Ford has just disclosed why it halted production/delivery of the Lightning, its three-ton half-ton electric truck. One of them apparently went up in smoke during a “pre-delivery quality check.” No word as to whether the charred Lightning was moving when it caught fire.
Ford did issue a statement that it “has no reason to believe electric pick-ups already in use by customers are affected by the battery issue.”
And why would Ford think that?
Unless there was a manufacturing problem with that one specific Lightning – something like an assembly worker failing to correctly assemble something, a bad part, etc. – it may be a design problem, something that could be a problem with every single one of Ford’s three-ton half-ton “electrified” trucks. This is in fact known to be a problem – or at least, a built-in vulnerability – of lithium-ion batteries, generally. Their chemistry and construction being such as to make it so. It is why EVs made by GM and Tesla – two different brands – have also caught fire. It is because they use the same types of battery packs and so have the same built-in tendency to thermally runaway – or short circuit and catch fire.
The odds of a three-ton half-ton catching fire have been favorable – in terms of an incident not happening, so far – because Ford has only made about 15,000 of them, a drop in the proverbial bucket. Chevy was not so lucky because it got some 60,000 of its electric Bolts into production; a number of them caught fire – and all of them had to be recalled. Teslas are infamous for spontaneously combusting. The odds of that happening increasing to certainty after several hundred thousand of them were produced.
Ford may have nipped some bad PR in the bud. But it may have the same problem on its hands that besets every company producing EVs with lithium-ion battery packs – that being their tendency to alight themselves.
And this may prove to be a fatal problem for Ford’s three-ton half-ton, which is already suffering from a bade case of buyer’s remorse – among those who already bought one – and buyers who want one being unable to afford one, in the wake of three huge price increases over the span of less than one year. The ’23 Lightning costs about $15k more now than the ’22 did and now costs close to $58k, rendering it almost $20k more expensive than a non-electric F-150 SuperCrew that will only catch fire if you insert a gas-soaked rag in the filler neck and set it alight with your Zippo.
It can also tow hundreds of miles without having to stop and when it does have to stop, you only have to wait a few minutes before you can tow another several hundred miles with it.
Ford’s big mistake with the F-150 may have been the thing that made it seem like a smart idea to “electrify” a truck rather than a car.
This being an understandable mistake.
A full-size truck is the perfect place to hide a massive battery pack. And the Lightning has one of the most massive battery packs extant, precisely because it is a full-sized truck and so already huge and thus requires lots of power – just to move. If it is going to tow anything substantial or carry anything substantial in its bed, it will need a very powerful battery. Which leads to a very big – and heavy one. Close to a ton, all by itself. And that is why the Lightning weighs well over 6,000 pounds – three tons plus – vs. the just over two tons a non-electric F-150 weighs.
This, in turn, reduces how far the Lightning can go – as well as how far it can tow. It is also the main reason why it now costs almost $20k more than its non-electric analog, the gas-engined F-150 SuperCrew.
Reductio meet absurdum.
Add to this the inherent problem of lithium-ion batteries being fire-prone and you have a really big – and very heavy – problem that’s made even worse, potentially, because the battery is so much bigger (and so, the potential fire that much more dangerous).
It’d be safer – and saner – to stop producing vehicles (not just this one) with a built-in design defect that everyone knows increases the risk of people being burned to death.
But, never mind.
It’s all coming from the same people who continue to insist that all of the people who have “died suddenly” since the “vaccines” were injected into hundreds of millions of people could not possibly have been caused by the “vaccines.”
. . .
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‘It’d be safer – and saner – to stop producing vehicles (not just this one) with a built-in design defect.’ — eric
EeeVees are the new welfare Cadillac, subsidized at every turn: the batteries; the purchase price; the charging network.
