I'm always a little skeptical of long form complaints that mix seemingly important things (papers please) with seemingly trivial preferences (he doesn't like where he'd doff his boots?). Its a day cab, not a sleeper, so that whole section of complaints is fairly irrelevant.
OTOH, he makes some good points about the ergonomics of seat and door placement. But are these really the things that will drive or diminish sales?
Put another way, imagine that you were a truck driver and a day cab would be sufficient. Now imagine one saved a few dozen $$ per day in fuel costs. Would you put up with not taking your shoes off where you want to in exchange for a few dollars?
These are good insights, but the framing seems a bit hyperbolic.
I can't speak from the perspective of a truck driver, but I drove CAT vehicles in the military in-country. We lived in them as well. The reason the boots part is important is because if you're living in a vehicle the dirty parts house a lot of nasty stuff that will get you sick. To offset that, you pull everything out of the truck and clean it. If you have to keep doing this then it adds stressful and exhausting repetitious work to your work life. If you ignore it you get sick. It's easier to pick a truck that matches your needs, and frankly, it's usually the small things that matter in big purchases.
Oh, I get it now. This complaint goes back to the whole sleeper cab problem. Its not a sleeper cab, so differentiating a dirty section from a clean section like that seems less important to me.
I get his point if he doesn't want his dirty boots near his bed in the back, but that's impossible with this setup anyway.
Not to be patronizing but it sounds like you don't have much experience with work boots or jobs that actually need them. If a driver spends their time going between relatively clean locations then yes, it's a relatively trivial complaint. The problem is that's often not the case: If they have to visit remote, heavy industrial, or some types of farm locations their boots will constantly end up caked in mud, random chemicals, or various biological debris. As someone who has dealt with all of the above, I find the complaint about door placement to be every bit as big a deal as having to get out of the seat at guardhouses.
Fair enough. TBH, a lot of it is that I just misunderstood him. I get the concern that this will spread the dirt over a larger area, including some of the space that really should have been usable for storage. It looks like a bad tradeoff in several important ways.
That may be, but that's exactly the irritating thing about Tesla. They make great drivetrains, but then anchor them to all these "innovations" that most people don't want. These sound like the truck equivalents of falcon wing doors, yoke steering wheels and touchscreen HVAC controls.
My father has been a truck driver for about 30 years, Tesla truck was clearly designed by people knowing nothing about heavy transport stuff.
Papers are still a thing, drivers like to have a clean cabin, really, but they don't like to waste time, especially when they have to in and out cabin several times in few minues.
I'm sure keeping the flow as smooth as possible starts with the shape of the nose. A flat brick of a cab will make the effective cross-sectional area larger.
Airplanes are really long. They still have pointy noses.
That's short-sighted. It's also possible to create a BEV that might not replace ICE vehicles for all use cases, but one that replaces the ICE vehicle in particular circumstances.
A BEV fits into my lifestyle. So much so that I think owning an ICE vehicle would decrease my quality of life. I don't want to go to a gas station every week. I don't want to have to take my car in for tune-ups every year.
> But... you'd rather charge every time you use it? And what if you run out of energy in the middle of a trip?
This is no work. You carefully mount the charger so that it‘s right between your car door and the charge port. When you exit the car it‘s a single movement on the way out of the garage.
As for range, you don‘t run out in the middle of a trip. The car finds a supercharger if it‘s really one of those longer trips.
I have not once ran out of energy in the middle of a trip. You need to be an idiot to pull that feat off. And I've taken road trips from LA to Vancouver once a year. It takes longer than an ICE vehicle, but the ADAS features outweigh the time-cost. I should note that the ADAS features are not exclusive to BEV, they just happen to be better than the ICE competition at the moment.
Anyway, the vast majority of the time, my car charges every single night and I have 80% or 90% battery in the morning.
I never said they don't need tune ups. But in my three years of ownership, all I've had to change were air filters and top up windshield fluid. The brakes are never used. The tires get rotated in my driveway by mobile service. Screw going to the local car mechanic or dealership every year.
So I'll pose the question to you. Maybe the answers lead you to sticking with ICE vehicles, and that's fine. But do you want to go to the gas station every time you run out of "energy"? Do you really want to change the oil, brake pads, fluids, etc.?
Yes. I get out of my car, plug in with the charge door right next to the driver door, then go inside. Longer trips, I use a fast charger. Went on a trip just before Thanksgiving that required 7 stops round trip.
I don’t need to change oil, or spark plugs or engine air filter. Stuff will need to get changed, but maintenance is much reduced.
Didn't the guy in the video point out that there are already a few electric European trucks? So we don't even really need to speculate about efficiency, cabover design, and all that, we should be able to find real numbers somewhere. At least pretty soon if not already.
OTOH, he makes some good points about the ergonomics of seat and door placement. But are these really the things that will drive or diminish sales?
Put another way, imagine that you were a truck driver and a day cab would be sufficient. Now imagine one saved a few dozen $$ per day in fuel costs. Would you put up with not taking your shoes off where you want to in exchange for a few dollars?
These are good insights, but the framing seems a bit hyperbolic.