area, has turned into a mild base of cognitive dissonance about the whole issue. Nevertheless, along the way, both Elon Musk and all sorts of other automotive purveyors who are trying to catch Tesla in the EV marathon have announced the launch of various EV trucks. I went so far as to put down deposits on the Tesla Cybertruck and the Ford F-150 Lightning, only to conceal both orders due to interminable delays and waning enthusiasm on my part.
A few weeks ago I wrote about a swing and a miss by a local Ford dealership, who faked me out into coming down to look at their Lightning inventory, only to be told that they actually had none. THey were never very contrite about the whole ruse, so I should not have been surprised that while driving back from Las Vegas yesterday, the salesman called me again and told me they had gotten in a new shipment of F-150 Lightnings and that several of them were unallocated. While it had been a long day of driving, there must have been a strong unanswered sense in my soul that I needed a truck because I very quickly agreed to head on down once I dropped Mike and Melisa at their house and took Kim home. Sure enough, I hightailed it down to the Ford dealership and found two F-150’s in the configuration I wanted (basic and not highly tricked out). I went for a test drive and found all the EV things I had come to know from my Tesla to be present in these new EV trucks, so all that remained was to cut a deal.
I will start by mentioning that the Tesla X that I bought seven years ago was a top-of-the-line model with all the bells and whistles. I have found some use for the features, but almost no use for the expensive ones like the big-screen navigation system and the autonomous driving. The big screen is very neat when you first get it, but I have never been convinced that it is all that necessary or even special. As for the autonomous driving, I am a big user of what Mercedes call Dystronic, but that is just about cruise control that keeps you at the right distance from the car in front of you and warns you if you leave your lane. That is hardly autonomous driving and when I have gone further into taking my hands off the wheel, I have distinctly not enjoyed the experience and simply don’t use the functionality. And then there are the gull-wing doors for the backseat passengers. These have been a way-cool feature ever since Delorean and Back to the Future made them so. On one of our first outings in the Tesla X, a father who had to suffer his kids’ oohs and aaahs at the doors mumbled to himself, “SO unnecessary!” and it became a family joke ever since. Those gull wing doors, to their credit are as exacting and clean in operation as the day I bought the car, but even after all this time, I have to either open and close the doors for my passengers, or give them repeated instructions as to how to operate them themselves. In other words, they are a nuisance and decidedly SO unnecessary, indeed.
Since I have had the Tesla, I have only had very minor and limited servicing issues with it. I did replace the tires at about 20,000 miles just because I thought I should after 6 years or so of use. I had a 12V battery go bad and that was replaced in my driveway for $240. And I had a piece of wheel trim go wonky and that was replaced for $110 also in my driveway. And that was it. Everything else about the car worked perfectly and I used to say that I would be long dead before it would be needing any serious drivetrain service. It really has been amazing on that front. But it is a seven year old car and logic tells me that things that are mechanical, even if they are electrical rather than internal combustion in nature, tend to start going bad. I tend to think more and more in an end-game frame of mind these days, and I did not see the Tesla X lasting me through my driving days. That was one of the driving forces for wanting to upgrade to a new car. One of the drawbacks of trading out of the Tesla X was that as an early adopter, I have the unlimited free supercharging from Tesla and though I have used it exactly twice in seven years, for what must be a savings of some $20, it was, strangely enough, a deterrent to sell the beast. Tesla even made that easier by recently announcing that we early adopters could carry over that feature to a new upgraded model. IF Tesla had been as good about actually launching the fabled Cybertruck, that might have won me over, but no such luck. None of those Cybertrucks have yet rolled off the assembly line with their Buck Rogers sleek looks.
So, there I am at the good old Ford dealership getting double-teamed into buying a new F-150 Lightning. In the moment I can only remember all the reasons I need and want a truck and manage to forget all the things I have said about driving the Tesla X until the day I die. I end up deciding that the truck I would prefer is the metallic Carbonite one that has the towing package and the spray-on truck bed lining, all for $2,000 extra ($600 of which I would have certainly needed in the bed liner and the rest a tow package which might possibly come in handy…who knows?) The trade-in value is never as high as one would like, but I have also never traded in a seven year old car or, for that matter, traded one in that has retained as much value as this Tesla X has. So I did the net trade-up deal and became the proud owner of a new Ford F-150 Lightning EV truck. It was, in actuality, a dark and stormy night, but I drove out of the dealership in my new truck and got home only to realize that it is actually quite a bit bigger than my Tesla X and just barely fit into the garage, as currently organized. That would have been a major neighborhood embarrassment if it had not fit, so I guess I just have to be more careful when pulling it in to park. In any case, I got out there on the road in the light of day today and figured out all that I had failed to do the prior night. The only drawback seemed to be the lack of an imbedded garage opener…which is fine since I now have a use for all the extra garage openers I had in a drawer in the garage. I spent the day getting to know the vehicle and am now ready to go out EV truckin’.