In 1970, Guy Drake could actually release a song titled “Welfare Cadillac” and get it played on the radio … though clearly he was self-parodying about hillbillies, not POCs:
But you know, things gon’ get better yet
At least that’s what I understand
Now they tell me this new ‘president’
Just put in a heck of a new poverty plan
Now they say, he gon’ send us poor folks money
Men, we gonna get it rainin’ from the trees
Fact is, my wife’s shopping ’round right now
For her shiny new EeeVee
The Epoch Times reports that the Biden Regime is preparing to sign the U.S. up to the WHO’s “Global pandemic treaty”, which would give a bunch of unelected bureaucrats at WHO absolute power to dictate what Americans MUST do during a declared pandemic or public health emergency. You thought the draconian measures that were foisted on the public in 2020 & 2021 was bad? The WHO could theoretically declare anything a “Public Health Emergency” and decree that ALL Americans MUST be locked down, be surveilled, give up eating meat and driving gas vehicles, wear face diapers, get the next mRNA “vaccine” Pfizer makes, take harmful drugs such as Remdesivir, etc.
Hi John,
This is alarming – but then, it may be curative, in that for many (myself, at least) it will be the point at which we cease attempting to just live our lived and begin defending them. By any means necessary.
Eric,
I’ve become convinced that that, along with Seymour Hersh’s report about the Biden Thing blowing up Nord Stream 2, the increasingly obvious failures of COVID “vaccines”, the massive study showing face diapers don’t work against respiratory viruses, etc., are things the Biden Thing DON’T want the public to know about and use “Chinese spy balloons” “January 6th”, etc. as distractions.
New York Slimes serves up a limited hangout on EeeVee pickups, admitting how big, heavy and material-intensive they are:
‘Size matters: As E.V.s get larger and heftier, their climate impact also tends to increase.
‘The larger batteries in larger electric vehicles require more of these materials [cobalt, lithium, rare earths].
‘Heavier vehicles, gas or electric, can be more dangerous in a crash for those outside of the vehicle.
‘Right now, American consumers love their big S.U.V.s and pickup trucks.’
https://archive.ph/pga9m#selection-2921.6-2921.77
To offset these adverse admissions, the Slimes includes three ridiculous ‘fish charts’ from M.I.Teeeee, purporting to show that even heavy EeeVees produce less CO2 ’emissions’ than compact ICE vehicles.
These fish charts are too abstracted to even comment on. Dozens of tendentious assumptions are embedded, no doubt. But pseudo-intellectual Slimes readers will find them sufficiently ‘sciency’ to gab about at cocktail parties, thus spewing more polluting memes into the choking Woke Kultursmog. 🙁
I’m as anti EV as it gets, but I’ve got a serious question for you EP. Why do Hybrids and Plug-In Hybrids not seem to have this issue? I understand some use Nickel-Metal batteries, but many use LI.
I’m just assuming here but I think several factors are involved. The first is hybrid packs are just smaller and less complex. They are usually protected in the interior of the car and don’t span it’s entire width and length between the wheels. Less physical and environmental stress and way fewer individual cells spot welded together. Hybrids also do not hammer their batteries with heavy charge and discharge cycling as the battery is just there to make up for the low power output of the Miller/atkinson cycle engines during acceleration. Hybrid batteries are usually never full or empty.
That said, plug in hybrids run in EV mode are probably more likely to self immolate and suffer shortened battery life. I was skeptical of the Prius at first but after 20+ years of production their batteries and eCVT have proven to be economical and long lived.
Hi BlackFlag,
I agree with you re the hybrids; the battery never completely discharges and these types of batteries aren’t subjected to the stress of “fast” charging, either. (I think this is true even of the “plug-in” models, which plug in to household 120/240V. I’ve also always thought a small diesel engine/hybrid combo could potentially be the ultimate hybrid, one capable of using s little fuel as a 250 cc dual sport motorcycle.
Hi Dan,
A hybrid’s battery pack isn’t subjected to heavy discharge/recharge cycling; the system prevents the latter from ever happening (by automatically starting the gas engine/generator to recharge it as you drive to maintain its charge at a certain predetermined level. They are also physically much smaller and less powerful, being, essentially, a supplementary rather than a primary power source.
