In my case, I'm not parking where I have access to charging every day, but that doesn't mean I never park where I can charge. F'rinstance, my car is frequently parked at my brother's house on the weekends, so I can charge there, and with a 150mi range, I could drive my daily commute all week without burning any gasoline.
I can remember 5-8 years ago I think, Ford was working on a reciprocating engine to be a range extender for the F150. Can't find anything on that though. It was similar to a hydraulic piston going back and forth.
Since this tech is similar to what trains currently use for motive force, I can see this type of vehicle coming to class 8 soon. There is a company called Capstone Turbine working on it with their micro-turbine system...
Sorry, the article is behind a paywall, but you get the drift.....
https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/90171-us-capstone-turbine-announces-truck-erev-programmes/
I believe Ford has been working on range extenders for quite some time. There were rumors about a range extender for Lightning before it debuted.
The question is where to use it and how to package it. Hopefully they don’t lean in on this too much and ignore regular HEVs or PHEVs.
Absolutely and I see it as spaghetti of a sort because Ford still hasn’t figured how to execute this.
It’s simply something PR to say when they have no real idea of what to do next without major changes.
This is all Farley could come up with after months of reviews?
Yeah you can bet this is a real morale gut buster…and Farley has to explain to Bill Ford and the board
I don't think that's spaghetti...
But yeah, they need to figure out the direction they want to go in. Not only is this constant change of direction very wasteful, I'd imagine it also does a lot of damage to the moral within Ford. Developing cars is hard, yet there are probably Ford engineers and designers who've had everything they've spent years working on thrown out. I'd be pissed.