EV trucks have been much-hyped, with their massive batteries giving them center of gravity and weight advantage in towing tests and the green lobby going on endlessly about them being more “environmentally friendly” than a traditional truck.
The problem? They just don’t work well, as numerous tests have shown. They take forever to charge, particularly if you don’t have the sort of special charger necessary to speed a charge up. Even when fully charged, the battery propels the vehicle over a far shorter distance than manufacturers claim, with that problem only getting worse when trying to use the truck for truck purposes, such as towing. Oh, and they’re wildly expensive.
So people should already know that these EV trucks are the opposite of a good purchase, yet people keep lighting money on fire buying them anyway, or YouTubers test them out to get some great footage of them failing.
Such was the case with popular YouTuber “JerryRigEverything”. Also known as Zack Nelson, JerryRigEverything wanted to test out his new, Rivian truck and see how far it could go in the cold when towing 10,000 pounds, something a truck should be able to do, particularly a new one as expensive as a Rivian.
As could be predicted, however, the test didn’t go well. Here’s what Trending Politics News reports happened:
Nelson almost immediately started seeing problems when he began his journey.
For one, the truck refused to give Nelson an accurate range reading as it jumped between 20 miles to empty and 600 miles to empty, giving him no idea of how much charge he had.
Nelson then realized that he needed to charge however the charger he went to was packed with non-electric vehicles so he was forced to go to another charger that was much slower.
The next charger was so slow that it took 45 minutes for the truck to charge just 10%.
““It was the slowest charger in the world,” a frustrated Nelson said.
“We’ve been here for about, I don’t know, 15 or 20 minutes now, and I pulled in on zero miles left,” he said.
“It’s charged zero miles, but it says it’s added 600, which is kind of embarrassing.”
Nelson continued: “Either way, it says it’ll be done charging in about 24 hours, so I’m going to be here a while. There is a faster charger up the road, but I would not have been able to make it.”
Oh, and those charging travails occurred after he’d made it only about 100 miles, less than a third of the range given by Rivian. So, in summary, he tried towing a Hummer on a trailer with the truck and made it..about a hundred miles…then had to wait about a day for the truck to charge…whereas with a gas-guzzling truck (or, better yet, a diesel), he could have just filled it up in a few minutes and kept going.
Yeah, so that didn’t go well. Quite the opposite, in fact: it was an utter disaster of a test showing just how useless these trucks are in real-world situations.
Watch the test here:
Featured image credit: screenshot from embedded video
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