PS: I know you probably know this already, as most ere do, but – for the record: While I personally have no interest in EVs as I regard them as personality-free devices that are also overpriced, over-teched and especially useful as a vehicle to control you, I don’t object to their being available in a free market. If there is one for them, which I doubt!
Over in East Palestine, Ohio, Norfolk Southern and a contractor that does free testing wants residents to sign a liability waiver in exchange for a measly $1,000 and “free” air testing on their property. The EPA & other government bureaucrats tell residents of East Palestine that it’s “Saaaaafe” for them to return home while at the same time the EPA head tells CNN that they’ll send personnel to look at the site when it’s “saaaaaaafe to do so.”……
https://thehighwire.com/editorial/east-palestine-residents-abandoned-epa-staying-away-until-conditions-become-safe/
The other night we were home getting ready to go to sleep. Long day at work and early morning schedules for all. We got the call from a family member who lives over an hour away who suffered a household injury. They needed help and hospital trip was involved. If we all had EVs there would have been no one in the house with enough the range to get out and back that night. Unless one of us left the family to go to a fast charger we could not make it back. So does the EV future mean we all need a spare car that is always fully charged?
Hi RS,
Yup. And it’s not just emergencies – though that is important. Also important is spontaneity. Not having to plan. Being able to just go. That is a big part of what they want to take away from us.
And imagine you were living in East Palestine, Ohio, at the time of the toxic train wreck, and had to evacuate. Will your EV make it out?
And all because of the hysteria over a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature in 100 years. Which statistic is questionable to begin with. The very notion that a climate that is forever changing can be stopped from ever changing again, regardless of what means are deployed to do so, is absurd.
We will eliminate CO2 from our economy to prevent a 1.5 degree temperature increase.
We will accept that increase so we can continue to eat and keep our living room above freezing.
Pick one.
Paraphrasing Captain Picard –it’s dubious science that became dogma. Lotsa that going on nowadays.
All lithium cells are 4.8 Volts. They consist of layers of anode, cathode and electrolyte. The package can then be rolled into a cylinder like a swiss roll cake, a prismatic cell which is more like a fig newton, or a pouch. The area of the package determines the watt/hr capacity, but there’s an upper limit due to internal resistance. And high amperage means there’s a lot of resistance in cables, so it is better to raise the voltage instead of current. This is done by connecting cells in series into a battery, then connecting batteries in parallel to raise the current.
So there are hundreds of individual cells in a battery pack designed to run an EV. Each cell has the potential for thermal runaway due to a manufacturing defect. So if Ford determined they had a bad production run they will need to start testing battery packs to make sure there’s none that are going to short out. And even worse is if the battery management system isn’t picking it up they’re going to have to fix the software too.
Kinda puts the Pinto gas tank debacle in perspective. At least there it was a sheetmetal problem, not a zero defects problem.
The best thing about this site is the many knowledgeable people that contribute to educating all of us. Thanks RK, thanks Eric and everyone that knows more than I do about so many things.
Keep it up.
‘there are hundreds of individual cells in a battery pack designed to run an EV.’ — ReadyKilowatt
Or more. One source claims that on average, EVs with cylindrical cells have between 5,000 and 9,000 cells.
https://tinyurl.com/58288fyu
This leads directly to an awkward statistical problem. Say that manufacturing defects which could cause thermal runaway are reduced to one cell per million — an impressive feat.
However, if your EeeVee has got 5,000 of those one-in-a-million cells under the floor, the combined probability that one is defective is now 1 in 200. That’s not as bad as 1-in-6 Russian roulette odds. But still, I don’t want to play.
Among a whole fleet of EeeVees with individual 1-in-200 chances of a bad cell, a few are gonna burn. This month, lightning struck at Ford (so to speak, heh heh) instead of in somebody’s garage.
Physics and statistics are cruel things, refusing to bend to the will of car makers and Clowngress. And until convincingly proven otherwise, I emphatically do not buy Ford’s claims that already-delivered Lightnings are unaffected by the battery issue.
“This leads directly to an awkward statistical problem. Say that manufacturing defects which could cause thermal runaway are reduced to one cell per million — an impressive feat.”
I would think the Six-Sigma cult would be all over this. Here, their input is not only useful, but could be a matter of life and death.
15,000 Lightnings manufactured. The weight of the battery times 15,000 will be the total weight. They are one thousand eight hundred pounds each, you have 27,000,000 pounds of batteries.
27,000,000/6.2 is 4,354,838 gallons of crude oil or fuels with 27 million pounds of good old Oklahoma crude.
Crude weighs approximately 6.2 pounds per gallon. Don’t know if there is an equivalence, just making a comparison.
108,870,967 road miles at 25 mpg. 10,000 cars will travel that distance in 10 years. That is the way it is, how it goes moving west.
15,000 Ford Lightnings driven 100,000 miles will total 1,500,000,000 miles. Maybe.
Good luck, you have to see it to believe it. I’ve never been to Missouri, you still have to show me how it is going to happen.
Less one, subtract 100,000 miles.
Surveyors in the old days used a chain 66 feet in length. 16.5 feet by one half mile is one acre. One chain will measure out four acres. You could compensate for the topographical differences.
One chain is 66 feet in length, 80 chains equals one mile.
Lasers are used today.
Cold snap next week. Arizona has been snowed on 30 miles from the border with Mexico.
Russians place two bottles of vodka in the snow during winter, when the bottles appear from the snow in late winter, it means winter is over.
We’ll all be living in sod huts and happy to be there. Purdy tough to burn down a sod hut with 16 inch dirt walls and a secure roof.
Milk the cow, raise the chickens, dig the well.
We are living in the future
I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper 15 years ago – John Prine, Living in the Future
A wood burning stove and firewood to keep the wolf away from the door will be a big help.
Addendum: 27,000,000 pounds of batteries will need recycling. 27,000,000 pounds of spent electricity is a Super Fund site.
27,000,000 pounds of fuels will weigh zero after burning, internal combustion works far better and no need for landfill space, every ecosystem benefits with more carbon dioxide to the rescue.
Not too difficult to foresee problems not too far down the road.
The fact that gasoline and diesel fuel have always, and WILL always have more energy per pound than batteries, will ALWAYS make them more energy efficient to go the greater distances is a fact of physics that no bureaucratic, virtue-signalling bullshit will ever change.
Reality sucks when your brain is saturated with Unicorn farts and Fairy Pixie dust.
Banning ice cars and pumping EV’s with no sound, life, emotion, sterile and dead…. because of wokeness….
Woke nutcases dreaming…..
Science fiction predicted wokeness half a century ago
The Lathe of Heaven.
The book — set in the early 21st century, or technically a few years ago — tells us the story of one George Orr, a Portland (ironically) resident who can literally change the world simply by dreaming. woke = change by dreaming….lol
Racism, overpopulation, the climate, world peace — each of these issues features in the book, and each features prominently in the progressive agenda. In the book, the wishing away of problems goes horribly wrong —
right now in Brooklyn and Seattle and on every college campus and in every government building and every boardroom of …..NOTE…every corporation pushing ESG …..and every “non-governmental organization” office, there are people who dream of being Haber, who dream of the possibility to change everyone else’s world with a single word — Antwerp….it will go horribly wrong again….
Acquiring control, power, personal wealth, and fame, and having the incredibly lovely if horribly misguided knowledge that you are getting these things by “doing good,” by trying to better society, by trying to “help” people and are therefore exempt from challenges, let alone consequences, is irresistible.
Re: every woke corporation pushing ESG
ESG Investing….a train wreck….a woke dream turning into a nightmare
Environmental, Social, and Governance. No one actually knows what any of that means, but you can throw that label on your fund, change your website’s color to a shade of light green, and instantly charge 5x higher expense ratios. Don’t believe me? Let me show you two ETFs: the first is BlackRock’s iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF, while the second is BlackRock’s S&P 500 portfolio. Notice any major differences?
No?
Well, there is one big one: the first ETF charges 400% more in its expense ratios. ESG became this funny thing where everyone knew it wasn’t really a thing, but everyone was trying to pretend like it was a thing because everyone needed everyone to think that they thought that it was a real thing. Perception was infinitely more important than reality.
The truth is that ESG was really just a side quest designed to make capitalism harder.
The economy was running so smoothly for the last 13 years that one day we got bored and said, “Oh your company is profitable? Cool. Now you have to hire a Chief Sustainability Officer, purchase carbon credits from companies that are actually environmentally friendly, and convince the general public that despite having sweatshops in China, your company is still one of the good guys.”
And you know what? Tim Cook managed the impossible.
I personally think ESG was yet another low-interest rate phenomenon, and it’s about to take a backseat to other, more pressing matters. Like making money.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/science_fiction_predicted_wokeness_half_a_century_ago.html
you can watch this actually pretty good dramatization of the book, The Lathe of Heaven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8VRbaVNvSA
Worth keeping in mind that for pickups and other light trucks, extra mass due to batteries, although it degrades performance and increases operating costs, is only an inconvenience.
However, for large, over the road trucks, there is a maximum GVW which must not be exceeded. A 30% increase in tare weight equals a 30% decrease in payload.
“is only an inconvenience” until it catches fire. Until you run out of battery and have to have it towed to a place to charge it. Until you discover you can’t use the pickup for what you bought it to do.
Want to really know what’s going on? don’t read MSM bs….go to Eric Peter’s site……
Constant Government Lies Spark Resistance Movements
If you want to know what’s really going on within a society, you don’t run to the national newspapers or interview people with titles. You get out and talk to the people nobody else would dare seek. In the Internet Age, you look at what’s being said by ordinary people on unremarkable chatrooms whose opinions are routinely overlooked.
What I see today is a bubbling movement of frustration and anger that is as acidic as anything I’ve come across. Citizens are furiously mad — but noticeably not in despair. People are not throwing their hands up in desperation; they’re venting their rage at a corrupt system of government that has gotten out of control.
They’re not hiding in the shadows, whispering in hushed tones; they’re screaming at the top of their lungs, just daring the Big Tech censors to blot out their (un)free speech. They’re not allowing the State’s “politically correct” priests and purveyors of officially sanctioned disinformation to shame them into silence; they’re laughing in the spin doctors’ faces and calling out the government’s mass propaganda for what it is.
Lord Acton’s famous warning that “all power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
When people without principle secure power, then power alone is worshiped as the highest principle..
We cannot be a free people with a cherished Bill of Rights when freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to self-defense, due process, and other supposedly secured rights are thrown out the window every time government agents declare a “health emergency” (especially now that “health” has been redefined to include everything under the sun, including “climate change” and “systemic racism”).
We cannot feign to have a functioning government when most every member is a bought-and-paid-for stooge for the wef.
what “the powers that be” fear the most: a self-assured population willing to see through all the poppycock and call it what it is.
You didn’t think our government just woke up one morning and decided to start an unprecedented mass-censorship campaign targeting “harmful” language” and “disinformation,” did you? They did so because they noticed that the people have noticed that they’re nothing but self-serving propagandists and liars. When people wake up in raw anger, real change is never far behind.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/constant_government_lies_spark_resistance_movements.html
>what “the powers that be” fear the most: a[n intelligent, educated] population [capable of critical thinking, and therefore able] to see through all the poppycock and call it what it is.
Which makes public education the most successful and longest running psyop in human history.
Imagine one of these huge battery factories going up in smoke! It’ll be like that Morton Thiokol rocket fuel plant exploding with the added effect of a cloud of poisonous gas…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_KuGizBjDXo
> like that Morton Thiokol rocket fuel plant exploding
Or the two plutonium fires at Rocky Flats.
Rage against the EeeVees:
‘Tesla drivers claim they’ve faced more incidents of road rage, like being cut off in traffic and heckled, since they started driving the electric car, according to a recent report from The Guardian.
“I noticed the road rage within the first week I got it,” said one man, who lives in Thousand Oaks, California, and didn’t want to be publicly outed as a Tesla driver.
‘He told the publication that he’d faced incidents of road rage eight times in November, alone. Multiple Tesla owners told The Guardian that the incidents appear to stem from anti-EV sentiment, rather than dislike of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.’
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-drivers-say-faced-road-rage-since-buying-electric-cars-2022-12
Yup. Was out shoveling snow in muh driveway yesterday, in a neighborhood where passing cars are so infrequent that people wave to each other.
First car that comes along is a white Tesssssla belonging to a guy up the hill. Didn’t even look up from my shoveling.
‘I’ve been wondering who exactly is/are making these EV batteries.’ — XM
As ol’ Uncle Warren Buffett says, when the tide goes out, you find out who’s been swimming naked:
‘South Korean electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturer SK On Company is considering suspending operations at its Georgia plant after customer Ford Motor reported unspecified “issues” with [its] batteries.
‘The battery problem came as a wake up call for SK On, which had been expanding aggressively in the US in the last two years. It has a joint venture with Ford, called BlueOval SK which is currently building two EV battery plants in the US.
Separately, SK On Company was considering pulling out of an agreement to build an electric vehicle (EV) battery plant in Turkey in a deal with Ford due to deteriorating funding conditions, according to reports last month.
The first phase of SK On’s US$2.6bn plant in Commerce, Georgia was completed in January 2022. When the second phase is complete, the factory will have a total production capacity of 22 gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries per year, enough to power 430,000 EVs.
https://www.just-auto.com/news/sk-on-might-suspend-us-plant-after-ford-lightning-battery-issues/
Let’s take a stab at defining ‘deteriorating funding conditions.’ If you are a South Korean lender, reading about both embarrassing technical problems and what appears to be massive production overcapacity as a global recession looms, you are sweating bullets.
Action steps: cut off all additional funding to SK On … and pray.
Edward Snowden recently posted that he thinks the federal government used the “Balloon” narrative to deflect attention away from Seymour Hersh’s report that the Biden Thing blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. If Hersh’s report is true, a case could be made that the U.S. government committed an act of war.
The US government has been engaged in acts of war for decades. Sanctions are an act of war, the modern siege. Which have nearly always fallen heavily on non-combatants, including women and children. As long as fewer than half a million children die, its “worth it”.
We didn’t need Hersh to tell us. No one else besides Norway had any gain from it. The only thing Hersh exposed is that Norway was in on it too.
John K,
And now the government has openly declared war on those who didn’t get the jab (or the latest “booster”), dissented against “The narratives”, etc.
John Kable, were not Norwegians called quislings during ww2?
Here is a superb rant from an Irish MEP in the euro-peon parliament: [1:11]
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/127/607/771/playable/d05bcb7fa6a68a5a.mp4?_=1
“Has the EU become so subservient to US empire that yous can’t even ask them if they did it? Yous are a fucking joke.“
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was an act of war not only against Russia but even more so against Germany. Not only did Germany own 49% of the pipeline, but the pipeline was a main source of natural gas for Germany, which is now paying five times as much to purchase liquified natural gas from the US. This act of international terrorism was not just a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It had been planned even before Russia’s invasion, in order to destroy the growing economic linkage between Germany and Russia and to render Germany massively dependent on the United States for its energy supply.
Indeed, it apparently has had little impact on Russia, while Germany is now cemented into dependence upon US LNG, and Norwegian natural gas. Which explains why Norway was apparently in on it. Ever since the Marshal Plan, the US Psychopaths In Charge have been intently invested in keeping Western Europe under its thumb. Which Russia was in the process of extricating Europe from.
BOOM!!
If our pathetic media ever asked who benefits when this happened, the answers would have been obvious
“Ford said Wednesday it believes it has identified the root cause of the fire and expects to conclude an investigation by the end of next week and apply findings to the truck’s battery production process, which could take a few weeks.” — Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-safety-agency-talks-with-ford-f-150-ev-production-halt-2023-02-16/
And what of the 15,000 Lightnings already sitting in garages? Too late to adjust their battery production process.
Ford has claimed that already-sold Lightnings aren’t affected by whatever battery issue burned up a couple of trucks in the quality check lot. Yeah, right! /sarc
Meanwhile, the NHTSA is sniffing round.
Ford is using the classic ‘incremental disclosure’ approach to crisis management, which only destroys confidence and blows up in their face.
If Ford just made a technical change in the battery and then one caught fire, they should say so. But if no change was made, then all previously produced batteries are suspect too.
Batterygate, Jim Faaaaarley: it’s bad … and it’s nationwide. Just stick your fingers in that 480-volt socket, and your problems will be over.
I’ve been wondering who exactly is/are making these EV batteries. Do individual car manufacturers make their own batteries for ICE vehicles? I didn’t think so but maybe they do.
Seems like it’d make a whole lot more sense for a dedicated electro-chemical company to make them, wouldn’t it?
But so, now Ford is gonna change the manufacturing process, so they must be in the battery-making business, huh?
I’m not convinced they were ever that good at the car making business. But sure, why not?
80% of the batteries come from china = bad quality….
Too bad that “quality control” is just as absent from Western tech as it is from Chinese tech. If not more so, since the West is not making much of anything any more, except excessive debt.
You can take a good look at a battery problem by sticking your head into an EV’s undercarriage, but wouldn’t you rather take the engineer’s word for it?
Reminds me of the TWA 800 air disaster. “Official” conclusion was that there was a DESIGN FLAW in Boeing 747 fueling system which could, under certain circumstances, cause a spark, which would cause the fuel tanks to explode, and destroy the aircraft. But did they ground the 747 fleet in order to *fix* the supposed defect? No, they did not. Did any more 747s blow up? No, they did not. Is the government FOS? I would say so.
Jack Cashill has written several books about the TWA disaster and has produced a number of documentaries and videos on the subject. All highly recommended. It wasn’t a center fuel tank problem.
Right, it was shot down by a missile launched from a US Navy ship; lots of eyewitnesses but who ya gonna believe, the FBI or your lyin’ eyes?
Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if Ford is having a serious case of buyers’ remorse with regard to the EV agenda. They had to know what was going to be the result of putting the F150 Lightning out for honest reviews.
At a minimum, I think they wanted the press about limiting the use of superchargers to extend the life of the battery.
Ford lost a ton of money on their Rivian investment too….
But EeeVee Mary didn’t get the memo:
‘On Thursday, Lithium Americas announced the closing of a $650 million investment from General Motors (GM). Coming into Friday trading, Lithium Americas stock was up 15% since the GM agreement was announced. Now it has given back 40% of that gain just on Friday.’ — Barron’s
How incredibly stupid for GM to ‘di-worsify’ into mining. GM lacks any expertise in that business. But they’ll learn: as Mark Twain said, the definition of a mine is “a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.”
Watch EeeVee Mary lose every penny of that malinvested $650 million, along with losing much, much more on baaaaaaattery plants.
Can’t wait until they follow Volvo’s rental model and rent these trucks. I think that’d actually be better for consumers because it leaves Ford holding the bag. Except that Ford would then pass on the cost of bag holding onto the consumer and then such rental would be astronomical.
Which it should be anyway because the entire idea of a battery-powered truck is stupid with current technology. So it should cost a fortune and it should be a disaster. And it should be on Ford’s balance sheet.